Simple Nutrition Recommendations

I have been getting a ton of emails and questions lately about nutrition. Being that I am not a nutritionist, I cannot tell you what to eat, but what I can do is give you some idea on HOW to eat. Below I have provided you with the top nutrition recommendations I have collected for fat loss and being as healthy as a horse. I have seen these recommendations work time and time again for many of my clients with great success.

I have read, studied, and connected with a lot of VERY VERY smart people to construct this list.  But lets start by being real first... Fad diets don’t ever work, and if they do, they are not sustainable. We all know what foods are best for us but we still choose to eat poorly; and there is no reason to ever count calories, if you just eat correctly the macronutrients will take care of themselves. Please do not email me back and say "oh, well, I don't think I can do that one. Is there something easier?" or ask me "which one can I skip?" The answer is none of them, and if you really do care about your weight, your health, your life, and your family, you will take all these recommendations to heart.

I think this excerpt out of John Maxwell's book Today Matters puts it well…

"You can escape from a lot of things that might hurt you. You can quit a hazardous job. You can move from one climate to another. You can stay away from someone who wants to harm you. But you can't get away from your body. For as long as you live, you're stuck with it. If you make choices that cause you to be continually hurting or unhealthy, it will affect every aspect of your life-your heart, mind, and spirit. Think about how hard it is to be positive, concentrate, or pray when you have a toothache. More serious conditions can be even more distracting!"

So ask yourself.... have my food decisions set me up to be successful today and everyday there after?

#1. "You cannot out train a bad diet" Simple as that. You can exercise until you are blue in the face but if your diet doesn't change, the scale won't either. Some physiological factors will improve in the short term but not until your diet is in check will you be justifying all that hard work and sweat you put in at the gym.

#2. Keep working towards eating more raw unprocessed foods. Anything that comes in a package has been processed. Ya feel me? A good friend of mine Whitney Sickler put it to me best, “If you’re feeding your body with nutrient dense foods it will become gradually less and less deficient, which is really what a “craving” is…your deficient body crying for wholesome foods.” May it cost you more $ ? Yes. May it take a little extra time to prepare your meals? Yes. But think of it this way… if you’re not paying for it now, you will probably be paying for it later in hospital bills, medicines, and lost days in a life that’s much too short.

#3. Eliminate grains! I have had multiple people do this one and all we got was amazing results. Everyone lost weight; some in the 20+ pound range! Along with feeling a whole lot better in general. If you are going to eat grains, which I still don’t recommend, make sure it is from quality WHOLE grains. Look for the word “whole” on the package. If its not “whole” its not worth it.

#4. Eat as many fruits and vegetables as you want! How many people do you know got fat and sick from eating too many vegetables and fruits. NO ONE! Not mention the cancer reducing effects they have... that should be enough in itself for you to start eating them!

#5. Eat more fruits and vegetables! Did I already mention this one? Yes, it's that important.

• Eat fruit every morning w/ breakfast (my favorite are bananas, strawberries, blueberries, oranges, and apples)
• Eat ATLEAST 4 salads a week for lunch (while working towards having one every single day)
• Eat some sort of vegetable with every dinner. My favorite vegetable is spinach. I buy it fresh and it goes with almost everything because it doesn't really have taste. I put it in all my shakes, salads, and omelets.

          IMO Closer to What the Food Pyramid Should Really Look Like

#6. Once you get down to your ideal weight, allow yourself one cheat meal per week. Choose this meal wisely my friend! I prefer to use it as time to spend with my family, friends, or significant other.

#7. "Eat food, mostly plants, but not too much" – Michael Pollan

If you remember anything from this email it is this statement. It ties together everything I talked about above. Lets break it down:

• Eat “real” food: nothing processed, don’t rely on supplements
• Eat mostly plants: vegetables are KING! everything else in moderation
• But not too much: don't eat more food then you need too! Eat just enough to full! “Eat half as much as you would in one sitting but eat twice as often.” – Andrew Saul Ph.D

We are all human. Things come up and shit happens. Break the rules once in a while, that is life. “I’d rather you be 70-80% for a life time, than 100% for a month.” But remember "if you neglect enough today’s, you'll experience the "someday" you've always wanted to avoid".

An Example of A Realistic Day:

Breakfast: Omelet w/ cheese & spinach with 2 slices of nitrate free bacon and a bowl of blueberries & Oranges , Coffee w/ a splash of cream or milk no sugar

Snack: Two Apples & a bag of nuts (cashews, almonds, brazils, hazelnuts, & pecans), glass of water or tea

Lunch: Big salad w/ whatever you like in your salad! Lite dressing, only enough to make it taste good. A glass of water or tea

Snack:  Shake with blueberries, banana, natural peanut butter, whey protein, almond milk, & spinach.

