Increasing the amount and intensity of exercise requires the nutritional support.

I lead an active physical life and support it with a mostly vegetarian diet. I get my important foods groups of salads, vegetable soups, grains, beans, and nuts. Getting the most important foods included would require most people to leave out the bad stuff they eat.

I live at the beach and surf most days. Surfing does not work the muscles like a gym work out where one runs the treadmill and lifts weights. It is more of a full body test against the resistance of the powerful ocean. One has to paddle which is upper body strength and stand up on a board which gives a little lower body and certainly core exercise.

But the most test comes from the pounding and tossing of big waves as you duck dive, fight rips and currents, and fight the resistance of currents when entering the ocean. I surf most nights with a marine in great shape learning to surf. Seeing how tired he gets is testimony to the difference in the physical demands.

At the beginning the paddling is exhausting in combination with getting pounded by the waves. It is amazing how much energy duck diving and getting tossed takes out of the body. I would need a days rest after surfing a few days in a row. My fit twenty year old daughter said her arms were going to fall off after five minutes of paddling.

When I started, I was also stretching, running stairs, and running on the beach. I have added more stretching, core exercises, upper body push ups, and skateboarding. I have also started surfing each day.

My ambition has been to add training and two sessions of surfing a day. Even with the right diet and a protein shake I was only consuming about 60 grams of protein a day for my 175 pound or 78 kilo body. I was lacking the after exercise energy I needed to live a normal life.

Success came from adding a more complete protein supplement with Branch Amino Acids and Glutamine. I all of a sudden had the energy needed to have a good surf session and have since added a second session a day. My energy inbetween is excellent.

Now I want to add a more rigorous exercise regimen as outlined in the Total Surfing Fitness program.  To get stronger at a sport you need to engage in the sport and then add the sport specific exercises that increase over all strength, stamina, flexibility, and mobility.  In other words, you need to exercise longer.  To exercise longer, you need the nutritional and recovery support of the right food and supplements.

Olympic skiing and surfing coaches work to create great athletes first and then specific skills second. One Olympic surfing coach includes an hour and a half of surfing each day followed by up to two hours of training a day.

Whether you are a walker, runner, biker, gym rat, skateboarder, or surfer, you have to have the energy and recovery to motivate yourself to get better. If you are too exhausted at the end of your routine, you will need to have more rest days. If you feel great at the end of your routine, you have achieved good nutritional balance.

The underlined words are from the quote from the  Natural News article.

“Research suggests that flavonoids, the most diverse group of phytochemicals, may be a key phytochemical group that contributes to the reduced mortality rates observed in people consuming high levels of plant-based foods, according to the UC Davis report. In the Zutphen Elderly Study, myocardial infarction was found to decrease as falvonoid intake increased.

Phytochemicals are thought to be responsible for much of the disease protection granted by diets high in fruits, vegetables, beans, cereals, and plant-based beverages such as tea and wine, according to a University of California, Davis report (http://chnr.ucdavis.edu/content/Fac…).

Although it has become widely accepted that a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains reduces the risk of cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses, scientists have only recently begun researching the effects of the different phytonutrients those foods contain.” Natural News.com  Neeve Arnell

I have started up on my mostly raw diet again. I call it raw because I don’t eat or cook any meat other than canned tuna. I can eat as much as I like because nothing I eat hurts me. I feel excellent and it seems to create a positive mental outlook.

I think much of people’s negativism is caused by what they put in their bodies.

I have fruit in the morning and usually a big salad for lunch with a little tuna in it. I may also have eggs in the morning or oat meal. I may have my salad for dinner followed by my own 15 ingredient vegetable soup and/or spaghetti.  I have banana nut muffins for dessert. I often have a bowl of oatmeal or a protein shake before I go to sleep.

I also throw plenty of flaxseed for the omega-3’s into my shakes; much more potent, cleaner, and cheaper than fish oils and fish. Olive oil is also important and can be used in making a salad dressing.

Because I surf and am adding to my surf specific exercises during the day, I fill in with one or two protein shakes. Eating as much as I want, I have still lost 25 pounds this year.  I am at my high school weight and had to lose my college and post college poundage.

