What’s Cool With Me This Week: Gratitude, Shark Tank and Romanian Dead Lifts

 

 

 

 

Happy Wednesday folks. Today is my rest day from training and although I love it, a day off is really, really nice. My body has been feeling the workouts I’ve done so far this week.

A few people leaving the gym on Monday may have seen me in the middle of my Prowler suicide session. Good times. For those of you that haven’t experienced it, just think basketball-style suicides (shuttle runs) while pushing the Prowler. Awesome and awful combined. Aweseful?

So onto what’s cool with me this week.

1. Shark Tank.

Have you seen this show? Holy shit I’m obsessed with it now. So a little back story. A few weekends ago I went to a marketing event in Connecticut and got to see a bunch of my fitness biz pals which was cool. On the last day the keynote speaker was Daymond John who is the creator of FUBU and also on Shark Tank. I got to meet him and chat for a minute and my friend Scott Colby aka The Abs Expert was giving me so much crap because I had never seen the show.

 

I told him that I’d watch it just so I didn’t feel like such a loser. Well, that plan failed radically. Now I’m totally hooked, scrolling my onDemand for back episodes and staying in on Friday nights to watch the new episodes. Oh wait, I never go out anyway…. 🙂

If you haven’t watched it, you’ve gotta check it out. The sharks are awesome and hilarious and there are some really cool businesses that come through from that show.

2. Romanian Dead Lifts

Oh these sneaky little gems. Any of my clients that trained last Wednesday had the pleasure of doing these and they all felt really good, got a nice stretch, moved some decent weight and kept great form. Awesome right?

Bam.

Thursday morning hits. And Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday….

They were still talking about it.

Those little bastards (the dead lifts, not the clients) are killer for the hamstrings and lower glutes. You don’t feel a whole lot of work while doing them but the following days you are sore and walking a little funny.

Here’s my client Seth rocking out a perfect set. Photo credit John Pham 🙂

 

Trust me, I’m in the same boat today, I rocked 5 sets out yesterday.

I hadn’t programmed them in for myself or my clients in a while but they are definitely cool with me right now.

3. Gratitude

You know I’ve gotta get a little introspective here or it’s just not a proper blog post.

I was thinking about gratitude yesterday after listening to this really cool audio book called Pure Genius by Dan Sullivan. He was talking about how there are two kinds of gratitude.

The first kind is passive gratitude which is what most people do (some people don’t show or experience any, which really sucks but that’s another story for another day). Passive gratitude is when you only show that you’re grateful when someone does something for you.

A lot of people then in turn don’t show gratitude regularly because they feel that people aren’t doing enough FOR them and they don’t have anything to actually feel grateful for.

Kind of a shitty way to go through life.

The other way to look at it is to start becoming very aware of what’s going on around you and become grateful for things that are just happening or for people that aren’t doing anything directly TO or FOR you. The author gave an example of when he was on a plane and he began to think about how grateful he was for the pilot that was getting him there safely and for the whole aspect of air travel that allowed him to go from Toronto to Chicago in just a few hours.

Now I’m not saying get all woo-woo and walk around feeling grateful for the clouds in the sky or something silly but just think about the people that help you out without you actually asking for it or because they have to.

Don’t rely on others to do something for you. Having a more active attitude about the world and the people around you will put on a whole new perspective for you. Relying on others is a miserable and frustrating way to live so don’t be a passive gratitude seeker.

I hope you enjoyed this post and be sure to watch Shark Tank, do some RDL’s and take a few minutes every day to be grateful for all the cool stuff you have.