All posts by landland

Health and Fitness

Rip 60 Review

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What is Rip:60?
Rip:60 is a 60 day program that utilizes suspension training. That’s just a fancy way of saying ropes and pulleys. Suspension training is a useful type of training because it helps with balance, agility, coordination, and works muscles that you didn’t know you had. Doing a pushup on a stable floor is relatively easy. Put your feet in some unstable straps and the game changes slightly. Lots of MMA fighters use suspension training in their regimen, the most popular being the TRX system (which I also have). Georges St. Pierre and Jillian Michaels endorse Rip:60 and have included bonus DVDs.

How long is Rip:60?
8 weeks. 6 days on, 1 day off.

What equipment do I need for Rip60?
The suspension trainer, which comes with the purchased product, and some weights. In the videos, they use an adjustable kettlebell you can buy on their website. I used adjustable dumbbells which I already had. To work my forearms and grip strength more, I also used a pair of Fat Gripz (highly recommended for added difficulty and training of the forearms).

Description
Rip:60 is 1 DVD per week, 6 days a week with 1 rest day. That means you do the same workout for 6 days straight, which could get a little boring for you depending on how patient you are. Once the week is over you progress to the next DVD and repeat until all 8 DVDs are done. The weeks get progressively harder, but I found week 6 to be the hardest, not week 7 or 8. There is also a recovery week which is just a bunch of stretching with the help of the suspension trainer. Every workout includes a warm up and cool down. The workouts are run by a guy named Jeremy Strom whom I didn’t find very good.

There are 4 bonus DVDs. Rip:60 for runners, power yoga, one from Jillian Michaels and one from Georges St. Pierre. The power yoga is useless and I wouldn’t recommend it as the straps just get in the way. Stick with traditional yoga. The runners one is only slightly better. In the GSP DVD, GSP goes through a workout and it is narrated by Jeremy Strom. This one is decent except you pretty much get no time in between exercises and don’t really know what’s next. This is bad because the exercise has already started while you are still trying to adjust your straps, get into position, and figure out what to do next. The best of these bonus DVDs is Jillian Michaels, she rips it (pun intended), although the workout isn’t as intense as I would have liked. She should have been the one to run through the workouts in the 8 weeks.

The Good
Rotation in the straps, which TRX doesn’t have, makes the exercises more challenging. There are some seriously killer bodyweight exercises you can do with rotational suspension training that you wouldn’t be able to do in TRX. The straps themselves are also quite sturdy. I think TRX is a little better built, but Rip:60 won’t fall apart on you anytime soon and definitely a good piece of equipment to have in your home gym. The DVDs themselves are fairly good workouts using suspension training, although I believe they could have been so much better. I would have loved to see more uses with the trainer and less burpees and strictly bodyweight exercises, but nonetheless you can get a pretty good burn and sweat using Rip:60.

The Bad
Since Rip:60 hangs from door if you don’t have something to attach it to overhead, sometimes the exercises are hard to do because of the proximity to the door. And you should be aware that the metal components may scuff up the door, so if that is a concern you’ll need to tape something soft like a towel to the door. Also, Jeremy Strom is annoying as hell and sucks as a coach. If I was paying him as a personal trainer I’d fire him. His timing is off almost more times than not. He isn’t very motivating or funny and sometimes he’ll say 2, 1, go, sometimes he’ll say 3,2,1 and you are supposed to go, sometimes he’ll say 1,2,3, and so on. It gets unbelievably annoying when you are ready to hit it and aren’t sure when you are supposed to begin. You might think I am nitpicking but just wait until you are exhausted and he says there’s 5 seconds left and you start giving it everything you got only to find out there’s actually 15 seconds left. You’ll want to kill him, too. He also takes jabs at other home workout programs, most notably P90X, which isn’t really necessary. The strength and quality of the program should be enough to stand on its own merits, there is no need to take jabs at a different program (minor complaint, as this one isn’t the only program that does this). See Jillian Michaels’ DVD to see how its supposed to be done. Her DVD is near flawless and gives you an idea how home instruction is supposed to look like.

Final Thoughts
I had to take a week and a half off because I jammed up my foot real good. To finish on time, I had to do doubles and triples. I definitely wouldn’t recommend that, but having a few off days on a 60 day program doesn’t give you a lot of flexibility to catch up. Follow the program schedule as best you can. I didn’t follow the nutritional guide but ate pretty clean throughout and followed an 8 hour eating window and a weekly cheat day. In the end, I am as light as I have ever been in my adulthood and about as lean. So yes, I am very happy with Rip60 and would definitely recommend giving it a whirl.  You can get it here..

