On The Soapbox

I hear a lot about weight loss products because I'm a fitness junkie and it is sometimes hard to differentiate what is useful from what is not.

I tend to focus on what I hear from experts, and most of the time they tell me to stick to the conventional training techniques. Exceptions include the TRX, and foam rollers to name a couple.

So keep your finger on the pulse of the system if you want to know what is good and what isn't. As a humble person might say, when in doubt, trust the experts.

Winter

This winter has been pretty annoying to me so far. Normally I don't mind it but this year I have found that I have no tolerance for the cold and despite my lack of brutally dry skin, I'm still constantly itching. I decided to go for my own preemptive eczema treatment this year by lotioning like crazy before the nasty stuff appears. So far so good. This time last year my hands made me look like I had just been bitten by a zombie.

Plus I miss golf. Hard to really play a lot of that at this time of year.

You Have To Wonder

You've got some talent so you move to Hollywood. You work hard making connections and trying to get your foot in the door. Finally you land a quick job to get you some experience and something to have on your resume. Then you sit back and see yourself on tv for the first time, and these words come out of your mouth. "I've finally found relief for hemorrhoids!"

I'm sure quite a few careers have ended this way with similar products, because I have to imagine that people with no hold on the ladder can't afford to turn anything down but also end up hosing themselves with stuff like this.

Alternative Medicine

I don't know much about AM. I honestly have always been a firm believer in modern medicine, and the advances that have been made. I have heard stories, however, that there are some old fashioned remedies that haven't really been matched by current equivalents. How much of that is true, I couldn't tell you though.

Recently I saw the term glucosamine sulphate in the news. I had to look it up, because I had never even heard of it. Probably a lot of us haven't but who knows, it may be worth researching some of these things, if even to understand how modern medicine got where it is today.

Problem Areas

I really attempt to do fully body movements in most of my workout routines. I try to stick to variations of the big boys like squats, deadlifts, push/press movements, etc, but occassionally I violate the preachings of the fitness guru's and actually do some isolation work.

If you read the experts closely, you will find that they do this as well. It isn't that the exercises are useless, only that they are useless if you aren't already doing the big stuff. So if you are like me and your arms aren't as big as you would like, add some curls, or if your chest is puny adipex exercise.

SD is cool

I recently got a new phone that has an 8 gig micro SD card included. I still can't quite believe that they can cram that much memory onto a chip that small. In my college days, you were a beast if you have a machine with 16 megs of ram, and now you are wasting your time having less than 2 gig. Insane.

I guess if I were younger these numbers wouldn't astound me as much, because I would be used to them, but having been there in the early days I'm just amazed at the progress. I mean seriously, my phone has about 32 times the memory that my first PC had! Amazing.

Oldies But Goodies

Like most of us, when I first started working out, I went straight to the machines in a lot of cases. They seemed like the technologically advanced way to work out. Why use the abacus when you have a calculator, right?

Well as we learn more and more about fitness it is becoming increasingly obvious that the best fitness equipment is still the old fashioned weights. You just can't replicate the stabilization that is required to lift real weights. I noticed this even in my early days when I noticed that I could bench about 30 pounds more on the smith machine, than a standard bench.

So stick with the free weights and you will see better results.