My father and I were very close and used to speak three to four times a day.  Not having him in my life is a big adjustment.  One of the things that makes me really sad is knowing that his heart disease was largely preventable had he just made different choices.  He was terrible about diet and exercise.  I used to beg him to go to the gym and workout, but it was just something that he wouldn’t bring himself to do.

Being a part of Instructional Fitness has afforded me the luxury of being around some really incredible fitness minds.  They have all given me different ideas and tips that we hope to share with all of you for a very long time.  At the end of the day though, our level of health and fitness comes down to choice.  Some people diet and exercise just because they want to look better.  There’s nothing wrong with wanting to look good, but we should always remind ourselves that there’s a lot more at stake than vanity.  For me, the biggest reason to diet and workout is quality of life.  To be able to live a long life with your family, to be able to play with your children and to just feel good on a daily basis.

Building muscle and losing weight are great tools to make you look better and feel more confident, but they are even better tools to give you great years with the people that matter the most to you.

So as we go in to 2011, I hope that we can help you not just reach your fitness goals, but help you live a long and happy life!

Best wishes for the coming year to you all!

It’s almost summertime so I’m changing gears now in my weight training.  After my wedding, I decided to go for size and got back up to around 220 pounds.  In my Kung Fu school, a lot of people were asking me what supplements I used to get my size.  One of my favorite supplements is the creatine called Cell Drive made by JS Nitro.  I also took my fair share of Glutamine and Branched Chain Amino Acids (BCAA’s).

Now that I’m leaning out, I’ve switched to fat loss supplements.  Before and during my workouts, I have been using VPX Meltdown (I really like this one) and at night, I take another fat loss supplement from JS Nitro, Burn Extreme PM.  Since I’m almost out of the Meltdown, I’m probably going to try JS Nitro Burn Extreme (daytime fat burner).  The fat burners have been really good for giving me energy.  I usually take one pill before I go to the gym and another one halfway through my workout before I start my cardio.  I’m also still taking my Glutamine and BCAA’s.  Sherlyn Roy also started me on Vitamin C chewables which have been quite pleasant.

As any trainer will tell you though, bodybuilding supplements only make up part of the regimen.  The other more important part is the nutrition.  To this end, I have cut out my Cherry Coke again and I’m trying to make better choices with my food.  You have no idea how hard it is to cut out my Cherry Coke.  It’s like a drug for me.The one thing I’ve always been terrible about is getting in enough meals throughout the day.  I’ve been working on getting up to 6 to 8 meals a day.  This is to help with my metabolism so my body will burn more fat.

So whatever your goals are, make sure your nutrition is sound and use the sports nutrition supplements to help give you that little extra push!

Thanks for reading!

The fact of the matter is that nutrition actually makes up the largest part of achieving your ideal look.  You can work out constantly and take all the supplements in the world, but if you don’t watch your nutrition, there’s a 99% chance that you won’t reach your goal.

In 1992, the Bill Clinton campaign came up with a phrase to explain why Bill Clinton was a better choice than the first George Bush.  The phrase was, “It’s the economy stupid.”  Well, in the fitness world, if you substitute the word “economy” with “nutrition”, you have an explanation to the biggest obstacle in reaching your goals.

This is not to say that working out is not extremely important.  This also isn’t to say that there isn’t value in supplements.  But supplements enhance your progress; they don’t do the job for you.  Creatine, ZMA, and Amino Acids are all great supplements for people trying to build muscle, but finding the right ratio of protein and carbohydrates is absolutely essential.

On the other side, fat burners, fat blockers, and CLA are all great for those trying to lose fat, but eating the right amount of protein, the right kind of carbohydrates, and cutting down the sugars will help you get to your goal so much faster.

At the end of the day, you need to be honest with yourself and do what you need to do.  Cheating on your diet and exercise only cheats yourself.  If you don’t know what you should do, hire a personal trainer that can work with you and tailor a program to your needs.  After all, you only get one life and one body, so make the best of it!

