Wew, it’s been a while since I’ve last updated this blog. Of course, I hap­pen to be out­pac­ing my closet com­peti­tors Alex Guichet, Owen Kue­merle, and An Nguyen by a nice 5:1 ratio so I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad about not updat­ing it in a while. How­ever, as a writer and cura­tor of this blog, I find writ­ing updates some­thing that I love to do, and not being able to do so is a lot like lov­ing solar eclipses and always being dis­ap­pointed when one does not hap­pen in the course of the day. As always, my recent hia­tus is not due in part to a lack of sub­ject mate­r­ial, as believe me, a lot has hap­pened amongst grad­u­at­ing, the swim sea­son con­clud­ing, upcom­ing movie projects, and just life in gen­eral. But, like most in this world, my time is lim­ited and thus I choose to live life these past few weeks as opposed to writ­ing about it.

With that being said, I would like to intro­duce the world to per­haps the worst kind of peo­ple in exis­tence, incon­sid­er­ate bas­tards. “What is an incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard?” you ask. Well in real­ity an incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard has the very broad def­i­n­i­tion of being any­one who impedes another’s joy, progress, or con­cen­tra­tion due to their sheer stu­pid­ity and igno­rance. In the con­text of my life an incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard can be any­one from peo­ple rid­ing side by side together on the bike trail block­ing the whole way so that I can’t pass by, or a pedes­trian walk­ing as slow as fuck­ing pos­si­ble across a cross walk when I am try­ing to make a right hand turn.  How­ever, the incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard has recently mutated and man­i­fested itself into a new, almost incom­pre­hen­si­ble, and invul­ner­a­ble form; fam­i­lies at my neigh­bor­hood swim­ming pool.

Now I’ve had a long  and painful his­tory when it comes to using swim­ming pools in the off sea­son. This blog is lit­tered with numer­ous posts recount­ing how much I hate LA fit­ness for keep­ing their pool tem­per­a­tures at a min­i­mum of 100 degrees Fahren­heit, and how I absolutely loathe the old Asian women who clut­ter that pool with their bull­shit walk­ing exer­cises for hours on end. To be hon­est, I thought I was done with all of this after mov­ing into my neigh­bor­hood pool. After all, that pool is at least kept at rea­son­able tem­per­a­tures, and because my neigh­bor­hood is com­prised of many racist Bap­tists, and Fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians, there are very few old Asian peo­ple to walk in it. But after swim­ming in the pool for a cou­ple of weeks now, I can’t even begin to express how wrong I was in believ­ing that I could escape the dif­fi­cul­ties of a rea­son­able train­ing environment.

The incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard in my neigh­bor­hood is potent in ways that I have never before wit­nessed. He is igno­rant to the core, self right­eous to the extreme, and because he comes in the form of a fam­ily with young chil­dren, he is impos­si­ble to defeat. Allow me to fur­ther explain. My neigh­bor­hood pool is a decently sized, 6 lane, 25 yard pool. It’s the per­fect mix between the size of com­pet­i­tive pool, and the com­fort and ameni­ties of a decent com­mu­nity pool. Since my swim­ming career started at this pool, I enjoy swim­ming in it very much, but because I am so famil­iar with it, I real­ize that it is in no means “my pool” and is instead a pool that the com­mu­nity should be able to freely enjoy. As such, I gen­er­ally try to avoid the peak hours of when the pool is in use. That way I am not dis­turbed by the abun­dance of peo­ple in the pool, and that way they are not dis­turbed by me doing laps.

Thus, I tend to go the pool either early in the morn­ing, late at night, or at awk­ward times in the after­noon when there’s nobody there. How­ever, no mat­ter how remote the time period is in which I visit the pool, the incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard always man­ages to find me, and here’s how our usual deal­ings play out. I arrive at the pool at some ungodly time, and begin my work­out when there’s absolutely nobody there. I take a lane to the side of the pool so that way who­ever comes can just go to the oppo­site side of me and basi­cally use the other 90% of the pool. Halfway through my work­out (usu­ally when I’m done with my drills and warm up, and am ready to do some seri­ous swim­ming) the incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard enters the pool. I begin to do my main set, and halfway through it (usu­ally when I need to focus the most) the incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard comes wad­ing in front of me on one of the walls. Now bear in mind, there’s absolutely nobody else in the pool, and the incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard lit­er­ally has 90% of the pool to him­self entirely. Hell he has 98% of the pool if he is able to move out of lane that I am swim­ming in before I get to him. Yet some­how, the incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard man­ages to take the 2% that I absolutely need on the wall to make a flip turn with­out hav­ing to slow down.

Now I’m a con­sid­er­ate swim­mer, and if some­body absolutely needs the area in the lane that I am swim­ming in, I will gladly cede it to them. After all I usu­ally have every other lane in the pool to choose from. So I move my stuff over to another lane, hop­ing not to cross paths with the incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard again only to have him cross my path once again in a few short laps. I repeat the process again, and again, until some­how the incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard has taken up 50% of the pool to him­self, and every addi­tional por­tion of the pool that I absolutely need in order to keep a fast swim­ming pace.

Here’s the worst part of it, the incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard is usu­ally a young child and his dum­b­ass par­ents. So what hap­pens is the dum­b­ass par­ents put their young child in the pool, and let him do what­ever the fuck he wants. Oh no, don’t dare teach the child to be con­sid­er­ate of oth­ers and maybe tell him not to get in the way of the only other per­son in the pool. Nope, just plop him right down in there and have him take over the whole fuck­ing thing with his stu­pid pool noo­dle and water wings because he’s too retarded to swim prop­erly. Now you might be think­ing to your­self, “Silly Patrick, you can just ask the peo­ple to politely move or not get in your way”, well no I can’t. Remem­ber, my neigh­bor­hood is filled with the sec­ond worst kind of peo­ple in the world (next to incon­sid­er­ate bas­tards of course), Bap­tists and Fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians, and if I were to do some­thing that would be at odds with their right to enti­tle­ment, they would go absolutely ape shit on me. Not to men­tion the fact that if some­one were to even per­cep­ti­bly threaten one’s child be ask­ing him to not be a com­plete fuck­ing idiot, the par­ents world revert to their pro­tec­tive pater­nal instincts which some­how enti­tles par­ents to be crazy and always right.

