April's Great Fitness Experiment: Hedonism!

April's Great Fitness Experiment is going to be a little... different this month. See, when explaining my new Experiments to people, invariably someone always says to me, "Well my 80-year-old Grandpa smokes a pack a day, eats two slabs of bacon for breakfast, only runs if someone's chasing him and he's the healthiest, happiest man I know!" Other iterations include, "Well my neighbor lost 180 pounds by switching from soda to juice!" and "Cindy Crawford walks her dog a couple of times a week, splurges on hamburgers and she looks awesome!" and my favorite, "You worry too much! I eat whatever I want and play tennis twice a year and I'm still 96 pounds, just like I was in high school!" After years of dismissing the speakers as whack-jobs, sadists or just deluded, it occurred to me that maybe they have a point. What, exactly, would happen if instead of following all the rules, I broke them? It certainly seems to work for some people. Heck, that Supersize Me guy even got a book deal and his own TV special out it!

While I am generally healthier than I used to be, I still haven't been able to attain my goals. Perhaps it's because I'm trying the wrong things. Besides, have you read a health/fitness magazine article lately or listened to an interview with a self-proclaimed expert? Here's a round-up of my fave tips this month (and by favorite I mean, make me want to tear my hair out):

1. "I buy a pint of Ben & Jerry's, eat two bites - really savor them! - and then throw it in the garbage so I'm not tempted to come back to it later." ~ Random Starlet (Dear Hollywood: Please keep comments like this to your neurotic selves. This is why the rest of the world hates us. Thank you.)

2. "Use a fabric-covered scrunchie to prevent hair breakage when pulling your hair back for a workout." ~ Shape Magazine (Aside from the questionable aesthetics of wearing a scrunchie outside of any decade with Prince in the top ten, they're really not very functional - they slip and slide right out of your hair! Am I the only one old enough to remember that?)

3. "Grab this Puma gym bag - a steal at $225 dollars - rather than using a pricier bag. Bonus: it's so chic, it can double as a purse for a night out!" ~ Fitness Magazine (Two questions, Fitness: 1) Who buys a gym bag pricier than $225? Seriously. Something is not "a steal" merely because more expensive items exist. 2) What does one do with their stinky sneakers and sweaty gym duds during their night out?)

4. "I run for 45-60 minutes on the treadmill every day and slashed my calories to 1200." Valerie Bertinelli to People magazine on how she got her bikini bod back in time for her 49th birthday and their cover shoot. (Valerie: The miracle plan you are on? Is called a crash diet. It will soon betray you. Grow up and realize that if the best thing you can say about being 49 is that you can still wear a bikini, then you haven't accomplished much in your half century on earth.)

So you see why it might be prudent to ignore their advice. Besides, who doesn't love random anecdotes? For the month of April, I'm eating chocolate for 3 meals a day, skipping breakfast and calling my stroll to the mailbox my workout. In my free time I'm going to start a celebrity blog. Who's in with me?

This April Fool's day reminder brought to you by the Health & Fitness Industries of America.

PS) April's real new Great Fitness Experiment will be posted tomorrow... sorry, couldn't resist;) Did I fool anyone? Even for a second?? Please!?!?

Bling Bling

Just One Rule

I suppose "Don't hold the gun in front of your face" is a good rule to live by.

Eat a vegetable with every meal. Drink 2 liters of water a day. Meditate for 15 minutes a day. Don't eat sugar. Hug your kids. Take 5 minutes to yourself to relax before bed. Get properly fitted for a bra. Eat real food. Live mindfully. Laugh. No grains. Dance like no one's watching. Do cardio first. Work in what you love and love your work. Be passionate. Ask questions.

All of the above are responses that people have told me over the course of this month's "Perfection" Experiment, which I am renaming the Rules Experiment. Because while there was very little perfection to be had, this certainly was the month of rules.

What I discovered is that while many people initially say that they loathe rules, everyone usually has a few that they live by. I asked them to distill it to one. One simple rule. At first I asked people to tell me their one hard-and-fast health rule but slowly it broadened into their rule for life.

