I’ve promised I would update my blog more frequently, and haven’t really fulfilled that promise lately. My mind is kinda unfocused these days, so it’s hard to build momentum for one of my trademark comprehensive multi-page posts on a particular topic. Instead, I’ll just make it a more bullet-point brain-dump type of post – more fun for me and hopefully still informative for you. I will make an effort not to elaborate too much , so feel free to ask for further information in the comments section if there’s something that caught your interest, but please don’t bombard me with article requests on everything…you’ll just have to wait for the book. Yeah, the one I’ve promised to finish for the last 5 years.

- Sometimes you’ll have to go that extra mile and push yourself out of your comfort zone to be exceptional instead of just average. I don’t care if it means having to say no to going out drinking the third weekend in a row, saying no to overtime-pizza at work, or going to the gym when you’re tired from studying/working and would really just like to watch TV and have a cookie or twenty. No one ever said it would be easy, and if it was – why do you think 60-70% of the population is overweight and ridden with lifestyle-related diseases? If you really want it, it is worth working hard for and you will do what it takes to achieve it. If you ask yourself: “It won’t hurt me too much if I eat this cookie/go partying/skip todays workout, will it?” The answer in your head will be “no, I’ll make it up tomorrow/next week/next year”. If you instead ask yourself: “Will this cookie/party/missed workout help me achieve my goal faster?”. The answer will again be: “No” but the mental process will more often lead you to the more productive decision. Life is too short to make excuses and rationalizations sabotaging your efforts and dreams.

- Sometimes you have to listen to your body and go easy instead of pushing yourself to failure and beyond. A lot of famous coaches who’ve consistently taken athletes to the Olympics knows that after making a personal best, the athlete is better off warming down and going home, going easy for a few days instead of pushing harder. It inevitably leads down the path to burn out, pulls/strains or even worse, devastating injury. Allow yourself to take a step back if you want to take 3 steps forward. Auto-regulation is the key to long-term progress, and although some of the methods seem complicated,  it is simply a set of rules teaching you to go easy when you’re not up for it and to push harder when you have the capacity to do so. Work to a ‘daily max’ not a ‘competition max’ when you’re at the gym.

- To sum up the above: Keep the hard days hard and the easy days easy. Good for recovery: walking for 30 minutes. Outside in the fresh air, not on a treadmill at a sweaty gym with an iPod glued to your ears. Simple way of ensuring you don’t go too hard: close your mouth and breathe through your nose. Unless you have a particularly big nose you won’t be able to go much harder than about 60% which is perfect.

- Food doesn’t automatically turn to fat. Making intelligent food choices and training regularly usually prevents this from happening, but another often forgot variable is HOW you eat your food. Sit down to eat in silent contemplation – without external noise such as TV, newspapers/magazines or the Internet. Properly masticate your food (it means ‘chewing’ silly), and take your time, enjoying every bite. It’s a good food habit, you’ll improve your fullness and satisfaction from the meal, you’ll reduce your stress levels, and you will get better digestion from it. Always being gassy and bloated, excepting any food intolerances, is a sign that you’re probably highly-strung and stressed out, always in a hurry, always feeling compelled to occupy yourself with something else, something more exciting. There’s so little time, so much to do. Well, stop it. Now. Eating is not a chore to get over with, and there’s not a pack of wolfes clawing at your door to hunt down and kill your sorry excuse for a chicken salad so chill the f* out. Food is nutrients, fuels your brain, your muscles, your internal organs – it’s what allows you to get stronger, faster, leaner, smarter, prettier, sexier, to recover faster, sleep better, feel better, feel happier…and to live and breathe at all.

FOOD, and not starvation built this body.

- Not diet foods, even though a majority think they are: rye crisp bread (Wasa), salad without chicken/meat/eggs/cheese or other protein source, 2 slices of bread instead of 4 even if there’s a (tiny) sliver of smoked ham on top, bacon/sausages and other overly processed meats (yes, even if it’s “30% less fat”), protein bars, low-carb (and high fat) cookies and cakes, low-fat (and high sugar) cookies and cakes’, breakfast cereal (oh, you really think your body needs a high-carb meal of which 30+% of it is sugar after sleeping for 8 hours?) Make better choices, and I generally subscribe to what the late fitness guru Jack LaLanne used to say: “If man made it, don’t eat it”. I completely disagree with another quote from him, though: “If it tastes good, spit it out”. It’s perfectly possible to eat healthy, nutritious food which tastes good. You don’t have to take a cooking class, just play around with various herbs and spices. Salt and pepper as a base. Use the natural sweetener Stevia (as of December 2nd legalized within the EU and by the EØS extension – Norway). Lemon juice (preferably freshly squeezed) and apple cider vinegar (yes, I know man made it, but I still love it). Salt, sweet, sour. It works.

- I got into the best shape of my life eating a crapload of carbs from white rice, and most of it with my evening meal. I broke at least 3 rules of dieting there. Here’s another: I did only 2 cardio sessions per week of 30 minutes each. Check out the Biorhytm Diet – also published as Biorytme Dietten in the Norwegian Treningsforum magazine and soon here at MyRevolution.no. Yes, I’m fully aware that the before-after pictures sucked, but it was a bad judgement call to even use pictures of myself and I admit that these were more misleading than enlightening. I deeply regret and repent my sins and promise to subject myself to daily sessions of flagellation (Wiki it). Still doesn’t detract from the fact that this eating pattern beats everything I’ve ever done in myself and my clients, and I’ve been doing this for 20 years.