Case in point, upon walk­ing into the pool for swim prac­tice today, this guy who was doing laps asked this young boy to try to keep his lane clear. While the lap swim­mer was swim­ming away, the boy’s mother starts to yell at him “YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE SUCH A JERK ABOUT IT, WE WERE HERE FIRST”. It’s state­ments like this which really make me angry. First off, the guy wasn’t being a jerk he was merely telling the boy to do the right thing (which I know is some­thing that par­ents are reluc­tant to instill within their chil­dren nowa­days) but it by no means makes him a jerk, sec­ond, even if these peo­ple were at the pool first, would it kill them to not get into somebody’s lane? Now, I hate elit­ist ath­letes as much as the next per­son and both cycling and swim­ming are full of them, so I know how annoy­ing they are. How­ever, in this sce­nario I think the real prob­lem isn’t the ath­lete but it is instead the incon­sid­er­ate bas­tards of the world.

See, if par­ents would just take a lit­tle time to not act like com­plete fuck­ing dip shits when they are around their kids, and instead guide their chil­dren in ways that don’t incon­ve­nience oth­ers, my run ins with the incon­sid­er­ate bas­tard sim­ply would not occur. Remem­ber, it IS the respon­si­bil­ity of the par­ent here, nobody wants to be told to move, and no ath­lete wants to be forced out of his train­ing for some idiot walk­ing in front of him. The prob­lem is, the ath­lete can’t stop the per­son from walk­ing in front of them, and they really can’t tell the other per­son to move with­out piss­ing them off in some way, thus the peo­ple who are in con­trol on both fron­tiers are the par­ents. I would also like to point out how incred­i­bly risky it is for par­ents to let their kids wade around aim­lessly like this as well. When I am swim­ming, and in par­tic­u­lar mak­ing a flip turn, there’s moments when I have zero vis­i­bil­ity of what’s in front of me or what’s behind me. If I were to throw my feet into a wall while I made my turn and a kid walked in front of me, I’d nail his head. Like­wise, if I were to push off of the wall and some­body walked in front of me, chances are that I would push off into their chest at a pretty fast speed. I actu­ally had this hap­pen to me the other day when I was swim­ming a work­out. As I was approach­ing a flip turn, I looked up, saw no one in my periph­eral vision, and went in for my flip, only to have a kid’s pool noo­dle acci­den­tally hit my feet when I was mak­ing the turn. Just imag­ine if the kid went back a few more steps, that would have been his head. For­tu­nately the mom saw this hap­pen and real­ized that let­ting her son walk in front of some­body while doing a flip turn is dan­ger­ous shit, and she got him out of my way.

I just wish that peo­ple would be more cog­nizant of the incon­ve­niences that they place on oth­ers, and the own risks that they expose them­selves to, by sim­ply not tak­ing the extra step to be cour­te­ous.  Of course, there is hope as a few peo­ple who were walk­ing across the pool today for exer­cise chose not to go all the way to the lane that I was swim­ming in, and instead opted to stop just before it, so as not to get into my way. But we still have a long way to go. Either way, by that psy­cho mother’s own logic, I get to the pool first, and thus I am always in the right.

In an ironic twist of fate, I think that I have inad­ver­tently trans­formed into the very thing that I despise and hate. That thing is Owen Kue­merle and the very thing that I despise is not updat­ing blogs. Yes, if I still have my five read­ers read­ing (we’re up to five now oh goody) they have prob­a­bly noticed that I haven’t updated this site in about a month. No, this wasn’t a ploy to empha­size how impor­tant my exer­cise advice is, nor is this lapse in updates due to a lack of sub­ject mate­r­ial. On the con­trary, I’ve had a ton of things that I wanted to blog about but due to the pres­sures of the real world I sim­ply haven’t had the time to sit down and write a qual­ity blog post. When I apol­o­gize for not updat­ing my blog, I usu­ally go into a long list of things that I’ve been doing in the past weeks which is sup­posed to some­how jus­tify my blog­ging absence. Instead of tak­ing this cookie cut­ter approach, I’m sim­ply going to write a post about one of the biggest deci­sions in my life, pick­ing a college.

For those that have been fol­low­ing this site for the past year, the one thing that I’ve blogged about the most has been col­lege. I’ve blogged about the var­i­ous col­lege cam­puses that I planned to apply to, how hor­ri­ble it is for Chap­man to lose essays after hard dri­ves decide to explo­di­ate,  and I even started to bitch about the admis­sion process in gen­eral. Well a cou­ple of weeks ago I made my col­lege deci­sion and as it turns out, all of that blog­ging was for noth­ing because I now only care about one school and that is Cal State Long Beach. “Cal State Long Beach?”  you ask, oh yes Cal State Long Beach, home to 88.1 Kay Kay Jay Zee, or as they com­monly call it KJazz.