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If you liked this review, you may also like my P90X2, GSP rushfit, P90X+, Insanity, RevAbs, or RMAX BER reviews

Lifestyle, Mindset

The Lost Art of Solitude

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I need to qualify my last post a bit. I wrote that I didn’t know what to write and that’s why I haven’t posted in a while. What I meant to say there was that in the past year I have been bombarded with information. Much of it was new to me and much of it conflicted with stuff I already believed. It took me a while to crunch through it all. The best way I know to do the crunching is in solitude.

Solitude is one of those things that people these days don’t get enough of, in my opinion. Life is just too busy. Bills, kids, 10000 TV channels, and twitter just keeps peoples’ schedules full. But solitude is probably one of the most enlightening activities there is. Really, it is my preferred activity most of the time. While I do enjoy hanging out with friends and being around people, for the most part I just love being by myself. I read an interview with Derek Sivers a while back where he basically said the same thing and I was relieved because I thought I was the only weirdo who prefers to be alone. Nothing brings clarity like some quiet, alone time.

I use solitude to reflect, absorb, plan, recover, or just plain enjoy. I do it anywhere, preferably outdoors. Sometimes I’ll just go and read a book at a cafe or go to the library. Sometimes I’ll enjoy a meal somewhere or go watch a movie by myself. Sometimes I will people watch or just stare at a tree. That alone time does wonders. Even just doing everyday chores like folding the laundry or grocery shopping alone can bring about that magical recharge that only solitude brings. I liken it to a good workout, some yoga or meditation, or a relaxing jog.

We are overstimmed in this crazy world we live in. A little bit of alone time is the cure. Being alone without being lonely is the key. This isn’t loneliness I am talking about. If you can’t spend some time by yourself without feeling alone you got issues, mang. Get that checked out, maybe. This isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about that rich, beautiful, inner peace and quiet that comes out only from being completely ok with being by yourself. It brings a sense of balance back into your life that not many other activities can do. It offers a type of introspection that allows you to form your own thoughts. To not multitask. To not be good at following the pack. To be awesome.

Friends and Family, Goals, Life

Psssttttttt…is this thing on??

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Wondering if anybody still reads this thing, outside of random Googlers. If you do, awesome, you guys/gals rule. It has been a busy year so far! A lot of things happening that are as exciting as they are scary. I haven’t updated here in a long time not because I didn’t want to and not because I didn’t have the time. In all honesty, I just don’t know what to say. Sometimes the best course of action is no action. Some of the consequences of my decisions won’t be known until a few years out, so I’d rather not comment on them. The things that are going well are doing exceptionally so. And the things that aren’t I’m not really that worried about.

School was one of those things that just kind of took a back burner in terms of priorities. I honestly don’t know if school was the right decision at this point. It has its pluses, it has its minuses, so who knows. What doesn’t? Ask me again in 5 years and I’d have a more solid answer for you. The only real regret I had with school was that I didn’t get to connect with my classmates as much as I would have liked. I lost touch with a bunch of them that I would have liked to see more. But thems the breaks. School was extremely fast paced, stressful for some, and money/finding a job and time was always a concern for many. As for me, my own priorities changed as well and going out constantly and being involved in extra curricular school activities started to wane on me. I much prefer things like solitude, taking on personal challenges, physicality, learning on my own and so that’s what I focused on and set my priorities to. It might have been a schizo move and I acknowledge that but I just have to keep it real to myself and so I apologize to my friends and the potential friendships that I didn’t make because of my actions. There really are fantastic people in my program.

I feel very creative, experimental, and stoic right now. It kind of feels like that feeling when you spend a long time on a really hard math problem and get the right answer. I’m just loving life right now and rolling with the punches. I remind myself that this is my one chance at life and so I am going to do it the way I am going to do it. This summer is going to be my best yet. This much I’m sure of.

Goals

Small Decisions, Small Victories

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One of the reasons that I do not subscribe to the New Years resolution mentality is that I know it rarely works.  I have mentioned before that if you have to wait until a new year to start on whatever journey you plan on embarking than the burning desire just isn’t there.  I have written before about how willpower alone just doesn’t cut it.  Willpower is finite. For the people who regularly go to a gym, what they see every year is a spike in treadmill usage and other cardio equipment for the first few weeks in January.  And then gradually those people start dropping like flies because “real life” gets in the way.

Lack of defining clear, actionable goals is a major contributor to this problem.  Nobody really knows what lose weight actually means.  Most probably mean lose fat.  Other people’s goals are just too epic, like trying to lose 150 lbs in 3 months or something.  Aside from the fact that weight is not a good indicator of fat loss, large goals are hard to achieve with a high failure rate.  Small goals and small decisions, however, are much easier to achieve.  Eat an elephant one bite at a time.  150lbs can be broken down to walking 10 minutes a day for a week.  That is a much easier goal to achieve.

