Train Hard, Live Easy

Create your own haven of recreation within the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Find yourself a few hours a week -- only a fraction of what you spend for your job, your friends, your family and all the small daily obligations. Don’t think so little of you that you won’t allow yourself some care time and don’t waste this precious space with empty, meaningless stuff. Use it to bring you forward and start challenging yourself. It will pay off.

For me, the best way to achieve this in physical terms is weight training with main emphasize on the basic, heavy compound lifts, spiced up with some high intensity interval training (HIIT) and additional joint mobility, flexibility and stability work.

Such a workout never takes more than it gives back. Every set and every repetition is an investment in your body and, thus, in your health. We are talking nothing less than quality of life here. You think I exaggerate? Then go ahead and drag yourself through your predetermined daily schedule of predictable behavior only to find a little excitement in silly reality TV shows, pictures of undressed women on the internet and getting drunk at the weekends. But is this really everything you ask for?

False Motivation

“You are not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis.” (Tyler Durden in "Fight Club").

There is no correlation between success and product ownership. Not a bit. How many times, however, did you try to compensate your lack of motivation with consumerism? How many times did you buy state-of-the-art equipment before you even got started with whatever you wanted to do? Products provide us with the illusion of accomplishment, the illusion of belonging. They send the message that we are part of something bigger, that we live a certain lifestyle; they offer us a pillar to hide behind. They are the easiest way to show the world what we want to represent without actually doing something or being good at it.  

That of course is what advertisement tries to make us believe. You want to be a photographer? You simply need to have a state-of-the-art camera. You want to be a hip bohemian artist? Rent a trendy loft-studio in a chic neighborhood. You want to be a martial artist? Buy a fancy hoody made by a MMA apparel company. You want to gain some muscles? Just get the most expensive protein powder from your local supplement dealer. No work required.

The Best Workout Routine

Not only beginners find themselves occasionally stuck between the battle fronts in the war of training routines. The internet is a breeding ground for supporters and haters of a particular style of training and the weightlifting / bodybuilding communities are full of small-minded people fighting their silly little battles over training modality supremacy. There are the people who will tell you that the only way to increase your strength is a one-set-to-failure-once-a-week routine, there are those who tell you that you need to work out twice a day for six days a week, there are the advocates of high reps and those of low reps, the supporters of super slow training, and, not to forget, the whole Crossfit community. All these modalities and systems are legitimate workout approaches but let me make one thing very clear: anybody who tells you that he or she has the ultimate method is lying. This is as true for workout routines as it is for everything else in life. These people are a) advertiser for their own product who will tell you anything in order to make quick money (please note: I am not saying everybody who tries to make a living from coaching is a bad person) or b) they are just too ignorant and have never explored the world outside of their own narrow ways of thinking, they usually even honestly try to help but their view is too limited to give sound advice.