First let me start off by say­ing that it was hell of a hard to get into a col­lege this year. The schools decided to go into “WTF!? we don’t have money” mode which means that they weren’t exactly excited to accept fresh­men this year. This was bad news for me because I was bank­ing on the fact that my well roud­ed­ness would help me over­come the tyran­ni­cal oppres­sion  of GPA’s and SAT scores, but when the col­leges don’t have money they say “Fuck that” and make the GPA and SAT scores the only things they really focus on. As a result, I got denied from Chap­man, Notre Dame, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, wait listed from LMU, and accepted to SFSU, CSULB, and CSUN. Chap­man can go to hell, when I become an Oscar win­ning direc­tor I’m going to tell all poten­tial film stu­dents to ignore the snob­bery of Chapman’s film school and to go to some place that isn’t dom­i­nated by rich sub­ur­ban white kids. I still hold high esteem for Notre Dame because they sent me the nicest rejec­tion let­ter ever, and they were very help­ful when I had to con­tact them in regards to my appli­ca­tion. The UC’s are now solid­i­fied as the worst schools ever in my mind. They basi­cally screwed over all of California’s col­lege appli­cants by hav­ing a 10% admit­tance rate to vir­tu­ally all of their cam­puses ( on aver­age they accepted 4,000 stu­dents out of 40,000 appli­cants, yeah bull shit), plus they donated over one mil­lion dol­lars to Barack Obama’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. So basi­cally, they com­plain about not hav­ing enough money even though they donated to Obama’s cam­paign and refuse to accept stu­dents will­ing to pay their hiked tuition fees, they can go burn in hell. LMU would have been nice to go to, but it costs too much and I’m a lit­tle fed up with the rich white kid demo­graphic that they have so I don’t really care that much that I wasn’t accepted there.

So yes, after being denied from almost all of the col­leges that I applied to (fuck the UC sys­tem once again), I was forced to choose between the three col­leges that I did get accepted to. San Fran­cisco State Uni­ver­sity, Cal State North­ridge, and Cal State Long Beach.  Iron­i­cally, the Cal State schools where the only schools that didn’t take into account my well round­ed­ness as every­thing was based purely off of GPA’s and SAT scores, so I how I got accepted to these schools is still a bit of a mys­tery to me.  Attend­ing SFSU was thrown out rather quickly because it really didn’t seem like a place that I would fit in at, plus San Fran­cisco has some really lame weather.  So the choice really came down between CSUN and CSULB. CSUN had a great film pro­gram (as it was located very close to Hol­ly­wood), it also had a very nice cam­pus, and the peo­ple were very friendly there. CSULB on the other hand was a bit of a dis­ap­point­ment, it didn’t look as nice, had a much weaker film pro­gram,  and it had a noto­ri­ous rep­u­ta­tion for being a com­muter school. So why did I pick CSULB over CSUN?

Well for every weak­ness that CSULB had in com­par­i­son to CSUN, CSULB seemed to make up for those weak­nesses by offer­ing vari­ety. The city of Long Beach as a whole is very diverse, and so is the cam­pus at CSULB  in terms of clubs, extracur­ric­u­lars, and sim­ply things to do. I real­ized that I’ve never really based my life on one sole thing, and that instead I like vari­ety and am a jack of all trades, since CSULB had more vari­ety, it seemed like the log­i­cal choice to choose. The three fac­tors that really made CSULB a win­ner in my mind were the pres­ence  of KJAZZ broad­cast­ing from the cam­pus, the con­struc­tion of a new recre­ational cen­ter which will be ready by the time I attend in the fall, and the fact that one of their stu­dent news­pa­pers, The Union Weekly, is awe­some. So yes, I did base my col­lege deci­sion on the things that most peo­ple don’t think mat­ter like radio sta­tions, gyms, and stu­dent news­pa­pers, but these are the things that appeal to me and they will make a dif­fer­ence in how I approach college.

Of course, everybody’s been ask­ing me if I am liv­ing on cam­pus because tech­ni­cally Long Beach isn’t too far away from where I live so I could com­mute there. How­ever, I have never  had to com­mute for more than 10 min­utes to any one of my schools so hav­ing to take a 40 minute trek to and from Long Beach each day isn’t some­thing that I nec­es­sar­ily want to do. As I learned long ago when going on a col­lege tour with my friends, park­ing at every col­lege sucks, and hav­ing to deal with park­ing each and every day would put a damper on the col­lege expe­ri­ence. Lastly, tuition at CSULB is super cheap and see­ing as how I don’t even have my own room at my house, I think it’s worth pay­ing the extra money to live off on my own.

I think it’s funny how much stock peo­ple put into “pres­ti­gious” schools. Don’t get me wrong, receiv­ing an edu­ca­tion from a pres­ti­gious insti­tu­tion is def­i­nitely a good thing,  but what I’ve found is that most peo­ple bend over back­wards either finan­cially, or with their grades in order to attend these places. It feels really nice to lis­ten to peo­ple talk­ing about their fights with finan­cial aid peo­ple in order to afford their $40,000 a year col­lege, while my col­lege tuition cur­rently costs less than my high school one does. At this point in my life, I feel that  it’s impor­tant for me to become inde­pen­dent in all facets of my life. I want to have a job so that I can afford the things that I want, and I also want to start pur­su­ing the things that I want to accom­plish in life. Right now, I per­son­ally think that hav­ing an over bear­ing edu­ca­tion will be more of a detri­ment to my inde­pen­dence than any­thing else. I want to be defined by what I pur­sue and what I accom­plish in col­lege, not by what or how pres­ti­gious my edu­ca­tion is.

So what exactly is my plan for col­lege? Well for starters I want to pur­sue some dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties. CSULB has a triathlon club/ team so I want to be part of that. I’m also con­sid­er­ing tak­ing up a mar­tial art, and maybe an intra­mural sport as well. I def­i­nitely want to have a job so I will prob­a­bly get a job at some place that makes and sells food (mainly so that I can con­sume said food for free), and I will prob­a­bly start work­ing for my par­ents more often. I would also love to join the Union Weekly even if they won’t let me write for it, because I think it will be a fun and reward­ing expe­ri­ence to be a part of. Because CSULB isn’t too far away from home, I should def­i­nitely be able to stay in touch with my fam­ily and friends, but I will also have enough room to be off on my own in col­lege so that should be nice as well. All in all, I’m look­ing for­ward to what CSULB holds and I am happy things turned out the way that they did.