Every small decision achieved is a small victory.  Celebrate the small victories with a fist pump so that they motivate you to continue.  Perhaps you can try to challenge yourself with a slightly harder goal.  That’s eating the elephant.  I’m not a fan of long term projections, goals, and planning, although for some reason or other they like teaching it in business schools.  The projections are almost always wayyyy off and suck but business people like looking at them.  Mind boggles.  Every inaccurate variable compounds over a longer period of time so if you are off a little at the beginning the longer the goal the more off you’ll be.  Don’t worry, unless you are writing a business plan to investors or something then you do not need to be this silly.  Start small and celebrate small.

I’ve reclaimed my inbox and gotten to inbox zero, something Merlin Mann talks about to take control of email overload. Fist pump!  Its nice having gmail say “No new mail!” .  On the flip side my goal of writing 500 words per day for 2 weeks straight failed immediately.  You ever say something and regret it as you were saying it?  Yea that was me with this one.  My best friends have kept me busy and I don’t spend nearly as much time with them as I’d like so I didn’t get to do as much writing as I wanted, among other things.  Also, there is no burning desire so the goal had the odds stacked against it from the beginning.  I have begun to write more, which was the initial jump start I was looking for, so I am satisfied about that.  Now its time to get back into the swing of things (I am currently recovering from the sore throat from hell)!  I should probably start small and work my way up.

Friends and Family, Me

2010 Annual Review.

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Annual reflections are a good little exercise to try.  It helps put things into perspective by taking a look at what went right, wrong, nowhere and somewhere in between in your life.  This helps with planning on future direction and gaining insight.  I would encourage everybody to give it a go.  At the end of the year is completely arbitrary as I don’t subscribe to the new years resolution mentality.  If it can wait until the new year than the burning desire for achieving the goal just isn’t there yet.  You could just as easily do an annual review mid year.  In fact doing a semi-annual review wouldnt be such a bad idea but if you’ve never done anything like it before than starting with one is a good start.  Something I am very bad at is measuring and recording results.  This leaves me doing inaccurate guesswork with skewed and crappy memory.  Don’t do that.  Record and measure results whenever possible and save the guesswork.  Be as specific as possible.

What can I really say this year? 2009 was a year of epic lows and mountain highs.  2010 was much more low key.  I did some traveling.  Hit up a cruise and went to some excellent European countries.  Great fun.  Met some great people during these times and had some really positive Couchsurfing experiences.  I will likely write about that in the future.  Quit my job and got back into school, which I put off for too long.  I have been very happy with this decision.  Got back into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and realized a healthy, tougher me is also a better BJJ student on the mats.  So for me, 2010 was like transitioning into a new and exciting phase in my life.  Lots of tiny little discoveries and aha! moments that have made it quite rewarding.

I didn’t define many goals for 2010 and thus did not accomplish many goals.  This was a mistake.  I tried a machine gun approach and because of this learned a ton but in terms of measurable success it was negligible.  Still, in terms of overall life satisfaction I raised the bar for myself.  I expect 2011 to be an equally slow process of discovery and adventure.  The one thing I lacked the most in 2010 was consistency, which imo is one of the most important things you could do to achieving any type of noticeable gains.  I plan on being much more consistent in my endeavours going forward.

I was amazed how tough 2010 was for some of my friends and family.  This affected me more than most things going on in my own life.  Lots of marriages and breakups and highs and lows hit me with smiles when things were good and poopiness when things were bad.  I felt it more this year for reasons I cannot explain.  It did seem like it was a string of bad news after bad news more than usual.  No worries. Just a random series of events.  Good news always follows.  I hope my friends know that walking through fire only makes them stronger.

That’s it, may 2011 bring you success and happiness.  I have a good feeling it will 🙂

Friends and Family, Health and Fitness, Life

What Happens if You Started Today?

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I have been feeling lazy, which is why I haven’t written in a while.  Well, there’s more to the story than that.  School kept my hands full.  I wasn’t overloaded, just annoyingly occupied to the point where I wasn’t really able to do a lot of extracurriculars.  I had to cut down on my exercise, jiu jitsu, rock climbing, and writing.  I did still keep up with reading, though, so all was not lost.  Then my exams finished, and school was off for the break and I just decided to plunk down on the couch, play some video games and eat a lot of junk.  So far, so good.

I wanted to write a series of posts over the break but that didn’t happen.  Instead, this is the best I could muster.  Google seems to be sending lots of beachbody P90X, Insanity, Rev Abs people my way.  For the record, this isn’t a health and fitness blog, at least not completely.  Its mostly a lifestyle blog.  It was started before Facebook and Gmail and Twitter and Skype as a way to keep in touch with friends.  Friends are now much easier to keep in touch with so this blog, at least to my friends, became much less relevant.  Except some awesome readers have stated they have found my writing useful, and because I still enjoy writing. Man, the internet moves FAST.