We’re just coming off of the LA Fitness Expo that was this past weekend.  What a great event!  We attended the event on Saturday and had a great time interviewing some of the personalities there and watching the different events like the Body Space competition.

Joe Tong and Sherlyn Roy were there and conducted a lot of interviews that you’ll be seeing pretty soon.  Mike O’Hearn was also there as a judge for the Body Space competition and actually conducted several interviews for us too with people like Lou Ferrigno (he was such a class act), Ronnie Coleman (a monster and great guy), and Clark Bartram (extremely knowledgeable and so much energy), to name a few.

If you haven’t been to a fitness expo, I really recommend going.  In addition to a lot of celebrities (fitness and sports), you get a chance to get a lot of free samples for sports supplements that you might what to try without paying an arm and a leg.

So stay tuned, because we have a lot of material coming your way!

I saw Mike O’Hearn in the gym today and he mentioned that he is still in the running to play Conan The Barbarian in the remake.  He auditioned for the role in late 2009 and made such an impression that they called him back to meet with the director Marcus Nispel a few days later.  They’re seeing a lot of people for the role, but they should be coming to a decision soon and as you can imagine, Mike is very excited to play the part.  Of course this means that he would be taking over the role from the man who made it famous, Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Mike has been a great friend to our site and we wish him all the best.  If anyone can play this role, it certainly is Mike.  He has the body, the looks, and the talent to make this film great!

So to all our Instructional Fitness friends, please be sure to send out some positive vibes and support our good friend Mike as he takes his career to new heights!

First off…Just want to wish everyone a very Happy New Year!  This is a very popular time in the fitness world as many of us decide that we want to be in better shape for the coming year.

Today my body part of choice was chest.  My workout consisted of incline dumbbell press, pec deck flys, and the Hammer Strength bench press.  I did 4 sets of each exercise and was getting ready to finish off with decline bench press.  That’s when I ran into Mike O’Hearn and he told me I was doing too much.  Seeing that I was feeling a little lazy, I listened to him.

Sherlyn Roy was also at the gym today getting ready for the Arnold Classic in early March.  She’s training hard and looking good.  I believe today she did chest and shoulders and a bunch of cardio.  I’ve trained with Sherlyn a couple of times and I’ll tell you, that girl trains hard!  She put me through some of her routines and I was sore for days!  I’m sure if she ever gets around to blogging she’s going to make fun of me.

My goal for this upcoming year is to get up to the 230 pound range and lean out somewhere to the 215 to 220 pound range.  Given that I was 138 pounds at the same height (6’2) when I graduated high school, this will be a huge accomplishment for me.

Whatever your goals are, I wish you all the best of luck in reaching them and I promise we’ll do our part to help however we can!  Good luck everyone!

Just wanted to wish you all Happy Holidays!  It’s been an incredible experience launching Instructional Fitness this year.  We’ve worked hard to create a site that everyone can benefit from.  Whether it’s learning how to perform exercises correctly, read up on nutrition and supplements, or even just providing a place for you to buy supplements at great prices, our goal has been, and continues to be, to provide you all with a fitness home.

There are a lot of changes in the making right now.  Some of them are going to be coming soon.  We’re also going to be shooting a whole new series of exercises soon with Sherlyn and Joe and getting to your questions.  I know a lot of you have submitted questions that we haven’t been able to get to yet, but I’m hoping you’ll be patient a little while longer.  Between Joe’s physical therapy and Sherlyn’s competitions, it hasn’t been easy to get everyone in one place long enough, but I promise we’re going to be getting to everything soon!

So I just want to thank you all for your continued support and to let you know that in 2010, we will do our best to continue to grow and provide you all with the best information possible!

Until then, have happy and safe holidays!