Do no harm. Don't be evil (thanks Google!). Give more than you get. Listen first.

Another good rule: If you want your kids to eat healthy, set a good example.

As part of my Experiment this month - and per the advice of at least 3 of you darling readers - I read (she of Real Housewives fame) Bethenney Frankel's book Naturally Thin. At first it felt like every diet book. "This is the last diet book you'll ever need!" "But don't call it a diet!" But the more I got into it - it's based around Frankel's 10 simple rules for healthful eating - the more it felt like Intuitive Eating, a book I both simultaneously love and have been frustratingly unable to implement. Except that in Naturally Thin, she gives you a little more guidance on how to do what she suggests. Her first rule, and the most important according to her, is to think of your body like a food bank. Good, healthy foods are deposits. Decadent desserts, french fries and other unhealthy foods are withdrawls. You can eat them all but just make sure to balance your budget every day.

This is the way "naturally thin" people eat, she asserts. No weighing or measuring portions. No counting calories. No obsessing over preparation methods at restaurants. Just making sure your balance stays in the black. It seems to make sense. While I do have friends that do the weighing/counting/measuring/obsessing thing to stay thin, I also have several who just seem to know what their body needs and eat it. If I have a choice (do I?) I'd prefer to be in the latter group.

But I have always - perhaps this was my first cogent thought as a newborn? - assumed that I was not naturally thin. I always knew that my body, if left to its own devices, would head towards obesity faster than Nadya "Octomom" Suleman runs to the press. And yet Frankel says this is not so. She says that every person has the ability to learn to be naturally thin. You just have to follow the rules.

Where she has 10, others have fewer. Michael Pollan is famous for his pithy 3-rule advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Gwyneth Paltrow: "Eat raw." Mariah Carey: "Eat purple." But it's not the famous people whose rules I'm interested in, it's the real people.

A great rule: Never leave without a kiss.

MizFit summed up her approach for me thusly: "I don't do rules." Reader Dara told me, "Nothing makes you look slimmer faster and stand up prouder than a good bra." Heather Eats Almond Butter discovered the secret for her is "just Yoga." And there were many responses in between. For me, while this Experiment has helped me cull my rule list (apparently using mouth wash every day is bad for you! Who knew??), I have not been able to distill them down to just one. Or even an overarching theory. But I feel closer than I was before.

Recycle. Live simply. Be kind. Ride mass transit. Talk to strangers. Pray. Love generously.

What's your One Rule? Have any of you read Naturally Thin? Hype or doable?

Don't forget: New Experiment coming at you tomorrow!

One last rule: No piercings bigger than your head

RICHARD SEYMOUR'S/FIT SCHOOL.....LEAN FOR LIFE

Muscle will only responds in advanced
trainers or athletes with resistance. If the muscle is not
presented with new challenges ( resistance ) it has no reason to
adapt and grow. Your body has no reason to change( body ) composition ( burn fat, build lean muscle tissue ).

With H.I.G.T (high intensity group training) the basis is to stimulate new muscle
development by recruiting type two fibers, red also known as fast twitch muscle fibers. Fibers that will only come into play when the muscle becomes over loaded. I like to call these fibers the lazy muscle fiber, you red or fast twitch fibers. H.I.G.T does this in two ways. When you have taxed your muscle lets say with a set of dumbbell presses, most of the work was done with type one fibers,white, slow twitch...little to none of your type two "RED" muscle fibers came into play. This has been studied & proven by science, zeroed and molded into perfection by me.

By immediately moving from one multi joint exercise (exercises that recruit the most muscle fibers to perform the movement, IE: squats, dead lifts, rows, etc..) to the next, up to four different exercises for different body parts in a set, type
one fibers have become overworked and force type two fibers to come & assist, thus causing maximum damage and with proper nutrition & rest larger stronger muscle tissue. With consistency, change in overall body composition

The second way is with intensity, in my routine I achieve this with little to no rest between sets, all as I am increasing the weights on each set. Crazy? Not realy over time you adapt and can still increase the amount of weight you lift, it's just hard as hell to do and takes an open mind and thinking outside the box. So stick it out.