After my recent post regard­ing “The Tires From Hell” I received a com­ment from a cer­tain reader named “Christina”. Since this is the inter­net, and this IS my web­site,  I knew that the chance of attract­ing two legit­i­mate female read­ers was about as strong as hav­ing light­ning strike in the same place twice. Thus I took this reader named “Christina” and assumed that she was some kind of sick joke being played on me by some 40 year old man in Ken­tucky who is prob­a­bly stalk­ing  me. That, or this “Christina” was the FBI pos­ing as a sexy female try­ing to lure me into a trap in which the FBI would con­vict me of rape and sub­se­quently throw me into the party van. With these two dis­tinctly neg­a­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties thrust before me, I decided to respond to this “Christina” in very much the same way that I responded to An.  I approved the com­ment assum­ing that it was from some kind of spam pro­gram that only made user names that were indef­i­nite arti­cles. To my sur­prise though, this “Christina” wasn’t a 40 year old man in Ken­tucky try­ing to fon­dle my gen­i­talia, nor was it the FBI, or even a spam pro­gram, this “Christina” was in fact a female and a real one too.

Now you may be ask­ing “Patrick, how exactly can you prove this?” well, if one were to rewatch all of my movies they would see that a cer­tain Christina Susanka played a few roles in some of my movies. First she played a high class pros­ti­tute who turned out to be a guy (okay maybe that isn’t a good exam­ple to prove that she isn’t a guy) and in another movie she played a courier who got hit by a car, and was then sub­se­quently hit on by our very own Thomas Lyons. Upon recon­nect­ing this name to my past movies, I was able to deduce that this “Christina” was really indeed the Christina Susanka that I had in my movies. Now this is great news for the site for a vari­ety of rea­sons. Not only does it mean that the site has more traf­fic, but it also mean that the site’s gen­der read­er­ship ratio is a fair and bal­anced 1:1, take that Alexguichet​.com, round​blog​.net, twit­ter, and game​faqs​.com. But per­haps the most impor­tant devel­op­ment for the site is the fact that it now has closet read­ers. Just like closet smok­ers, closet drug users, or even closet tread­mill movie watch­ers, this site is now a place where peo­ple can stop by and divulge in the guilty plea­sure of read­ing my posts with­out any­one know­ing it (unless they make a com­ment about it of course). See­ing as how Christina was once a closet reader (although she  has recently come out of the closet (see what I did there)), this means that I have more closet read­ers lurk­ing in the shad­ows. I can only hope that most of them are female, but chances are that they’re just the FBI or my 40 year old man stalker from Kentucky.

Speak­ing of closet tread­mill movie watch­ers, given the suc­cess of my last self help blog post about nutri­tion, and due to my nat­ural incli­na­tion as a fit­ness elit­ist to tell peo­ple what they can and can­not do when it comes to exer­cise, I’ve decided to write yet another self help post, this time about exer­cis­ing. Now unlike my pre­vi­ous post, in which case I had very lit­tle for­mal train­ing or expe­ri­ence in terms of nutri­tion, my exper­tise as a swim coach will help give some more cred­i­bil­ity to this post. With that being said, the advice listed here is meant to be applied prac­ti­cally and in every­day life. Unlike the piece of shit yahoo/ aol health arti­cles, it’s going to take some com­mit­ment, but it’s also going to be effec­tive. Unlike the ridicu­lous sci­en­tific arti­cles, it will be prac­ti­cal for the every­day per­son to use.

1. Step off of that  scale– Like nutri­tion, one of the most com­mon rea­sons for why peo­ple decide to join a gym or decide to “exer­cise” is because they want to lose weight. While there is noth­ing wrong with want­ing to lose weight, peo­ple who exer­cise often take it as the only means of mea­sur­ing their “fit­ness” or “ath­leti­cism”.  Wor­ry­ing about poundage alone is some­thing that is a big issue when it comes to exer­cis­ing because in actu­al­ity, if a per­son is exer­cis­ing the right way they should be either gain­ing weight or main­tain­ing weight, never should they be los­ing it. Now obvi­ously a per­son who is obese or just out of shape is going to have some ini­tial weight loss once they start work­ing out, but there will be a point when los­ing weight becomes either impos­si­ble or unhealthy. The rea­son for this is really quite sim­ple. Mus­cle weighs more than fat, so as a per­son exer­cises and devel­ops more mus­cle they are going to inevitably find them­selves gain­ing weight. This is incred­i­bly preva­lent in weight lifters, who tend to gain a tremen­dous amount of mus­cle, which in turn adds to their weight. Main­tain­ing weight is also very impor­tant for peo­ple with slight builds.  If a per­son with a light build loses weight, then chances are that they are prob­a­bly los­ing mus­cle, which will only make them weaker. I’ve actu­ally had both of these sce­nar­ios hap­pen to me in the course of a year. When I first started veloc­ity I began to gain weight because of all the body weight exer­cises build­ing up my mus­cle den­sity.  Now that I am in the swim sea­son, I have to main­tain weight because I can eas­ily lose 5–10 pounds if I don’t eat enough. While I am sure a lot of peo­ple dream of being able to lose 5–10 pounds in the blink of an eye, it really isn’t some­thing that should even be sought after. I think a main rea­son for why peo­ple always look to lose weight when they exer­cise is because they see it as some­thing that is quan­tifi­able and easy to mea­sure. In actu­al­ity the real rea­son to exer­cise is to become healthy and to be ath­letic, both of these traits are impos­si­ble to quan­tify by mea­sure­ment, but more so by show­ing of endurance, abil­ity, and strength. So to start things off, when exer­cis­ing the mind­set should always be to become a bet­ter ath­lete or a health­ier per­son, never to lose weight.

