Fitness Safari

Fresh fruit will not make you fat. I don't know about you, but my favorite part of any food store is the produce department. I love the rainbow of colors, shapes and sizes on display. The playful misting of the lettuces, the exotic vegetables I've never heard of from parts of the world I've only read about. I can't imagine anyone getting fat by eating a variety of any combination of the foods you find here. So why do people think fruit will make them fat? It's the F-Word - Fructose Fructose, or fruit sugar, is a simple monosaccharide and one  of three dietary monosaccharides, along with glucose and galactose, that are absorbed directly into the bloodstream during digestion. Unlike glucose which can be immediately available to the muscles, however, fructose must first be processed in the liver, giving it the lowest glycemic index of all sugars. Naturally, fructose is fou nd in fruit, many plants and some vegetables, but not in very high concentrations....

Last night when I was finished my bench/pull-up/dip routine, I had some extra energy - and time. I hopped on the treadmill and just started walking. I like walking. Whether it's around the neighborhood with my dog or on a treadmill in the gym, I find that when I'm walking is pretty much the only time my mind is totally free to meander wherever it wants to. I started thinking... Despite the fact that I'm fighting a cold and hadn't slept well in a day or two, I felt really, really great. I wanted to run or even maybe do some HIIT intervals to help ignite my fat burning furnace. But then the voice of my coach echoed in my head, "When on a cut, don't be stupid and do too much." My coach, Andy . Well, maybe those weren't his exact words, but the general idea is spot on. Regardless of how good I feel or how impatient I'm getting with the snail's pace of fat loss I'm experiencing, too much training volume or intensity will only be counterp...

Ever hear the expression, "Too many cooks spoil the broth?"  Put simply it means, when trying to cook something - even something as simple as broth - too many conflicting ideas will ruin it. If you have too many people adding this and that, with no cohesive plan or recipe, your broth will taste more like dishwater than anything palatable when you're done. Training and fitness are the same. I never really put it together until Andy commented on a crazy bench press pyramid routine I tried the other day that I posted on Fitocracy. It's not that he was against the routine, per se, but he did point out that I'm on a pretty strict cut and the volume was way too high and will likely affect recovery and progress at this point. He warned me not to fall prey to the "too many cooks" trap. He's right, of course. But I was frustrated with my RPT bench routine which has stalled at 110 lbs. x 4 reps and was looking to do something different to break through ...