Writing is like many skills that require practice.  If you don’t use it it becomes harder to do.  I’m still kicking myself for not practicing tying a few uber elite knots I was taught over the summer and have since forgotten 🙁  So, I am going to try to write 500 words per day for the next 2 weeks and see what happens (not all of it on this blog).  Just for fun, no pressure.  I find putting out a goal outside of your head and onto something else such as telling your friends makes it real and thus forces you into action.  Letting someone know that you are going to be running in a marathon forces you to start running.  Afterall, nobody wants to look like a liar and a fool.  Sometimes it happens, anyway.  No biggy, sack up and try again (trust me nobody really cares that much).

But when you start, it feels good.  Then, when you look back on what you’ve accomplished hopefully you have something to be proud of.  If you’ve made any improvements whatsoever, that’s an awesome thing.  Even if you don’t hit the goal, heading in the right direction is pretty rad.  I love it when I hear someone tell me they’ve started P90X, because I know that there’s a good chance, if they want it enough (that burning desire inside), that they are going to finish.  And I have yet to meet someone who finished it and didnt look better, or feel better, even if they hated the workout or Tony Horton’s annoying voice (I don’t find Tony annoying, he’s hilarious imo).  Heck, even if the ones who didn’t quit immediately saw some good benefits.

Just imagine what can be accomplished if you just started today.  Its one of those things that nobody can really force you to do, so its got to come from an “oh shit” moment.  Sometimes a moment comes from really crappy places like a divorce or passing out from eating too much chocolate cake (Win?).  Other times the moments come from really cool places like watching a 72 year old bench press 400 lbs.  Find the moments.  Find the burning desire.  Today is a good day to start.

I think I’ll do a year end review next.  Seems like a good time to do it, being year end and all.

Me, Stories

I Miss My Blog.

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Dear blog, I miss you.  Sorry I have neglected you for so long. A lot has happened since we last spoke.  I went on a crazy ass adventure that took me to volcanoes, ash filled glaciers, 24 hour sunlight, lots of rain, lots of mountains, lots of wind, lots of food, lots of laughs, lots of memories, and some shenanigans.  I met some super cool people, and a few duds along the way.  I got pretty sick but also ate a lot of weirdness.  And yes I put on some weight.  Worked on a farm, almost got eaten by a dog, and visited the city where Fred Flinstone grew up.  I also made it in a Turkish newspaper and some sort of video blog TV show. That was neat.

And then I returned to my favourite city in the world: Toronto.  My grandfather passed away.  I miss him.  He was a great dude who loved to laugh a lot.  I think I got that from him.  I read on Facebook the other day someone’s status update about how if you could spend one more day with someone up in heaven who would it be, and I would have to go with gramps.

Then I got to go to camp where I met all sorts of intelligent and fun people.  Right after that, I got to spend 3 days with the foremost expert in Northern bushcraft in the world.  I learned a lot.   I found a really cool place by my school.  I can literally go home between classes and nap.  I do that everyday.  Naps are so nice.

I got into some trouble with a large company. They sent their lawyers after me. Long story, don’t want to talk about it. That was scary. I made a mistake and got slapped. I pray that its over.  It won’t be the last mistake I make, either.  One of the reasons I haven’t written in so long is I was warned by my school.  I have to represent the school and myself in a professional manner now to maintain a good reputation.  I will say this: My reputation has long been far from good.  It doesn’t take a genius to find some dirt on me on the internet. I can’t stop a friend from posting a dumb picture of me and tag my name on it. I don’t see myself stopping myself from doing stupid stuff in the future, either. Cameras be damned, its in my nature.  But I also know a secret that I’m going to share with you.  People are forgiving, forgetful, and simply don’t care.  So I’m not worried, not for a second.

I’ve been so busy, but in a good way.  I really enjoy school right now.  I can’t believe I just wrote that, but I really am.  I am learning a lot.  And the people are just so smart.  It feels so good to be back in academia.  And I’m not in the least bit stressed.  In fact, I get plenty of sleep, eat well, exercise frequently, and even get to go rock climbing and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu a few times a week.  And when I’m not doing that, I am attending some school social events, club meetings, doing group work, or hanging out with friends.  I even started journaling again, and reading!  Phew, and I was worried I wouldn’t have any time.

It hasn’t been easy, though. There have been plenty of bumps and I have my fair share of bruises, but you how I am.  So don’t worry about me, I’m all good, but I do worry about my friends and family sometimes.  Things have been rough for some of them.  I know they’ll get through, but not being able to help seriously sucks.

Anyway, its late, and I’m sleepy.  I was supposed to go out to a classmates birthday party but when I got there the lineup was ginourmous so I couldn’t get in.  On my way home I thought of you.  Strange, I know, but here I am writing away.  Hope to do it again, sometime soon.  In fact, you can bet on it.

Best,

marty