The body will respond two ways training this way. First, you will burn loads of calories and force the most important muscle in your body to work overtime. Your heart! Pretty much eliminating the need to do boring types of cardio to strip away fat and shed water. Secondly, with little to no rest you fatigue your type one fibers much faster than traditional one set and rest old school training. Thus conditioning your body to recruit faster, type two fibers. The muscle building lean for life, ripped as a Mother F@#!*! Type two ,fast twitch fiber!

My H.I.G.T training will keep you lean & muscular for life, not to mention it is challenging and fun to do, in time of course. At first you will be sending me hate mail.

Richard Seymour

Is Your "Real Age" Accurate?

I got to see this costume up close! My fave part: the piano, also filled with bubbles. And her playing said piano with her clear plastic stripper stiletto. Oh yeah, the singing was fab too.

For those of you who think I act like a teenager (this 30-year-old mom recently saw Lady Gaga in concert - a show otherwise filled with superfan teen girls and drag queens), apparently I have good reason. According to this test, I'm actually only 18. If you, like me, have been on the Internet since Al Gore invented it, then I'm sure you recognize the grandaddy of online quizzes. Basically, you answer 150 lifestyle questions and the test calculates your "real" biological age by adding years for things like smoking and sleep debt while subtracting years for healthy habits like flossing and taking a multi. The Real Age test is so ubiquitous as to be a staple on Oprah. And without even shoddily crafting a pseudomemoir!

At first I will admit I was thrilled with my results. See? That healthy living obsession is paying off in the form of high-kicking organs and a mind that could battle wits against a Sicillian and win (although not in a land war in Asia.) But then the doubt started to creep in. I fussed around with my results and discovered something interesting: the test puts an immense, some might say disproportionate, emphasis on certain supplements. Especially confusing to me was the pro vitamin E stance, considering all the recent research about its harmful effects. A supplement that reportedly causes a 15% increase in early death actually added years to my life according to the quiz. Are they just operating off of old research? After all, Vitamin E used to be the wonder supplement before Vitamin D threw it off the bridge with cement shoes. Or, is something more nefarious going on?

It turns out that I am not the only person to question the validity and thereby the recommendations of The Real Age quiz. The New York Times recently ran a story about the Quiz and came to an interesting conclusion: the test is sponsored by drug manufacturers who glean information from the surveys. Stephanie Clifford writes,

While few people would fill out a detailed questionnaire about their health and hand it over to a drug company looking for suggestions for new medications, that is essentially what RealAge is doing.

RealAge allows drug companies to send e-mail messages based on those test results. It acts as a clearinghouse for drug companies, including Pfizer, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline, allowing them to use almost any combination of answers from the test to find people to market to, including whether someone is taking antidepressants, how sexually active they are and even if their marriage is happy.

In addition, The Real Age test, backed by Oprah's Dr. Mehmet Oz, has branched out into a full online community with mailing lists, chat rooms and even recipes. Boasting a membership of over 27 million, they've got a lot of eyeballs. So not only is the test assigning an arbitrary number based on dubious health principles but they're also creating one of the largest online drug marketing databases in the world.

Then what's a health-and-quiz-loving girl to do? Tara Parker-Pope, also of the New York Times, suggests the Your Disease Risk Quiz. Their website isn't nearly as sexy nor will it give the you succinct and flattering satisfaction of a "real age" number but it will tell you which of your lifestyle factors make you more vulnerable to certain diseases. In addition to helpful tips more firmly rooted in research, the quiz (multiple disease-specific quizzes actually) also has the added benefit of not requiring registration nor storing any of your information. It is for your eyes only, to do with what you wish. (Iocaine powder tolerance, optional.)

Have you taken The Real Age Quiz? Did it make you younger or older? Did you find the quiz motivated you to make healthy changes in your life? Or are you suspicious of anything that ties up in such a neat little package? Anyone else secretly love A Million Little Pieces? (Shhhh....)