Eating right has all the benefits and could help me live longer.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/032463_phytochemicals_health_benefits.html#ixzz1MtlmZJlH

**

Total Surfing Fitness by Clayton Beatty  is good for all sports and life. This twelve week 3 level series works strength, stamina, core, balance, flexibility, and mobility. It uses a ball, two dumbbells, and rest is just exercises in an ever increasing build up.

When successful companies are too self satisfied, they ignore the laws of nature.

Complacency often accompanies happiness. Success is often accompanied by a fear of rocking the boat. If something is working, why would anyone want to change the formula?

It is understandable. I was in the real estate business for many years and it seemed prices would never stop increasing. Some of my friends built real estate portfolios that would carry them through their retirement years and fund their children’s lives.

How could something as remote as a wall street firm leveraging mortgage backed securities destroy financing for new mortgages and cause banks, insurance, companies, security firms to face failure and then destroy a global economy?

Chaos Theory and Quantum Physics explain how the Universe really works. The smallest components of matter are gluons and quarks. They operate in chaos but create new order with changes we don’t perceive. Nature is continuously involved in creative destruction.

The human body, society, and business are also affected by positive and negative feedback loops of Chaos. The butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause the tornado in Texas. Life is unpredictable. Change is all that you can count on.

The computer industry has been doubling capacity every few years. This innovation creates change just like ripples from a boat wake. Just when a company is enjoying its greatest success, someone else is aiming at their vulnerabilities and market share. Someone else is going for broke to create a whole new paradigm and steal the show.

Look how fast access to the internet went mobile. Look how fast computer sales were replaced with tablets. Who buys a nice inexpensive cell phone? What happened to Blockbuster? Where did all the jobs go?

Seth Godin in his book “Survival is Not Enough” talks about survivors enjoy change. They build it into their daily routine. Once you start embracing change as a reality, you don’t fear it as the potential destroyer of your current calm.

Forward companies aggressively seek the innovations that will destroy what they do. They know that somewhere someone is plotting to get them. Even if that were not true, every change to the business, social, and natural environment ripples through to everything else.

What kinds of changes have Face Book and Twitter created within the business environment? So many traditional long line family industries never considered Social Media as a real business tool. How long did it take Relationship marketing to convince even the most resistant companies that Traditional marketing was dying? Who would have dreamed that the most powerful advertising and news delivery power of newspapers would be replaced by quicker more flexible online services?

Once again, the power of being mobile starts usurping all other traditional methods of information delivery. The power of remote access and the power of the “long tail” gives every savvy website developer the ability to be global even if they are located on a mountain top in Utah.

How do you gear yourself up to be more flexible?  Eat different foods, listen to different music, change your daily routines, read material that never interested you, try new activities, meet people in different circles, do everything a little differently.

Change is fun. I happen to love doing, trying, reading, listening, and cooking new things.  I am always experimenting. I am always pushing the envelope. I have visions for reaching new plateaus in several activities. I focus, but I build constant change into each area of pursuit.

As Seth says, some people are natural zoomers (changers) and some are hoping nothing changes until their life plan is completed and they retire. That hasn’t worked out to well for the Baby Boomers. Zoomers will leave companies that don’t allow for flexibility, innovation, experimentation, and risk.

My dad loved Oldsmobiles and my kids grew up with big box TVs. You could enter a fast moving river in a canoe and pull into a cove to avoid the rush, but how long can you stay there?

**

Read “Survival is Not Enough” by Seth Godin

Read “Outliers, the Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell

Read “Bounce, the Secret of Success” by Matthew Syed

See Resources for books to explore your potential

See Speaking to give your group a glimpse of creating potential in working together

See Life Management to explore your personal potential and happiness.

See Organizational Peak Performance to accelerate achievement

Kaalm Media Group and KMG Consulting
Dedicated To Delivering Insights and Life Transforming Ideas

1-760-231-8966. or email at Mark@KaalmMediaGroup.com

San Diego, CA  U.S.A.  Pacific Standard Time

Peak performance, flow, the zone, healthy eating, fitness, spirituality, core competencies, passion, love, contribution, community, mission statements

As a culture, we have wrongly substituted the word talent for its true meaning.

We assume someone that has risen to the top of their field has innate skills as a result of genes, intelligence, and good luck. We see separation between them and ourselves feeling they have achieved something that we never could.

The real truth is that talent is the result of over ten years of purposeful practice creating certain neural pathways that allow the “true experts” to chunk information from a glance that the rest of us could never consolidate.