2. Don’t Pam­per Your­self– For some rea­son, when peo­ple begin exer­cis­ing they find the need to pam­per them­selves con­stantly. First they will start off by going to the clothes store to pur­chase an 80 dol­lar fit­ness out­fit, and a 100 dol­lar pair of run­ning shoes. Then they will go to the gro­cery store to pur­chase pro­tein shakes,  gatorades, power­bars, fit­ness sup­ple­ments,  and all of this other crap that they cer­tainly won’t need. Finally they will stop by the drug­store to buy some ibupro­fen in order to ease the “sore­ness” after their work­out. To put it bla­tantly, this mind­set is a load of crap. The whole point of exer­cis­ing is to push the body to its lim­its so that it will become stronger and develop new ath­letic abil­ity over time. I’m not going to say that an 80 dol­lar fit­ness T-shirt, power bars, and ibupro­fen are going to make a per­son weaker, but what they are going to do is pre­vent the per­son from push­ing them­selves to the limit. If a per­son is just start­ing off with exer­cis­ing, then they are going to have very lit­tle ath­letic abil­ity. If that per­son exposes them­selves to such fit­ness lux­u­ries at such an early stage in their ath­letic devel­op­ment, then they are going to become too reliant on all of these things for their per­for­mance. A major com­po­nent of exer­cis­ing is build­ing resilience. Resilience to phys­i­cal chal­lenges, as well as adver­sity. I learned this very early on when I sub­mit­ted myself to the hor­ror or LA Fit­ness’ pool or the con­stant butt hurt that I got from rid­ing hun­dreds of miles on a bike with­out proper cycling shorts. Sure swim­ming in a hot pool or rid­ing with­out cycling shorts sucks, but I got used to doing it and it made me a more diverse and resilient ath­lete. I would also like to note that most “fit­ness” prod­ucts are ter­ri­bly over­priced and not really nec­es­sary until a per­son hits a cer­tain level of ath­letic per­for­mance. If I can swim for 5,000 yards of high inten­sity inter­vals with­out need­ing a power­bar, gatorade, or ibupro­fen, before, dur­ing, or after prac­tice, then the new comer to exer­cis­ing def­i­nitely doesn’t need to be drink­ing a gatorade after 20 min­utes on the treadmill.

3. Don’t join a gym- Ah, so we’ve hit the con­tro­ver­sial bul­let point. How are you sup­posed to exer­cise with­out the ameni­ties of a well ven­ti­lated gym with plenty of weights, and per­sonal train­ers? I know, it’s a hard con­cept to grasp, but gyms are hon­estly ter­ri­ble places to exer­cise. Not only are they crowded and expen­sive, but they also serve as places to pick up bad habits about exer­cis­ing. To put it sim­ply 90% of the peo­ple that go to the gym don’t know how to exer­cise and nobody is going to see the 10% that do know how to exer­cise because every­one at a gym is too scared to watch what real work looks like. Don’t believe me? Check out the “weigh lift­ing” floor of a gym. 80% of the peo­ple will be on the crappy lift­ing machines, while the remain­ing 20% will be doing body-weight exer­cises and free-weights. Most peo­ple don’t real­ize this, but lift­ing machines are absolutely hor­ri­ble, and do very lit­tle to develop true strength and ath­leti­cism. They essen­tially iso­late mus­cles, instead of try­ing to incor­po­rate them like free-weights do. Using a lift­ing machine is a lot like mas­tur­bat­ing, the focus is only on one thing and there is usu­ally only one set way to achieve sat­is­fac­tion. Free weights are a lot like sex, they incor­po­rate more aspects of the body to derive greater sat­is­fac­tion. Which is bet­ter? Mas­tur­bat­ing or Sex? I rest my case. Oh, and the fact that about half of the gym uses a tread­mill, just shows how stu­pid peo­ple are. The tread­mill does noth­ing for the body and should never ever be used, ever. Now I will con­fess that I do have a gym mem­ber­ship and that I use it quite often, but I only use it because the gym has a pool for me in the off sea­son, and the gym also has weights for me to use. If the gym didn’t have a pool, then I hon­estly wouldn’t have a gym mem­ber­ship. Instead, I would invest in two 25 lb dumb­ells, maybe a med­i­cine ball, a jump rope, and a bench. That’s truth­fully all that a per­son needs to get fit. The only rea­son why I don’t have all of these things already is because I know that my gym has them and I don’t want to take away my only jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for hav­ing a gym membership.

4. Car­dio first– A big prob­lem that peo­ple have when they start work­ing out is that they want to look absolutely ripped.  Because of this, they often decide to start weightlift­ing. While there is noth­ing par­tic­u­larly wrong with weightlift­ing, my per­sonal phi­los­o­phy is that a per­son with a strong car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem is infi­nitely times health­ier and ath­letic then a per­son who can lift well. Work­ing the car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem allows the heart to deliver blood more effi­ciently which  essen­tially allows a per­son to burn more calo­ries and work for harder, longer peri­ods of time. Another ben­e­fit of car­dio is that a good car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem trans­lates well into vir­tu­ally any activ­ity whereas weightlift­ing can only trans­late well if the activ­ity incor­po­rates the area of the body that was devel­oped by the weight lift­ing. Now despite cardio’s numer­ous ben­e­fits, few peo­ple want to do it because they find it bor­ing, repet­i­tive, dif­fi­cult, and it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily build up mus­cle. How­ever, I stress strongly that a good car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem is the key to becom­ing a great ath­lete and a healthy indi­vid­ual. So what does it mean to have good car­dio? Run­ning, Jump Rop­ing, Swim­ming, and Cycling are all great ways to develop car­dio. Run­ning and jump rop­ing are the sim­plest and cheap­est to do, but swim­ming and cycling are more reward­ing. I must empha­size that any form of walk­ing, tread­mill use, or sta­tion­ary cycle use is not a form of car­dio­vas­cu­lar devel­op­ment. The tread­mill and sta­tion­ary cycle bas­tardize what it means to develop car­dio­vas­cu­lar fit­ness because they make it too easy on the body and they do not develop the mus­cles in a way that is at all sim­i­lar to actual run­ning or cycling.  Because of this, they should be avoided like the plague.  Another thing to note is that car­dio requires a high heart rate and lots of sweat­ing, fail­ure to have either of these means that it is not being per­formed properly.