Gerard Butler~The Ultimate Obsession

Aew 007 - Daniel Craig

Ricardo Baldin

Rihanna's Got a Gun

Rihanna - she of the battered by Chris Brown fame (What? She's a singer too??) - recently got some new ink done:


Lots of people are questioning the aesthetics of the tiny tattoos but even more are asking what it all means. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's pretty obvious. She was recently victimized, both by her boyfriend and then by the press, and now she's sporting permanent guns, an overt symbol of power and violence. Let's not over analyze this.

What is interesting to me is the different ways that victims use to regain their equilibrium after an assault. For me, the real question is, how will Rihanna ever feel safe again?

The immediate answer that most people give to that question is to pursue legal action and put your attacker behind bars where presumably he can no longer hurt you or anyone else and also runs a risk of being assaulted himself - punishment and revenge in one neat rap of the gavel. I can tell you that it doesn't work that way. For one thing, court cases are not immediate. Chris Brown is not currently in custody despite a substantial body of evidence against him. It may happen. It may not. Either way it doesn't provide immediate safety. Another problem with the court-as-protection argument is that once a person is victimized, they feel vulnerable on all fronts. It helps if their particular attacker is removed from their vicinity but it doesn't preclude an attack by someone else.

One of the tools that abusers often use is to put the blame on the victim. I remember the very first thing my boyfriend said to me after he sexually assaulted me: "Do you see what you made me do?" He then went on to say how I was complicit in my own assault (despite being asleep when he started) and how he was really upset about it and that I shouldn't let this happen again. When I weakly protested, he threatened to kill me and kill himself. I accepted his rationalization. I can't really explain it except to say that a) it is quite common for victims to accept the blame and b) I was doing what I thought was the safest thing at the time - I just wanted to get out of that car alive. This trick of having the victim take responsibility for the assault is insidious in that the victim then internalizes it as being something they did wrong. And logically, if we did it wrong once, we could do it wrong again and therefore be open to future assaults. It worked like a charm on me.

Another way, very popular in Hollywood, for victims to find a sense of safety is to learn how to protect themselves. Martial arts, learning to shoot, self-defense, and even hiring a bodyguard are popular leading-lady options. This works. But it works a lot faster in the movies. As I am discovering through my own study of karate, it takes a really really long time to get enough skill to withstand a determined attack. It definitely feels good to be doing something proactive to protect myself and gain confidence in my body but right now, as my Sensei pointed out to me, I'm probably more a threat to myself than anyone else. Not to mention that skills learned in a classroom setting are much more difficult to apply in real life, Kill Bill notwithstanding.

A third way that victims seek safety is by comparing their situation with others. I went through a period of time where I was so obsessed with watching movies and shows, talking to other victims and reading books and articles about rape, domestic violence and assault that to the casual observer it must've looked as if I were in the throes of a very strange fetish. All this information was a two-edged sword though. If the situation were radically different from mine - say the victim was a child - then I felt safer. However, and this happened far more often, if there were similarities between her and I, then I felt even more vulnerable with my new awareness of all the "could haves" and "might happens" out there. Law and Order: SVU was the bane of my existence. I couldn't not watch it. And then I wouldn't be able to sleep without nightmares for days afterward. Eventually this urge dies down but it never quite goes away. It's the what-if game.

The last and least glamorous, although probably the most common way that victims seek safety is talk therapy of some kind. This helps too although it also takes a long time.

No matter which tactic the victim employs however, this constant mental replaying of the assault (which is both reflexive and retraumatizing) often leads victims to change themselves or their situation in some meaningful way. Some of us move or change jobs or cut our hair. Others lose weight or gain weight. Change our style of dress. Alter our daily schedule. Avoid public transportation or friends houses or walking late at night. Refuse to talk about it. Won't shut up about it. Start drinking. Quit drinking. And some of us get tattoos of guns.

Some alterations are more effective than others in actually providing protection but every single one of them sends a message: I'm taking my power back. I'm doing something.