In his studies of firemen who make the right decision in dangerous situations, it was found they did not think through all the possibilities. Their minds quickly, beyond their own comprehension, parcel out the facts and know that something in the picture does not look right.

Athletes like Roger Fedderer and Wayne Gretsky can anticipate where the ball or puck will be before it is even hit or slapped. As case studies point out in “Bounce” by Mattew Syed, the brains of experts have formed a cognition as the results of their proverbial “10,000 hours of practice”.

It is not enough to just practice. Practice has to continuously push the level of comfort so that each session takes the participant to a new level. Practice has to have a goal of stretching the participant to levels of attainment that cannot quite be reached. The continuous failure of the effort leads to renewed commitment to be better.

There is little risk in practice other than having the courage to be uncomfortable with not being able to succeed. The Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy has trained more top professionals than any other coaching academy. Bollettieri has subscribed to a tactic other researchers have also found affective. Praise effort not intelligence or talent.

When praising effort, the student continuously works harder and never reaches his limit. When praising intelligence or talent, coaches and researchers have discovered that students start to protect that label and are afraid of losing recognition. These students will even lie about how they did on specific tests.

Very few work places build what we call talent. Talent is the result of training, purposeful practice that stretches ability, and very direct feedback. The best talent in the world resulted from this routine. Mozart had practiced 3500 hours by the time he was six under the coaching of a composer father.

The Polgar sisters, each world chess champions started at age five to practice chess several hours a day. The Williams sisters started entering tennis tournaments at the age of four. Andre Agassi’s father had him hit a million balls a year. David Beckham was already in the Manchester United Junior team at 14. Brazilians play futsal designed to give them six more touches of a slower heavier ball per minute than Americans.

Yes they all started at young ages and developed what we reverently call talent. The talent was developed from scratch. Just as we would turn flour into a cake, the ingredients are very similar for everyone that reaches notoriety.

**

Read “Outliers, the Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell

Read “Bounce, the Secret of Success” by Matthew Syed

See Resources for books to explore your potential

See Speaking to give your group a glimpse of creating potential in working together

See Life Management to explore your personal potential and happiness.

See Organizational Peak Performance to accelerate achievement

Kaalm Media Group and KMG Consulting
Dedicated To Delivering Insights and Life Transforming Ideas

1-760-231-8966. or email at Mark@KaalmMediaGroup.com

San Diego, CA  U.S.A.  Pacific Standard Time

Peak performance, flow, the zone, healthy eating, fitness, spirituality, core competencies, passion, love, contribution, community, mission statements

The greatest achievers operate in “flow”.  It is the state of engaging in a challenging activity that is not beyond your capabilities. In this state distractions are ignored. Judgment is not considered. Peak Performance is achieved through calm, focused, adrenalized action.

In their books “Outlier” and “Bounce”  Malcolm Gladwell and Matthew Syed destroy the well accepted myths that only the smartest, luckiest, talented people reach the highest status of achievement in any field.

Instead, they show that highest achievement is the result of many other causes or conditions. Gladwell shows how soccer and ice hockey players are all born from January through March. He shows how some of the richest computer gurus today were born in 1954, 55, and 56.

They both point out that there are some advantageous circumstances that lead to people being number one. But each of these circumstances is also accompanied by each of these performers practicing more than the competition. They both believe and can demonstrate that leaders take the proverbial 10,000 hours or ten years of practice to achieve notoriety.

To reach flow, one has to practice a competency until the mechanics are ingrained in implicit mind where they are performed without thinking. In fact, if one has to think of the mechanics while performing an activity, they cannot flow.

The act of practice that then separates the best from the rest is practicing always to improve. Leaders in sports, music, and math often have the advantage of secrets of practice that lead to skills not known to their competition.

For example, the Olympic cyclists of Great Britain, the table tennis players of China, and the three world champion Pogar sisters in chess all have special practice techniques that lead to winning in competition. None of their techniques short cut the hours necessary to practice.

Ask yourself if you have ever wanted to excel in something and whether you were willing to devote every waking hour to becoming better.  Few of us have the drive and passion to engage in an activity to almost the exclusion of everything else. Eventually masters can have normal lives, but in the formative years champions have to compromise the joys of afternoons and evenings “hanging out”.