5. Develop a rou­tine and keep it sim­ple, yet chal­leng­ing.- The best piece of advise that I have in this whole post is right in this bul­let point. The key to exer­cis­ing suc­cess­fully lies within the abil­ity to develop a rou­tine that can be per­formed con­sis­tently, and yet still be chal­leng­ing. I am not going to go and sug­gest par­tic­u­lar rou­tines because that relies on a person’s per­sonal goals, what I am going to do is describe all of the key com­po­nents that a person’s rou­tine should have. First and fore­most the rou­tine needs to be sim­ple. If the rou­tine requires too many weights, a cer­tain kind of space, etc, then it is going to become harder to per­form from a logis­ti­cal stand­point. The sim­pler the rou­tine, the more likely it is going to be per­formed, which means the more ath­letic the per­son per­form­ing the rou­tine is going to be. The sec­ond com­po­nent is mak­ing sure that the rou­tine is chal­leng­ing yet accomplish-able. Obvi­ously, if a per­son devel­ops too hard of a rou­tine then they are never going to do it, but if it is too easy then they are never going to improve. I suf­fer from doing this far too often. I often come up with very dif­fi­cult rou­tines and get pissed when I can’t com­plete them, other times my rou­tines are too easy and I waste my time by doing easy stuff that I can already do. Another key aspect for a great rou­tine is to make sure that it is pro­gres­sive. It should be dif­fi­cult at first, but as the per­son per­forms it more, they should be able to do it faster and with higher inten­sity. Just because a per­son gets bet­ter at doing a rou­tine doesn’t mean that it’s too easy for them, often times being able to per­form a task with higher inten­sity brings about the poten­tial to actu­ally get a bet­ter work­out in.

All in all, the most impor­tant thing to have when exer­cis­ing is the right mind­set. A mind­set that is will­ing to face pain and chal­lenges in order to improve. A mind­set that is able to sac­ri­fice lux­ury in order to develop resilience. A mind­set that is focused on being a more whole­some ath­lete, as opposed to being one that sim­ply “weighs less”. Most impor­tantly, a mind­set that can make due using the sim­plest means pos­si­ble because sim­plic­ity is the ulti­mate in sophistication.

One thing that I’ve become very crit­i­cal of in my life­time is proper nutri­tion. I’ve seen peo­ple who eat too much lose a great deal of func­tion­al­ity in their lives because they’ve grown to be over­weight and addicted to food. On the hand, I’ve seen peo­ple who don’t eat enough lose a great deal of hap­pi­ness from their lives because they obsess about their food (or lack-thereof) and their weight. While these two extremes seem to be the stereo­type when it comes to nutri­tion, one thing that I’ve always focused on is the per­for­mance aspect of food. As both an ath­lete and a coach, I’ve paid a great deal of atten­tion to how food affects the body and I’ve exper­i­mented greatly with what works best for keep­ing the body func­tion­ing at high per­for­mance levels.

Now  when research­ing nutri­tion, I usu­ally come across two kinds of arti­cles. There’s the shitty Yahoo health/AOL health arti­cles that try to con­vince peo­ple that doing things like eat­ing Avo­ca­dos will make them lose fat because doing so replaces reg­u­lar fat with mono-unsaturated fat. Then there’s also the overly extreme, in depth, sci­en­tific arti­cles which go to into great detail about the effects of eat­ing cer­tain foods. In my expe­ri­ence, nei­ther of these kinds of arti­cles are really prac­ti­cal. The Yahoo health/ AOL health arti­cles are often non­sen­si­cal and go off unfounded “well this makes sense to me” logic as is appar­ent by their lack of facts, and sci­en­tific stud­ies sup­port­ing their claims. The sci­en­tific arti­cles on the other hand, are proven, but they’re often too extreme for most aver­age peo­ple to pur­sue (although pro ath­letes usu­ally do incor­po­rate these claims into their diets and they often have great suc­cess in doing so).

So a big prob­lem that today’s nutri­tional advice has is the fact that it’s either too watered down to help peo­ple (I’m look­ing at you AOL health), or it’s in the oppo­site extreme and it’s too intense to be prac­ti­cal (Ahem, sci­en­tific arti­cles rec­om­mend­ing that peo­ple drink cherry juice after work­outs in order to dimin­ish mus­cle fatigue). Thus, as a coach and ath­lete (with absolutely no for­mal train­ing in nutri­tion, but a fair deal of per­sonal expe­ri­ence), I find it impor­tant to fill the gap left by these two types of nutri­tion arti­cles, and offer some nutri­tional advice for the “mid­dle of the road peo­ple”. Peo­ple who are some­what active, but are too busy or are too poor to fully uti­lize the advice pro­vided by today’s nutri­tion arti­cles. Now mind you, because I don’t have any tech­ni­cal exper­tise in this field I won’t be cre­at­ing a diet plan for peo­ple to fol­low. Moreso, my advice will come in the form of a nutri­tion ide­ol­ogy, one that empha­sizes bal­ance, per­for­mance, and happiness.