Dinner: Grilled Chicken w/ peppers & onions & avocado, steamed broccoli & a sweet potato, two squares of dark chocolate for desert with a glass of water or tea

Start implementing these ideas today and get back to me in a few months on how they changed your life!

This Article was written in collaboration with: Kevin Carr, Ana Tocco, Whitney Sickler, Marco Sanchez, and Henry Lau. Thank you for all your help.

Thanks for reading.

                 -Brendon Rearick

BONUS Required Reading:

1. Most Overrated Supplements http://www.livestrong.com/slideshow/550744-the-20-most-overrated-supplements/#slide-16

2. Most Shocking Diet Myths http://www.livestrong.com/slideshow/546558-the-most-shocking-diet-myths/#slide-11

3. Food Rules by Micheal Pollan

4. Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman

5. Today Matters by John Maxwell

What is one thing you have changed your mind about in the past year?

I recently wrote this for Strengthcoach.com’s “Holiday Special” article: What is one thing you have changed your mind about in the past year? For me its not really one thing exactly, but more of a change in my overall approach to getting people, not only shape, but out of pain.

It seems like everyone coming in to train these days is in some sort of pain or has a severe movement issue. Baby boomers are now hitting their late 50's and video games are a full time job for most kids. Unfortunately, in the next 20 years it's only going to get worse, not better. In the past year I've realized most clients no longer only need just training, what they need is to get out of pain; and not until they are out of pain will any type of change you are trying to make happen. Pain in my mind is more then just the cause of injury. It also comes in the form of stress, anxiety, addiction, illness, & mental disorders.

Because of this I think this industry is moving towards a more holistic approach. It’s no longer something just one person can fix. Trainers, physical therapists, chiropractors, massage therapists, psychologists, doctors, and nutritionists seem to be finally be getting together and realizing they need each other to really make a difference in somebody’s life.

This change is happening right before our eyes whether you know it or not. The best and most influential people in my business of strength & conditioning not only understand training and fitness, but they understand and integrate a lot of other “health” specialties into their work as well. For example good personal trainers and coaches read and seek out physical therapists to help them understand injury mechanisms and rehab better, and vice versa. This is not to say that as a personal trainer you should be practicing physical therapy, but that understanding what’s going on in the PT room makes you a better coach and a better programmer.

As a trainer having a team of people around, you can trust, makes you smarter and gets your clients results faster. This thought process has even led me to enroll in massage therapy school. Having only been in school for a few months, massage has already brought me a new appreciation for the inner workings of the human body and its amazing ability to adapt. The addition of massage to my education will allow me to help my clients get out of pain faster, make better recommendations when referring out, and it opens doors for me that would have been closed had I not pursued massage school… but even then I realize I still cannot provide everything my clients' needs, and I must rely on others in my network that I trust for help.

It is my hope that in the near future this becomes the standard in our business. Trainers, physical therapists, chiropractors, massage therapist, psychologists, doctors, and nutritionists working together for one purpose. I know for me I will continue to build my team that I call on when I need them to be sure my clients have the best possible resources to change their lives for the better, and I encourage others to do the same.

   

Crushing It In 2012

This post is long overdue but I have finally found the time to finish it. With all the big changes at MBSC recently I haven’t even had the time to sit down and scratch myself. But I am happy to announce that as of recently Coach Kevin Carr and I have taken over the internship duties at MBSC and  we have some big plans already in the making for the program. If you have any interest in interning with us please shoot me an email at brendon@rearickstrength.com  We are currently taking applicants for our upcoming summer session.

I am also happy to say MBSC is now an official affiliate of the Boston Red Sox! Some great things going on here at MBSC this winter… Congrats Mike.

Since this post did take me so long to put together, a Happy Belated New Year to all of you, and below I have posted all my goals for the year 2012. I am posting this in hopes it inspires you to write down your own goals, print them out, and hang them up somewhere you’ll see them every single day. I am proud to say that out of 20 goals I set for myself last year, I was able to complete 13 of them. That is why you write them down! If I hadn’t written them down I would have never known I accomplished anything the past year!

"Without goals, and plans to reach them, you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination." Fitzhugh Dodson

Goals for 2012

Life

1. Read 2 books a month (So far this month… Steve Jobs, Eat to Live & Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain)

2. Rock Climb 2 Times a Month (unbelievable exercise challenging the mind an body… got into it about 3 months ago been every weekend ever since)

3. Take One Full Night a Week Off From the Computer

4. Be the Best at Remembering Peoples Names – “Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” – Dale Carnegie

5. Stop Swearing So Much

6. Be the most positive person you know

7. Make better eye contact with people

8. Meditate AT LEAST 5 min per day

9. Continue to try and make a change in the world day by day

"Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor." Brian Tracy

Bucket List

1. Learn to Make Sushi

2. Go White Water Rafting

3. Learn to Snowboard

4. Learn to Wakeboard

5. Go Zip Lining (definitely hitting up this place in NH!)

6. Go To a Shooting Range

7. Go to a Casino

8. Visit Canada

9. Brew my Own Beer

10. Go Legit Camping for a week

11. Drink a Ton of Beers at a NASCAR Race

"People with goals succeed because they know where they're going." Earl Nightingale

Career

1. Finish Massage School at Cortiva

2. Educate my Athletes & Clients More on Nutrition

3. Make MBSC the most applied too and prestigious internship experience

4. Condition with every client at least once per week (read this No One Conditions Alone)

5. Give 2 Presentations On Training Some Where

Strength Coach and new Perform Better model Ana Tocco doing some bouldering on a recent trip!