Laird Hamilton is known as perhaps the greatest big wave surfer on earth. He grew up on Hawaii’s north shore where he could ride the biggest waves everyday. Then he moved to Maui where he could ride the treacherous waves of “Jaws”. He became strong from daily practice, talented from learning how to surf the most difficult waves, and famous because he had purposeful practice on waves others could ride only occasionally. This is not to short shrift the fact he may also have more courage than other surfers.

People are rarely accomplished, rich, and famous because they were born with specific genes and talent others do not possess. They have the right circumstances, took advantage of the right opportunities, had passion for their activity, and out practiced most of their competition.

To get better at something you love, just start practicing and learn how the best practice. Soon you will be better and eventually you might achieve your vision of how you would perform. There are rarely shortcuts.

**

Read “Outliers, the Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell

Read “Bounce, the Secret of Success” by Matthew Syed

See Resources for books to explore your potential

See Speaking to give your group a glimpse of creating potential in working together

See Life Management to explore your personal potential and happiness.

See Organizational Peak Performance to accelerate achievement

Kaalm Media Group and KMG Consulting
Dedicated To Delivering Insights and Life Transforming Ideas

1-760-231-8966. or email at Mark@KaalmMediaGroup.com

San Diego, CA  U.S.A.  Pacific Standard Time

Peak performance, flow, the zone, healthy eating, fitness, spirituality, core competencies, passion, love, contribution, community, mission statements

Seth Godin Blog

Hard work vs. Long work

Long work is what the lawyer who bills 14 hours a day filling in forms does.

Hard work is what the insightful litigator does when she synthesizes four disparate ideas and comes up with an argument that wins the case–in less than five minutes.

Long work has a storied history. Farmers, hunters, factory workers… Always there was long work required to succeed. For generations, there was a huge benefit that came to those with the stamina and fortitude to do long work.

Hard work is frightening. We shy away from hard work because inherent in hard work is risk. Hard work is hard because you might fail. You can’t fail at long work, you merely show up. You fail at hard work when you don’t make an emotional connection, or when you don’t solve the problem or when you hesitate.

I think it’s worth noting that long work often sets the stage for hard work. If you show up enough and practice enough and learn enough, it’s more likely you will find yourself in a position to do hard work.

It seems, though that no matter how much long work you do, you won’t produce the benefits of hard work unless you are willing to leap.

Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers” paraphrased

And if you add born in the right year and took advantage of the right opportunities you would have the life of Bill Gates and the Beatles. They were always willing to do the long work and the hard work. They were also born at a time that at the right age they could take advantage of some unique opportunities.

Those opportunities placed their long and hard work in competitively advantageous position to become rich and famous.

The Chinese and Japanese students go to school more days than Americans. Chinese don’t have summer vacations. Consequently American poor lose reading capability over summers while advantaged kids pick up reading capability. Chinese have an easier math system and like math. So more school days, a better math system, liking math places them ahead of American students.

As a parallel the Chinese work long hours growing rice which is a very precise discipline. They grow crops three times a year because the more they do the richer the soil becomes. They believe in starting 360 days a year before 6 a.m.. The Americans have to give the land rest when growing corn and other crops. They take off summers after harvest and rest land another year or two. Americans in the 1860’s thought too much education was dangerous for the mind. They thought children should have the summer off.

The reason Japanese and Chinese outwork Americans could be tied to their attitude of what it takes to survive and prosper starting with their attitude about agriculture.

**

Read  Outliers, The Story of Success by    Malcolm Gladwell . How being born in the right year, working hard, and having unique opportunities has lead to success like Bill Gates, Beatles, hockey and soccer stars, and several other unique examples. Why the Chinese and Japanese are better at math.

Read “Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” by Eckhart Tolle

See Resources for books to explore your potential

See Speaking to give your group a glimpse of creating potential in working together

See Life Management to explore your personal potential and happiness.

See Organizational Peak Performance to accelerate achievement

Kaalm Media Group and KMG Consulting
Dedicated To Delivering Insights and Life Transforming Ideas

1-760-231-8966. or email at Mark@KaalmMediaGroup.com

San Diego, CA  U.S.A.  Pacific Standard Time

Peak performance, flow, the zone, healthy eating, fitness, spirituality, core competencies, passion, love, contribution, community