I'm going to tell you the truth. It's been 10 years since my assault and abusive relationship and I still don't feel entirely safe. A homeless man approached me in a dark parking lot recently and before he could even ask me for money, I had burst into hysterical tears - the panic overtaking me in a way that I am still ashamed of. It's one of my greatest frustrations in my karate training now is that every time we learn a new move, I silently think "This wouldn't have worked. This wouldn't have saved me then." And yet I am too untrained and too afraid to learn the moves that would have saved me. Unless nothing would have. And that's the crux of it for me. I will always wonder if there was nothing I could have done to prevent what happened. What if what I did was really the best thing to do in the situation? But I can't allow myself to think that because that would mean that my assault was inevitable. And if I couldn't have protected myself then then how can I hope to prevent it from happening again?

I think I'll get a tatoo of a gun.

Model David Miliband

EXERCISE BALL. ARE YOU READY FOR A NEW CHALLENGE?

Exercise balls are one of today's top fitness tools - and for good reason! Using an exercise ball will improve the strength of the abs and the lower back. Since the exercise ball is unstable you have to constantly adjust your balance, which in turn will improve your balance, proprioception and flexibility. As an extra challenge you can use the exercise ball as a bench using free-weights to target those hard to reach stabilizer muscles.

Fitness Benefits of Heavy Bag Training

A good heavy bag program strengthens your cardiovascular system, tones and strengthens your muscles, burns fat, increases bone density and connective tissue resilience. Not only can you get into great shape, but you can develop functional self-defense qualities at the same time.

By repeatedly striking and kicking the bag, you activate all of the major muscles groups in your body. The arms, shoulders, abdominal, and leg muscles must be coordinated and conditioned. This training also builds athletic qualities such as speed, power, balance, timing, and coordination. I incorporate my heavy bag work into my daily weight & fitness training.

Richard

Survival of the Weakest

If I've learned anything from grading thousands of high school SAT essays - other than everyone read The Great Gatsby this year - it's that life is all about your weaknesses and how you deal with them. There are very few 17-year-olds that are innately good spur-of-the-moment essay writers and yet the forces that be have decreed that if you want to get into a good college then you'd better be able to crank out something both quasi-meaningful and semi-literate in under 30 minutes. This conundrum forces students to confront one of their weaknesses and deal with it in a high pressure situation.

Those students who are prepared and/or just talented - about 25% by my rough estimation - usually sail through with few problems other than blandness (seriously, I have the most boring job in the world.) It's the rest of the kids who make me alternate between wanting to kill the next texting-at-the-table teen I see in the restaurant and wanting to hug every sad sack in excessive eyeliner and a Hot Topic hoodie. The students unprepared for the exam or perhaps caught up in a clench of testing anxiety usually employ one of several tactics: overconfidence, bluffing, gibberish or just plain giving up. (Side note: I had one student, once, who drew me a wonderfully illustrated - yet wordless - cartoon interpretation of the prompt. Sadly we don't grade for creativity. I still wonder what happened to that kid.) Obviously the first three irritate me greatly but it's the last one that breaks my heart. There's usually at least one essay in every batch that is nothing but some eraser marks and tear stains.

Write something! Write anything!! I want to scream at them. Even if it's nothing but a tangential recap of last night's American Idol, you'll still get some points. But two x-ed out sentences and a damp spot? Nada. You have to at least try.

It makes me think of all the times in my life that I've left nothing but proverbial eraser dribble and tears. I'll be honest: I'm a wuss. I don't have a high pain tolerance or risk tolerance or gore tolerance or any other tolerance. (Back when I was teaching, one of my classes figured out that they could actually get me to run out of the room with my hands over my ears by recounting the plot line to any of The Saw movies. My street cred never quite recovered from that one.) I often joke that if I'd been born a Serf or a Pioneer or a woman in any other age before feminine hygeine products were invented, I probably would have died before passing on my genes thus ending the Charlotte lineage of crazy before it could even get going.