1. Don’t think about weight– Prob­a­bly the biggest rea­son why peo­ple read the crap on Yahoo and AOL health is because they’re fat and they want to do some­thing about it. While I’m all for peo­ple get­ting slim­mer, fit­ter, and health­ier, these kind of peo­ple usu­ally look at these arti­cles solely with the intent on los­ing weight. The prob­lem is that they have no intent on chang­ing their eat­ing habits and lifestyles. There’s a rea­son why the lap-band, and weight-loss– pills are so pop­u­lar, and that’s because peo­ple only care about los­ing pounds, as opposed to actu­ally being health­ier. The first step to embrac­ing proper nutri­tion is to not think about los­ing weight, and to instead think of what’s right for the body. I will cite a per­sonal exam­ple to make this point. My younger brother weighs about 190LBS while I weigh about 160LBS. He’s only an inch taller than me, but he has a much big­ger frame than I do. He isn’t as healthy as I am (in the sense that he doesn’t exer­cise as much or eat as healthy as I do), but he still lives a fairly healthy lifestyle. If my brother wor­ried about his weight and lost 30 pounds in order to be in the same weight region as I am, I can guar­an­tee that he would have issues. His mus­cles would be smaller, he wouldn’t have as much energy, and in gen­eral he just wouldn’t look as healthy as he does today. The rea­son for this is because his body sim­ply has a big­ger frame and is bet­ter suited for sup­port­ing more weight. So I think a big fac­tor in tack­ling nutri­tion is to just avoid wor­ry­ing about weight, and more so focus­ing on how the body feels.

2. Cut out fast food- The first step to eat­ing healthy is to sim­ply get rid of fast food. There’s a ton of things that are wrong with fast food, it has a lot of calo­ries, is made of processed ingre­di­ents, and in gen­eral it just isn’t some­thing that the body should be tak­ing in. Now a lot of peo­ple think that they should give up fast food because it has a lot of salt, cho­les­terol, calo­ries, and fat. While fast food does con­tain all of these, hav­ing a lot of salt, cho­les­terol, calo­ries, and fat isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing.  Swim­mers like me need a lot of fat and calo­ries in order to main­tain body weight. Like­wise, if you’re a run­ner or play a sport that involves a lot of sweat­ing, the salt is vital for main­tain­ing proper mus­cle func­tions. So in real­ity, fat, salt, cho­les­terol, and calo­ries, really aren’t the ene­mies in fast food (at least to an extent), the real prob­lem with fast food is the fact that it lacks any other nutri­ents. In order for the body to be healthy and to really per­form well, it needs to draw upon a large pool of dif­fer­ent vit­a­mins and min­er­als. The prob­lem with fast food is the fact that it sim­ply doesn’t add any­thing to this pool.

3. You don’t need Soda, Tea, or Cof­fee– If there’s one thing that pisses me off it’s peo­ple who exten­sively drink soda, tea,  and cof­fee. Soda is packed with sugar, and a lot of food addi­tives that the body has trou­ble break­ing down prop­erly. While con­sum­ing any­thing that is overtly sug­ary is some­thing that I look down upon, the real prob­lem with soda is that it has a lot of calo­ries with no nutri­tional value. If you drink two cans of soda a day, you’re con­sum­ing about 300 calo­ries in soda. That’s about 15% of your rec­om­mended daily caloric intake. Now, I’m never one to advo­cate cut­ting calo­ries (because believe me, your body needs those calo­ries), but if you’re going to con­sume 300 calo­ries of some­thing, at least make sure it’s packed with vit­a­mins and min­er­als. But what about diet soda? In my opin­ion diet soda is even worse from the body. A lot of the chem­i­cals in diet soda have been linked to caus­ing can­cer, and at the very least, if you’re going to con­sume soda any­ways, might as well do it the right way and enjoy the full fla­vor of a real soda.  The prob­lem that I have with tea and cof­fee is the fact that they both have a lot of caf­feine in them (although some kinds of tea are decaf­feinated). I don’t nec­es­sar­ily have any­thing against caf­feine, or the kind of effects that it has on the body, I more so have a prob­lem with its addic­tive­ness. Peo­ple who are used to drink­ing caf­feine day in and day out become reliant on it, which in turn makes the body feel like shit if it doesn’t have caf­feine. Addi­tion­ally, the more you drink caf­feine the less acute its revi­tal­iz­ing effects become, which in turn means you have to con­sume more if you want an energy boost. Caf­feine is use­ful in some sit­u­a­tions, so why not wait until you need the caf­feine before con­sum­ing bev­er­ages that con­tain it? I rarely drink caf­feine, but when I do just a cup of iced tea or two makes it seem like I am on an energy drink. If I con­sumed caf­feine every­day then there’s no way iced tea would have those kinds of effects on my body. On the flip side, I func­tion per­fectly fine with­out caf­feine in my day to day life, and I think my body is much bet­ter for it.