- In GENERAL (no, it’s not a golden rule without exceptions), carb intake should scale with high-intensity activity, fat intake should scale with bodyfat %age. So a lean athlete with high volume weight training workouts and/or interval-type sports activities will stay lean and perform optimally on a high-carb, low-fat diet. Lots of low intensity long-distance stuff with a little pudge left to lose, feel free to jump on the low-carb bandwagon, you’ll probably feel great. At least until you lose fat.

- I’m a big fan of intervals to get in shape, but remember to look at your overall weekly training volume and intensity. If you’re already doing 4 high-volume weight workouts per week, adding 3-4 days of intervals on top of that is a recipe for disaster. On a related note, you can’t just go online or the read the most popular fitness author publication and pick and choose one diet here, a weight training program there, and then add a cardio routine from yet another source and think you’ll end up with a Perfect Program. You have to look at the context from which that diet/training program/cardio routine was taken from. You’re not that person, you don’t know what they have been doing to get to a position where they could get results from that diet or routine, or even if they’re getting results from it at all (look up what ‘ghost writer’ means). Take a good hard look at yourself first, decide where you want to go and set up an integrated strategy to achieve that goal – or hire a competent coach to do it for you. Emulating Arnold, Usain Bolt and Lance Armstrong with a PSMF on top of it all will annihilate you in a matter of days. Yeah, I know, when I put it like that it’s obviously pretty damn stupid, isn’t it? Well, just look around you – or in the mirror for that matter – it happens all the time. I’m guilty of it myself…

- Contrary to what some rehab experts want you to believe, we’re not all dysfunctional and should spend most of our time doing one arm-one leg kettlebell hip flexor stretching on a bosu-ball, while dumping the squats, benches and deadlifts which are responsible for millions of strong and muscular human beings throughout history. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Yeah, like a perfect hypochondriac we’re easy to convince that we’re one of those dysfunctionals, because lifting heavy weights is uncomfortable and just too damn hard. Many people are doing their sports and regular activites pain-free, yet with MRI abnormalites that would normally require surgery. Pain may very well be in your brain, not necessarily in your body, and mobility work a way of resetting the motor patterns in your brain which are perceived to be “safe”.

No, it won't make your back pain go away or improve your athleticism

- I used to hate on kettlebells simply because they were so overhyped. They’re a great tool and I find it fascinating that some will improve their deadlift numbers more from a few weeks of 12-24kg kettlebell swings than from actually deadlifting, but let’s not get carried away: it’s a lump of steel with a handle. Why didn’t anyone come up with a 3000 dollar Master Level Certification program for snow shoveling, changing to winter tires, christmas shopping on a Saturday afternoon, or cross-country skiing with two broken poles? All are just as hard and painful to do. That last one is speaking from personal experience and took me 6 hours to get home. Lesson learned: if you’re over 100kg spend some extra cash on steel poles. I bought a snowboard after that trip.

- If you generally feel sleepy, moody, lack energy and motivation – you’re probably affected by the so-aptly-named SAD – Seasonal Affective Disorder. I don’t like labeling everything that one happens to feel or think – everyone talks to themselves inside their head without necessarily being schizofrenic – but SAD is very much a real case of the winter blues caused by lack of sunlight. My recommendation is to take 2000-5000IU of Vitamin D3 per day and invest in a light-therapy lamp. The lamp provides the full spectrum and intensity of light (about 10,000 lux) you would experience on a bright summer day, without UV- or IR-light. All you have to do is sit in front of it while reading or working on your computer. You won’t get a tan, but you’ll feel more awake and generally more pleasant to be around. If that still doesn’t work, physical touch is proven to help so pet a dog or a cat. Or a monkey (would you like to pet my monkey huh-huh-huh). If that doesn’t work either, it could very well be that you’re just an asshole. And for that, I am sorry.

- Intermittent fasting should be a lifestyle and comfortable/convenient eating pattern, it’s not magic or a religion, and there’s not even a lot of human data in active people or lifters showing it to be superior to a more regular eating pattern. In my experience, it works for maybe 30-40% of people, yet you don’t hear much about the 60-70% who could never adapt to it, still feeling hungry and lethargic 2+ weeks later, or didn’t really get any better results from it. For someone with an active lifestyle and working to improve their fitness level, I would never recommend willingly going without food for a whole 24 hours, there are better ways of managing your weekly calorie balance and it doesn’t ‘detox’ you or some silly shit like that (pun intended). I’m not picking on IF here, as I could say the same thing about the 6 meal per day pattern, LCHF, PSMF, Zone or whatever. It’s about finding out what works for YOU without feeling the need to go all missionary about it trying to convince the world there’s only one way of doing things. Yeah, I know it doesn’t sell books, products or attract website traffic, but I think a good author or coach should tell you what you need to know to make your own informed decisions and try something different if whatever you’re doing isn’t working.