There is an upside to my wussitude, however. Having so many weaknesses makes me confront them on a regular basis. And this - while painful and often embarrassing - generally makes for a lot of good learning opportunites. Because, here's the thing, our society tends to focus on individual strengths; encouraging people to hone their skills, focus on their assets and trumpet their achievements but the real growth comes not from doing what you already do well but from trying what you suck at enough times that you get better. There is little interest for me in reading about people who born good at what they do (um, hi, Lance Armstrong). I'd much rather hear about those who struggle and fight and earn every inch of what they've got. And if I'm being really honest, those are the things I like best about myself.

I take for granted my speed-reading ability because frankly I've always been good at that. I've never had to struggle to learn to read. But on the other hand, for years I was painfully, gut-wrenchingly, awkward-as-Daria shy. It's taken me a lot of work and effort (and, yes, reading) to overcome what I had once seen as an unchangeable personality trait, an accomplishment that holds far more value for me. Another weakness that I'm currently working on overcoming is my obsession with and hatred of my body, in particular my weight. I know you guys get tired of hearing it. I get tired of writing it (and thinking it and crying over it and wasting time on it.) I'm not over it yet. But I'm not going to quit confronting it until I've conquered it. (Jellybean weakness duly noted. It's on the list too. Somewhere. Bottom-ish.)

This is the problem I have with most fitness stories. It's all about the "Before" (cue frowny face and big lumpy t-shirt) and the "After!" (bring on the white grin, 3/4 turn and bikini in heels!). So very little is said about the struggle in the middle. It's not that I don't ever want to hear about what people do right - we all definitely need more positivity - but is it wrong to want to hear the messy middle too?

Thanks to advancements in medicine and eugenics laws, a lot of us weak folk are surviving. But life is about so much more than just surviving it. To thrive you have to learn from your weaknesses, whether they be physical, mental or spiritual. All of which means that at least my life will never be boring. What about you? Have you ever come face to face with yourself and not liked what you saw? How did you overcome it?

For a truly inspiring example of conquering weakness, check out this guy - a Down's Syndrome kid with cancer who not only overcame his own hardships but managed to lift everyone else around him as well, even in his death. There is value in fallibility.

Hot Star George Eads

Sexy Brazil Guy Matheusverdelho

Nutritional Superstars that keep the fat off!

Cheap comfort food and stress-induced binges are causing the numbers on people's scales to rise, even as their finances plummet. Here's a look at 10 foods that are nutritious and keep you lean at a low cost.
1. Apples
2.Bean's
3.lentils
4.Yogurt
5.oatmeal
6.Frozen spinich
7.Eggs
8.Lean pork
9.Parm-cheese
10.Air popped pop-corn

The truth about arm training

My rule on arm training goes against the standard practices and advice given my most trainers. Barbell curls as well as dumbbell curls certainly have a place in every ones routine, however to build strong well defined biceps I am certain most of you are leaving the most crucial bicep builder out of your current routine.

Chins! That's right the good old fashion chin-up will build a bigger stronger bicep than dumbbells and barbells alone. How you ask? Basic science tells us muscle grows with resistance, we all know it but few people in the gym and even athletes fully understand this. Truth is most trainers taking your money giving you advice don't.

Resistance & intensity are two keys when it comes to building lean muscle tissue and burning fat. Most of you, no just about all of you can not curl your body weight. But most of you can chin your body weight. I way 165 pounds. I can chin multiple times for multiple sets. However I can only curl 55 pound dumbbells and maybe 130 pounds with a barbell curl. So you see more resistance 165 pounds with a chin up will tax my biceps and force growth and functional strength much more than curling 55pd dumbbells.

If you cant perform 10 chin ups you have no business doing arm curls. learn to chin and do pull-ups, these basic exercises are some of the best going. You will reap the rewards.

Richard

Allentown's newest boxing gym

Former lightweight boxer Luis Melendez has plans to open another boxing gym in Allentown PA. More details to come. Feel free to contact Luis at lmelendez65@gmail.com

As Obesity Rises, Our Military Shrinks

In what I think may be the most poignant picture of the obesity epidemic, it was reported today that 3 out of 4 military-age Americans are unfit for service. The reason? They surpass the weight and/or body fat percentage limits set by the government. Since 2005, over 48,000 potential soldiers have been turned away due to weight issues - more soldiers than are currently stationed in Afghanistan.