4. Drink Water and Milk!- We elim­i­nated soda, tea, and cof­fee, so what exactly should you drink? Just Water and Milk. A lot of peo­ple think that Juices and Sports drinks are healthy, but they’re not as ben­e­fi­cial as most peo­ple think. Fruit juices (while gen­er­ally health­ier than soda) still have a ton of calo­ries and sugar, with lit­tle nutri­tional con­tent. Sure most fruit juices have 100% vit­a­min C, but so do gush­ers. The real nutri­tional value of fruit is found in the fibers of the fruits them­selves, fruit juices elim­i­nate these fibers, and thus most of the nutri­tional value of a fruit is stripped when it is juiced. With that being said, fruit juice is in no way “bad” for you, espe­cially if it’s all nat­ural like Naked Juice or Odawalla juice, but it cer­tainly isn’t as healthy as peo­ple per­ceive it to be. Sports drinks also aren’t as healthy as peo­ple think. A bot­tle of Gatorade has about the same amount of calo­ries as a can of soda does, and it has about just as many nutri­ents as soda does too (which is none). Sports drinks are great for recov­er­ing elec­trolytes after sweat­ing, or work­ing out for a long time, but that doesn’t mean that they need to be con­sumed reg­u­larly. If you couldn’t tell, I’m big on adding vit­a­mins and min­er­als to the body, so why am I sug­gest­ing water if it doesn’t have these? Well to put it sim­ply, water is one of the most ver­sa­tile things in the body. It’s use­ful in cool­ing, chem­i­cal reac­tions, and even pro­duc­ing waste, so hav­ing a pure sup­ply of water is immensely ben­e­fi­cial for the body. More impor­tantly, water is cheap (unless your a dum­b­ass and buy bot­tled water every­day), abun­dant (there’s drink­ing foun­tains every­where), and easy for the body to absorb (which is impor­tant when exer­cis­ing). Peo­ple seem to have a lot of issues with milk. It’s high in fats, calo­ries, and sugar, and for what­ever rea­son a lot of peo­ple don’t like it. I used to rarely drink milk myself, but as I began to work­out more, and found myself crav­ing it, and it has done won­ders for my body. Despite the high fat, chole­strol, calo­rie, and sugar con­tent of milk, most of it is nat­ural which means that your body doesn’t have as hard of a time pro­cess­ing it (unless your lac­tose intol­er­ant). More impor­tantly, milk con­tains pro­tein and cal­cium which is vital for rebuild­ing bones and mus­cles. Hell, milk’s pro­tein and cal­cium con­tent is so ben­e­fi­cial for the body that stud­ies have shown drink­ing milk to be more ben­e­fi­cial for mus­cle gain in  begin­ning weightlifters than steroids. An added bonus of milk is also the fact that it is fill­ing, which makes it a great way to sup­ple­ment a par­tic­u­larly light or unful­filled meal.

5. Never skip meals– Prob­a­bly the worst thing that you can do for your body is to skip a meal. By doing so, not only are you likely to deprive your body of much needed nutri­ents and energy through­out the course the day, but you’re more likely to gorge your­self when you do eat. Phys­i­cally, your body acts adversely to skip­ping meals. If your body misses a meal, it’s more likely to put the food that you con­sume in your next meal, directly into the fat stores. The rea­son for this is because your body feels like it’s deprived of nutri­ents, and energy, and thus it’s going into mini sur­vival mode. Some stud­ies have sug­gested that eat­ing three large meals a day is worse for the body than eat­ing 6 smaller meals which are spread out more evenly through­out the day. The logic behind this is the fact that eat­ing three large meals a day is very dif­fi­cult for your body to han­dle, whereas eat­ing six is much eas­ier to cope with. I per­son­ally have never tried eat­ing six small meals a day (because it’s imprac­ti­cal for me at the moment),  but what I think is most impor­tant is sim­ply get­ting the body on a con­sis­tent meal rou­tine. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t eat before or after your usual meal times, but it’s more so of a way to pre­vent erratic eat­ing habits such as skip­ping a meal, or eat­ing a lot in one meal and then noth­ing for the rest of the day.

6. Eat when you’re hun­gry, just make sure you are eat­ing right– I think when many peo­ple approach nutri­tion they get too car­ried away with fat, calo­ries, cho­les­terol, salt, carbs, and the neg­a­tive effects that all of these things have on the body. Obvi­ously, reduc­ing caloric and fat lev­els does indeed help in los­ing weight, but not eat­ing at all as a way to lower caloric and fat lev­els does more harm than good for the body (both phys­i­cally and psy­cho­log­i­cally). When eat­ing, it’s okay to have things that are high in calo­ries, fat, carbs, chole­strol, and salt, just as long as said meal is also packed with nutri­ents, and hap­pens to come from a nat­ural source. For instance, a filet min­ion and a baked potato are loaded with fat, carbs, calo­ries, chole­strol, and salt, but eat­ing a filet mini­non and baked potato is a hell of a lot health­ier than eat­ing a snick­ers bar or drink­ing a soda (even if the snick­ers bar and soda have less calories).

In con­clu­sion, the key to get­ting proper nutri­tion is to find the bal­ance between psy­cho­log­i­cal well­ness, and phys­i­cal ben­e­fits. Not eat­ing, or only lim­it­ing your diet to cer­tain kinds of food (whether they be low fat, low salt, low carb, what­ever) are things that can make a per­son absolutely mis­er­able. How­ever, doing things like cut­ting soda from a diet or eat­ing more nat­ural foods, will pro­vide the phys­i­cal ben­e­fits that most peo­ple are look­ing for, with­out the great psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ture that most peo­ple feel they need to have when they start to eat healthy. Another thing to keep in mind is the fact that eat­ing healthy should always be cumu­la­tive.  There’s a rea­son for why my advice is in a num­bered list and that’s because it’s in the order of steps that I used when I decided to start eat­ing healthy. At first I gave up eat­ing fast food (which was dif­fi­cult, but not TOO hard), then a few years later I noticed how ben­e­fi­cial not eat­ing fast food was for my body, and so I decided to give up soda, tea, and cof­fee, and from there the list con­tin­ues. The point that I am try­ing to make, is that eat­ing healthy should make you feel good, and when you feel good it will become increas­ingly eas­ier to become health­ier and health­ier. Lastly, remem­ber that being healthy doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily always involve “not eat­ing this or only eat­ing so much of that”. Proper nutri­tion also involves eat­ing more things, and con­sum­ing what feels right. For instance, I eat about twice as much as all of my friends, and while this is partly because I exer­cise so much, it’s also because I know that what I am eat­ing is healthy for me, and thus con­sum­ing a large por­tion of it won’t be as harm­ful to me. I per­son­ally think that this is the best way to go about nutri­tion because it’s a lot eas­ier to enjoy eat­ing 20 slices of pineap­ple, then it is stress­ing out about con­sum­ing only a half a piece of pie.