Training Goals

1. Shoulder & Low Back = Pain Free

2. Workout AT LEAST 4 days a week

3. Keep Eliminating Processed Foods and moving towards Natural Foods

4. Continue to let someone else write my program

5. Eat AT LEAST 3 salads a week

"Until input (thought) is linked to a goal (purpose) there can be no intelligent accomplishment." Paul G. Thomas

Blog

1. Post at least 2 times a month = 24 posts in a year

2. Average 12,000 Hits a month = 3,000 per week = 428 per day

3. Be Asked to Write Something for a Major Website or Magazine

Financial

1. Make $                  Grand This Year = $                    a month = $               per week (you really thought I’d tell you how much I make??)

2. Get 20+ PT Sessions Per Week

3. Pay Rest of My School Loans OFF Total= $                    = $                  a month = $              a week

"There is no achievement without goals."Robert J. McKaine

What are your goals for 2012??

         Thanks for reading – Brendon

 

   

Dan John Warm Ups

Everything I read by Dan John makes me a better coach. Dan’s book “Never Let Go” was a phenomenal read and I recommend it to anyone who lift weights, has personal training clients, coaches athletes, wants to perform better, or breathes air for that matter. It was his philosophy on “warming up” that had the biggest impact on me and next day I at work I decided to give his approach a shot.

Below are the excerpts from Dan’s book on “Warming Up” that got my mind racing….

“We use the warm-ups to attempt to do every one of the big moves. Currently, I have my athletes do this:

1. Crush Press Walk/ Horn Walk/ Waiter Walks/ Suitcase walks/ Crosswalk/ Farmer walk/ Seesaw Press Walk
2. Goblet Squat 2 sets of 8 w/ Hip Flexor Stretch
3. Bootstrapper Squats
4. Alligator Push ups
5. RDL Stretch and Deck Squats
6. Hurdle Step Overs
7. Pull ups 3 sets of 8
8. Ab Wall Throws 1 set of 25
9. Half turkish Get up 1 set of 25 ea. side
10. Ab roller & Windmills
11. Goblet Squats with pause at the bottom
12. Swings

Don't worry about specific exercises or names here. The general idea is to do every move, lightly, in the warm-ups. Lightly is of course a relative term. I have junior football players using 110 pound kettle bells on the goblet squats. Here is the point: I think all nine movements are important, so we do them every day" pg. 334

"The idea here: Keep your specialized training, but continue to keep in contact with the big general movements each workout. It's an easy way to have each workout become a full body session with an emphasis on a body part. Don't go crazy on variations; keep pounding away on foundation. From a strength coaches perspective, you'll get stronger and stronger in these basics, which can't help but make a difference in your other long-term goals." pa. 171-172

 “I like to note, "Hey, we're done with the warm up!" as my athletes fold over and look forward to something fun like max front squats or bench press. What? Yes, the warm up is the workout. pg 173

"With most athletes the movements need repeating... far more than most people think. At the elite level of track and field and Olympic Lifting, the total number of full movements is staggering. Many young people are out of touch with movements like squatting because they've used chairs their entire lives, and have been kept from deadlifting and rotating by the Safety Lifting Police." pg 335

Dan has a very different take on “warming up” then most and just reading that warm up above makes me tired. But you know what? He’s right again as always.

I get to see most of my personal training clients and athletes for one hour 2 times per week, at most 3 times. We’d of course all like it to be more but that’s just the nature of the beast. That means every time they come in we need to get in A LOT of “stuff” and if we want to cover all our bases our workouts will always have to be full body. These “Dan John” warm ups allow you to do just that, while only focusing on 2 or 3 main heavy lifts for that day. It’s a win win. You get in all your movements during the warm up, then you get to dial in on a few select exercises for the lift that day (clean, bench, squats, deads, chins, pulls) and master those.

Below are my results with the “Dan John warm ups”, how I began implementing them into my programs, and some suggestions that may help you if you want to try them out.

Cover Your Basic Movement Patterns Every Workout – Like Dan suggests, construct the warm ups with all your basic movement patterns in mind. Here are the eight movements I thought were most important, you can set it up however you’d like, but I found that eight exercises works best. Six is not enough to get the heart rate up in 2 or 3 rounds but ten is too many to get through in a timely manner in my experience.

