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You down with lifting weights?
(Yeah, you know me…)
You down with lifting weights?
(Yeah, you know me…)
You down with lifting weights?
(Yeah, you know me…)
Who’s down with lifting weights?
ALL THE HOMIES!
-Naughty By Nature (probably)
Happy Friday, Coach J here from Anyman Fitness – and welcome to the latest edition of The N.W.A. Newsletter.
Each Friday’s N.W.A. Newsletter will have 3 parts:
- A Nutritional Tip to help make your diet healthier and easier to stick to.
- A Workout Tip to help make your training sessions more effective and fun.
- An Attitude/Mindset tip to help you strengthen your greatest asset – your mental toughness.
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I will also give you my single favorite piece of social media content from AF over the past week and link to it on either Instagram or Twitter.
Without any further ado… let’s get started, shall we?
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N.W.A. Nutrition Tip Of The Week:
Today’s nutrition tip is simple: To improve your cooking skills immensely, get a cast iron skillet and start using it regularly.
Everyone’s grandmother had a cast iron skillet to cook most of their family meals on.
Somewhere along the lines we became annoyed at how food sticks to cast iron skillets and everyone started buying non-stick surfaces for all of their cooking.
But quicker and easier seldom translates to better; if you don’t have a cast iron skillet, I would definitely recommend it.
Cooking with cast iron has a number of benefits.
Cast iron retains heat extremely well.
This causes your food to be cooked more uniformly and thoroughly, allowing the food’s flavors to shine.
Cast iron is tough and durable.
Cast iron skillets used to be passed down for generations.
Great Grandmothers would pass their skillets down to the Grandmothers who’d pass them down to the Mothers, etc.
Cast iron skillets can literally last hundreds of years – you buy one and you’ll have it forever.
Cast iron can go anywhere.
We like to use our cast iron skillets on our electric range, but you can do anything you want with them.
Put ’em on a grill, put ’em in the oven, heck, even take them to a bonfire or campground and use them there.
No matter where you go, you can take your cast iron and make delicious meals with them.
Cast iron adds a small amount of iron into your diet.
Many of us are iron deficient, so getting this element into our bodies is a net positive for our health.
Iron deficiencies can cause low energy, anemia, and fatigue, so getting a bit of iron into your system can be beneficial for you.
Cast iron cookware improves over time.
Since cast iron is porous, a little bit of the seasoning of each meal you make gets baked into the cookware itself.
This allows for tastier and tastier food over time, improving your dining experience each time you use it.
And perhaps my favorite reason to grab a cast iron skillet or 2:
You can make tender, delicious steak all winter long when you learn how to properly reverse sear a steak.
In fact, this technique is so tasty even in the summer time, we’ll often use the cast iron skillet inside instead of the grill and use the reverse sear method.
It just flat out tastes better.
Eating your meals at home is always an excellent strategy for lowering your overall calories.
But making your food tasty should be a high priority for you as well.
Grabbing a cast iron skillet and learning how to cook with one is a big step in that direction.
N.W.A. Training Tip Of The Week:
The older you get, the more important it is to move your body each and every day.
I will admit when I was younger, I didn’t adhere to this.
When I was first getting into fitness, I trained 3 days per week for about 40 minutes and I took 4, full rest days per week.
On those rest days, I didn’t train at all – I simply rested.
No lifting, no cardio, and no additional activity.
Granted, some of that was due to not having the time, as I had 2 young children in diapers, but I still didn’t do a thing for my fitness 4 days per week, unless you count corralling the little buggers for bath time (trust me – it requires a LOT of energy).
As I’ve gotten into my 40’s, it’s become clear to me just how important it is to move your body every day.
The benefits to strength training aren’t just to have bigger muscles and look better in t-shirts (although that’s important).
Moving your body makes you feel better from the inside out.
There’s a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction you feel when you’ve put in a good, honest day’s work and you’ve exercised as well.
That’s the kind of feeling that boosts your confidence and helps you sleep better at night.
Frequency always trumps duration in the world of fitness.
Meaning, the number of times you exercise trumps the length of your training sessions.
If you have 2 options and they are:
1. Train for 2 hours, 3 times per week.
2. Train for 1 hour, 6 times per week.
You want to choose Option 2 every single time if you can.
They both equal 6 hours of training, sure, but spreading your sessions out over 6 days will allow for better recovery and more ‘movement days’ overall, which will provide you a better result overall.
You will be more metabolically healthy and you will likely find yourself more refreshed than you would if you annihilated your body 3 times per week in long, 2 hour sessions.
The underlying concept is simple and it’s similar to being back in school.
What’s the better option if you’re going to be studying for a final exam in college:
1. Studying for 1 hour for 10 straight days.
2. Studying for 10 hours right before your exam.
The choice is obvious here – we all know “cramming” isn’t the best way to retain information.
And “cramming” for fitness works the exact same way.
If it fits your schedule and you can commit, the more times per week you exercise, the better, assuming you’re recovering properly and not burnt out.
Shorter, more frequent sessions > Longer, less frequent sessions
Be sure you always keep this in mind when designing your own personal training program.
N.W.A. Attitude/Mindset Tip Of The Week:
“We all have 2 lives, and the second begins when you realize you only have one.”
-Confucius
I just love this age old quote.
What does a quote like that mean to you?
We all get caught up in insular thinking based on our unique worldview.
For 31 years of my life, I was conditioned by society and it formed the way I thought the world worked.
I thought the path to success in life was simple:
> Go to school
> Get good grades
> Go to a good college
> Graduate
> Get a good job
> Diligently save/raise a family
> Retire at 65
This was the path that was hammered into every kids’ head from the first day they set foot in kindergarten class.
It wasn’t until I started doing my own thing with my own business that this world view was shattered into pieces.
Maybe you aren’t interested in starting an internet business or a side gig, but what can you do to challenge your own, insular thinking?
What worldviews do you have that are unique to you?
What skills do you have that other people would be interested in learning?
What can you provide to this world outside of working a normal, 9 to 5?
Change is frightening no matter how you look at it.
But history tends to favor the bold.
Are you spending your current life in a blur of workdays, loads of laundry, and carting kids all around your hometown?
Or are you carving time out for yourself and working on your own self-improvement?
You have one life to live.
Perhaps you don’t yet feel the urgency of this fact.
But you will eventually.
And I hope once you do, your second life starts to blossom for you as well.
One Favorite Social Media Post Of The Week:
Self love is fine and all, but sometimes you need to get furious at yourself and demand you do better.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of the Anyman Fitness N.W.A. Newsletter.
I’ll be back next week.
Hope you have a wonderful weekend.
Best,
Shock-Coach-J
Anyman Fitness
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DJ Kool Herc from the Bronx is widely credited with creating hip hop and rap music as we know it.
He was the first DJ to loop instrumental beats together to create one, continuous, flowing song.
Eventually, lyrics were added over the instrumental beats, and rap music was born.