What does it say about a country when the vast majority (75%!) of the citizens who are eligible to fight for it - and ostensibly are in the prime of their lives - are physically unable to qualify for military service on the basis of weight? And lest you think the military standards are overly rigorous, you need only to come in under 26% body fat for men and 32% for women. To see the maximum allowable weight by age, gender, height, check out the official Army site (although the requirements vary slightly by branch of service.) Catwalk models, they are not.

Curtis Gilroy, the Pentagon's accessions chief, says, "It's clearly a problem for the United States military. We're faced with a dwindling pool of the youth population in the 17-to-24-year-old group about which we are very concerned."

In addition to compromising our ability to protect ourselves from outside threats, another recent study shows that our rising weights also affect our ability to provide fundamental emergency services. Researchers from Harvard and The Cambridge Health Alliance found that more than 75% of emergency responders (fire or ambulance services) are obese or overweight.

"Emergency responders (firefighters, ambulance personnel and police) are expected to be physically fit to perform strenuous duties without compromising the safety of themselves, colleagues or the community. Traditionally, these professions recruited persons of above- average fitness from a pool of healthy young adults. However, given the current obesity epidemic, the candidate pool is currently drawn from an increasingly heavy American youth."

While I cringe at the thought of weight discrimination in the work place, there do seem to be some fields where job performance is contingent upon general health, weight playing a significant part of that. Can an overweight or obese firefighter or EMT provide the same level of emergency care that they would be able to if they were lighter? Perhaps it depends on the person. Certainly there are people out there labeled as overweight that could throw me over their shoulder and strap a kid to each appendage and then climb down 10 flights of stairs - but I'm guessing that's more the exception than the rule.

I have to admit it makes me feel a bit frightened and vulnerable to think that such a high percentage of those people who should be able to serve and protect, if necessary, are simply physically unable to do so. All concerns about aesthetics aside, our country is only as strong as its citizenry.

Not everyone feels this way, however. Professor Samantha Kwan says the "obesity epidemic" is overblown media hype. "This epidemic has been constructed to the benefit of the medical industry that has in part medicalized the treatment of obesity over the years. While there may be a rise in 'obesity,' the BMI is not always accurate. Some scholars describe this epidemic more as a moral panic. While there may be some truths to rising rates, they have been overstated."

How do you feel about it? Do these stats scare you? Or is this one more incidence of the fat hysteria sweeping the country?

Hottie Ryan Daharsh

Black and White, Model, Ryan Daharsh, Shirtless And Six Pack Abs

Triceps Dips

The dip is an exercise used in strength training. Normal, shoulder-width dips primarily train the triceps, with major synergists being the anterior deltoid, the pectoralis muscles (sternal, clavicular, and minor), and the rhomboid muscles of the back (in that order). Wide arm training places additional emphasis on the pectoral muscles, similar in respect to the way a wide grip bench press would focus more on the pectorals and less on the triceps.
Performing the Exercise
To perform a dip, the exerciser hangs from a dip bar with his arms straight and shoulders over his hands, then lowers his body until his arms are bent to a 90 degree angle, and then lifts his body up, returning to the starting position. Usually dips are done on a dip bar, with the exerciser's hands supporting his entire body weight as pictured.

Richard Seymour's/ High Intensity Group Training ( H.I.G.T )

Resistance & Intensity combined build muscle. Sorry, not long runs on a treadmill or lifting light weight for endless reps. Train that way and your body has no reason to change it's composition (burn fat, build lean muscle tissue, build functional strength. ) That is about as simple as I can make it.
A combination of heavy resistance, multi joint exercises up to four in one set ( group) and little to no rest between sets. This is the key to unlock the door to a lean muscular body, for life! H.I.G.T combined with boxing is an exciting and challenging way to train.

Richard