Quote of the Day: Teaching is Learning

"Who dares to teach must never cease to learn"
-John Cotton Dana

Workout: Tabata Tuesday

Workout:

Tabata Intervals (A 24 minute workout - including rest periods)

• 20sec Crocodile Walk, 10sec rest - (repeat for 8 rounds).
• rest - 1 minute
• 20s Drivers (or 20s all-out sprints), 10s rest - (repeat for 8 rounds)
• rest - 1 minute
• 20s Crab Walk, 10s rest - (repeat for 8 rounds)
• rest - 1 minute
• 20s Farmer's Walk (carry as heavy as you can for 20s), 10s rest - (repeat for 8 rounds)
• rest - 1 minute
• 20s Burpee w/ 2 Press-Ups, 10s rest - (repeat for 8 rounds)

* Go as hard as you can and as fast as you can during those 20s periods of work.

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Note:

Please scale all Fitness Explorer workouts and playouts to your current ability.  This may mean increasing or decreasing the weights prescribed, modifying distances and times, or changing number of sets and reps to complete.  Get adequate rest and sufficient nutrition to fuel the activity and to aid in recovery.  Work hard and play hard but never sacrifice correct form.

Please visit the exercise FAQ for details on individual exercises or consult the advice of a registered exercise professional to ensure safe execution of the above movements.

If you are new to this mode of exercise, try one of the beginner's circuits

Perform a warmup prior to activity, here's an example Fitness Explorer warmup

Watch    Fitness Explorer video's here on YouTube

Guest Post: The Right Motion for Exploring Fitness

This is the second in a series of guest posts by Susan Alexander.

Quick recap: The first post was about Mindset, which is the first of four principles of the model I created to empower any change you want to make in your life - whether it's exploring fitness, learning to eat sensibly, remaking yourself in some way, or any other change.

This post is about Motion, the model's second principle. Motion is the term I've given to the combined actions you take to bring about a chosen change. Whatever the change is, and whatever the actions are, they fit into the same evolutionary process that made the world what it is, organism by organism, ecosystem by ecosystem.

The process is natural selection, aka classic trial and error. Once we recognize that the process that evolved the world is the same process that evolves us throughout our lives, we can tap into it whenever we choose to make change happen.

The motion process - distilled to its essence

In classic trial and error, this is all you do, over and over:

• First and foremost, reject what doesn’t work.
• Be extremely open to what might work. Try things out. Experiment.
• Draw information from your inevitable mistakes and quickly correct them along the way.
• Find what does work. Once you do, keep doing it, tweaking and iterating to maintain an upward trajectory.
• Keep working. Awareness is key. Denial is the enemy. There may come a time when what works now doesn't work anymore. When that happens, stop doing it.
• Keep looping through the process to keep evolving.

The takeaway

You can take any actions specific to any change and implement them through this process. Looking at change in evolutionary terms demystifies it and transforms it into something we can be open to. So does seeing change for what it really is: learning skill. It doesn’t matter what kind of change you're making. Every change is skill-based, whether it’s physical (like working out in a new way), or routine (like eating differently), or thought-related (like changing a belief), or character-related (like becoming more assertive).

What's next?

As explained in the last guest post, my niche topic is personal change. I've taken all that I've learned so far and distilled it into four essential principles that drive change. Together, they comprise a model you can store in your head and use anytime you want to make a change in your life. So far, we've covered the first two principles, Mindset and Motion. In future posts, we'll cover the remaining two: Mastery and Measurement.

Over to you: Have you ever thought of change in evolutionary terms? Have you ever been conscious of teaching yourself something through classic trial and error? Does it help to look at the learning process through this evolutionary lens? Let's talk in the comments.

Susan Alexander blogs at gooddisruptivechange.com

You can follow her on Twitter at @SusanRPM4.

Rant of The Day: Charlatans

Rant of the Day: 

A leading "self-appointed" cutting-edge nutritionist posts a comment on their Fitness Page about "refined coconut oil" being the real deal. Their justification? Because it doesn't taste or smell of coconut and because it doesn't contain cellulose which can irritate the lining of the gut.

I replied with a few statements: 

• If cellulose is a carbohydrate (polysaccharide) and therefore does not exist in coconut oil.  An 100% oil i.e. fat does not contain carbohydrate;
• If cellulose irritates the gut, that's a lot of vegetation we need to avoid immediately;
• Refined (pure) coconut oil is usually heat treated, uses toxic chemicals (such as hexane), is filtered, bleached and processed to produce a much cheaper and less nutrient-dense product than extra-virgin or virgin coconut oil;
• In the majority of cases the less that is done to food, the healthier it is likely to be.

Her fans ask for clarity and a response based around my points.  They ask who is right, as one No reply from her.

I then gave more details depending on the question - with a caveat to do their own research, to use some (un)common sense judgement and not just to take my word for it.

The nutritionist's response? To delete all my comments and all questions relating to my comments (about 20 in total). Nothing like asking your readers to stop questioning and to give advice without any consideration for those who are actually genuinely interested in making better decisions about their health. 

It's not about being correct it is about wanting your audience to be better informed.  If I change my opinion from a previously held view due to improved information this is a blessing not a curse...

If it is important to you, always question, never just accept.

If you are teaching take note of the following:

"Who dares to teach must never cease to learn" -John Cotton Dana