1. Push
2. Knee Dom
3. Pull
4. Hip Dom
5. Core
6. Upper Body Plyo
7. Carry
8. Lower Body Plyo

As Dan always says “If its important, do it everyday”. So every day we will push, pull, hinge, squat, core, explosive, and a carry before we even get to the lift for the day.

Get The Heart Rate Up – It’s a called a “warm up”, not a “cool up”. Try to keep everything bodyweight and encourage them to move as quickly as they can from exercise to exercise. My average client is warmed up and ready to go after 2 rounds if they move at a good pace. Slower moving clients may need 3 rounds to be ready and on the other end of the spectrum your well-conditioned clients can usually handle 3 rounds.

Form Over Speed – I always preach good form first. Although you want them moving quickly from exercise to exercise it must never come at the expense of quality. Blasting out 10 fast shitty push-ups is not getting us what we want and it’s almost as painful as watching a Jillian Michael’s DVD……. almost.

None of these!!

Corrective & Mobility Work – These warm ups are also a great way to throw in corrective and mobility work as “active rest” between metabolically demanding exercises like jumps, medballs, and ropes. And when your mobility exercises are thrown in between tougher exercises circuit style they don’t seem as boring, the are actually welcomed.

Great for Off Days – These warm ups are great for deload weeks or days you or your client know you just don’t have it. Foam roll, stretch, run through one of these warm up a few times and go home. You keep the body moving, you get your heart rate up a bit, and you let the body recover to prepare for the next workout or training phase.

Regressions – If someone cannot do an exercise be sure you have a regression in mind. If you need to write down the regressions do it. The best example, in my warm up below, I have written “chin ups X 3 or TRX Rows X 10”.  In a group of 12 people I know probably half of them can do chin ups but the other half cannot. Therefore I write the regression next to it so I don’t have 6 people hanging from a bar and kicking their legs for 20 minutes trying to complete one chin up. A good coach knows and uses his/her regressions and progressions. Never let someone who is incapable do something just because everyone else is doing it, that’s how injuries happen.

Carry Over – By doing our warm ups like this we significantly increase the amount of exposures someone gets to certain movements. For example we may do 20 band squats in the activation, 3 sets of 10 overhead squats in the warm up, then 4 sets of 10 goblet squats in the lift. This means by the end of the workout they would have accumulated 90 total squats that day. And believe me good body weight squats make for better looking goblet squats. Good body weight single leg deadlifts make for much better looking weighted single leg deadlifts. Solid body weight push ups make all our push up progressions look better. You get the idea.

The “Dan John Warm Ups” I use - Here are three examples of the “Dan John” Warm Ups I’ve been running my clients through. Every 4th week I try to change 1 or 2 of the exercises on each list.  The exercises are not done in a specific order as long as all the exercises are done twice or three times through. Click on the links to see a video of the exercise performed by yours truly.

I write the “warm ups” on these nifty hurdles that also serve as whiteboards at work. They work great, especially for setting up circuits.

Day #1

1. Push – Push Ups X 10
2. Knee Dom – PVC OH Squats X 10
3. Pull – TRX Rows X 10
4. Hip Dom – SLDL w/ Knee Grab X 10 ea. leg
5. Core – Front Plank X 30 seconds
6. Upper Body Plyo – Battling Ropes X 20 seconds
7. Carry – Suitcase Carry (DB or KB) X Turf
8. Lower Body Plyo – Box Jumps X 6

Day #2

1. Push – Scap Push Ups X 10
2. Knee Dom – Lunge Matrix X 5 ea. way
3. Pull – T-spine Rotations X 10 ea. side
4. Hip Dom – Single Leg Hip Lifts X 10 ea. side
5. Core – Side Plank X 20 second ea side
6. Upper Body Plyo – Medball Side Toss X 10 ea. side
7. Carry – Farmer Walk X Turf
8. Lower Body Plyo – Sprints X Turf 4 times (no video pretty self explanatory… dig down deep, put one foot in front of the other, find your inner caveman & chase down your dinner)

Day #3

1. Push – Wall Slides X 10
2. Knee Dom – Toe Touch to Squat X 10
3. Pull – Chin Ups X 3 or TRX Rows X 10
4. Hip Dom – Lateral band Walks X 15 steps ea. way
5. Core – Lateral Crawls x 10 yards down and back
6. Upper Body Plyo – Medball Chest Pass X 15
7. Carry – Heartbeat Walks X Turf
8. Lower Body Plyo – Ladder X 5 times through pick any drill

Feel free to steal these warms up or just use them as a template for creating your own. Whatever you decide to do have fun with and never stop experimenting!

Please share if you like this. Thanks for reading!

               - Brendon