My family just recently came through a very difficult time.  My father, a 71 year old man with Congestive Heart Failure was at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, CA visiting a doctor who dabbles in alternative medicine.  Unknown to him at the time, he had accidentally overdosed on Potassium earlier that day.  If you know about Potassium or have read about it on the site, you know that this can be lethal.  In fact, in my father’s case, it stopped his heart for over 10 minutes.  We were very fortunate and blessed that when it happened in his case, he happened to be right in front of a doctor.  The doctor immediately began performing CPR with his partner and they called for an ambulance.  They were able to get a pulse and get his breathing back and rushed him to the ER for further treatment.

When I arrived, it was the scariest moment of my life as I had never seen my father like this before.  To make matters worse, because his brain had been deprived of blood and oxygen during the time he had no pulse, he had absolutely no short-term memory.  He would ask me where he was and what happened to him only to forget three minutes later and ask me again.  After he was stabilized, a Neurologist came to see him and noticed he was deficient in Thiamine.  They began giving it to him and 48 hours, his memory was back to normal.  Aside from a few broken ribs from the CPR, he is now back to normal.

This experience reminded me of something very important.  All too often when we exercise, we are so focused on our appearance that we forget that there’s a much larger issue at stake…our health.  Don’t get me wrong, I want to look good as much as the next guy, but I’m realizing more and more that quality of life is so much more important.  Many times we put off proper nutrition and exercise until tomorrow, but by doing so we risk having poor health.  So just remember that whenever you put these things off until tomorrow, you take the chance of tomorrow being in a hospital with your loved ones around you being scared out of their skin.

Sorry to be so cryptic folks, but this really was an eye opener for me.  Also on a side note, I would really like to thank all the friends and family that were so incredibly supportive during that time.  And a special thank you to Joe Tong who came to the hospital as soon as he could and stayed with my father until 11:00 at night when he had to wake up at 4:00 am the next day.  He was there to talk to doctors, and played nurse to my father when others weren’t available.  He was a true friend through this process and I consider myself blessed to call him a friend.

So that’s it for now…Be good everyone!

I recently came across a video of Mike O’Hearn talking about his goals and career path and I thought I should pass along the link to all of you.

As many of you know, Mike has become a very good friend of mine, and I have to say that I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to call him a friend.  Not because he is a 4 time Natural Mr. Universe or Titan from American Gladiators or that he has graced the covers of countless magazines (although that’s all really cool), but because of what he stands for.

Mike is one of the most focused and driven guys I’ve ever met.  One of his most admirable qualities is his perseverance in pursuing his dreams.  This is a quality that shows up in so many aspects of his life.  He pushes himself in the gym the same way he pushes himself professionally and personally.  Always striving to be better.  It’s hard not to admire a guy like that.

I hope you all get a chance to watch this very short video (under two minutes) and are able to take something away from it.

Until next time…Work hard everyone and never stop striving to be better!

Here’s the link…

http://www.stylelife.com/academy/videos/ohearn.php

Hope you all had a very happy Thanksgiving!  I spent my very first Thanksgiving with my in-laws in San Jose, CA.  I can’t speak for them, but I had a great time!  Mike O’Hearn and Sherlyn Roy also happened to be in town during the same weekend so we all got to hang out and hit Dave & Busters.  I had the misfortune of playing Sherlyn in Ms. Pac Man and got absolutely destroyed.  What she did to me should seriously be illegal.  I’m not 100% convinced that she isn’t the love child of Mr. and Ms. Pac Man!

Anyway, like most people around the holidays, I managed to eat quite a bit and I only got to the gym once during the weekend.  My body part of choice was back with some ab work at the end.  Truth-be-told, I’ve been a little disappointed with my training over the last week.  I feel like I allowed the holidays to throw me off.  Some people would say that it’s the holidays and not to worry about it but my feeling is that given the fact that it’s the holidays and that most of us are not only going to be eating more, but probably not very clean, the best thing we can possibly do for ourselves is to get to the gym and push ourselves that much harder.

So my challenge for myself, and perhaps a challenge you would all like to take on, is to push myself that much harder during this holiday season and not put things off until the New Year.  As tempting as it is to overeat and be lazy, my goal is to push through that laziness so that no matter what I have going on, I still find my way to the gym.  Let’s hope this works!