Strength training the ultimate supplement for entrepreneurs

There are many views on how you should live and prioritize your life as an entrepreneur. Some find the only way is to dedicate 25 hours of your day towards your company or goal. If you aren’t working all hours of the day, then maybe your competitors are and they are getting ahead. Eating, sleeping, being able to see the sky – useless – you lazy slob!

While this might work for some, primarily robots, computers and others who has the luxury of not being alive, it’s probably not the best way forward most of the time. There can be times where you need to do this because of tight deadlines and in those cases you should of course be willing to put in the work. But if it is your default state then I’ll try my skills as fortune teller and say that it won’t be for long.

One of the hard things with entrepreneurship is not getting recognition for your work. You can work your ass off for days on end without anything to show the outside world. Or perhaps you do have something to show the outside world, but getting traction can then be hit or miss. In other words your work/reward relationship is very non-linear. Over long periods of time this can be very frustrating. Getting acknowledgement for our work is a very basic and natural urge.

But as I have written before and will elaborate more on in the future you should not derive all your identity from one source. Meaning that if you get all your sense of identity from being an entrepreneur then your mood, sense of worth and general well-being is pretty much tied to the highly unpredictable rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship. You should of course be very proud of your accomplishments but if you are only “The entrepreneur” then you are very one-dimensional and may be more negatively impacted by adversity.

What you need is a way to spend your time that is more linear in terms of work/reward. You could of course always turn to drinking. Generally the more you drink the more drunk you get and the more days in a row you drink the more miserable you feel – all very linear. But perhaps an activity where the work/reward curve goes in the opposite direction will be more appropriate.

There are numerous way to go about this, but my personal recommendation would go towards strength training. You get to work with your body, you get to work with your mind, you get to work with your hands, you get to meet people who are not neck deep in the world of entrepreneurship.

Strength training is very linear in terms of work/reward. You can even put all your knowledge about 80/20 analysis etc. to good use both in terms of the training itself and nutrition. You’ll get a good break from whatever your endeavor is and may even find that during your workout you come up with solutions to problems you haven’t been able to solve or new business ideas.

A side effect of getting stronger and in better shape may even be more successful meetings as you standing more proud and erect before any person, will alter his or her perception of you. This may seem shallow but never underestimate the subtle cues of body language.

In other words the only real downside to strength training is really the time you need to allocate for it. And allocate it you should. Otherwise you’ll be very prone to postpone in the beginning and find ways in which working can be seen as more important. But 1-2 hours 2-3 times a week should be manageable for most – even the most prolific and busy entrepreneurs. It might be the best investment you’ll ever do.

Does foam rolling work? Mobility, warm-up and science.

There has been a lot of different opinions when it comes to foam rolling. Some people swear by it while others says it is a total waste of time and highlights the foam-roller as the most over-hyped accessory in the fitness industry. But now finally there has been some scientific research that looked into the matter and shed some light on it. It will probably not put the arguments to rest and I would be surprised if it’s the last research paper on this subject, but nevertheless it is a good place to start. For good measure the link to the study is in the bottom of this post.

I can’t even remember where I heard about foam rolling for the first time, something inside me says it was probably Kelly Starrett – but whether that is just because he has been at the forefront of the proponents or it was actually the case I can’t remember.

My opinion about it however has stayed somewhat neutral. I am in no way against it but does in no way see it as the holy grail of neither warm-up nor mobility practice. My main use of it has always been to release some tension in the upper back. For this it is absolutely brilliant! But rolling around smashing my quads or hamstrings before squatting for instance never really caught on with me. I have always been a proponent of warming up with the movements you are about to do in your training.

But now the big question is whether I should abandon my usual practice and go all-in on the foam roller or stick with what I have been doing so far?

This first research paper focused on stretching and flexibility of the hamstring by comparing PNF stretching with foam rolling and a control group. For good measure PNF stretching is where you contract and release into the stretch and is generally seen as superior to static stretching and therefore a good and high measure on which to compare foam rolling.

The unsurprising find of the study was that PNF works compared to the control group – we know that. But the surprising find is that the foam-rolling group gained as much flexibility as the PNF group. In other words the foam rolling actually gave as much flexibility as what is otherwise seen as the superior way of gaining flexibility. I had by no mean expected that! I could perhaps have understood if it stood the ground against some weaker static stretching but this finding is quite surprising.

So this leaves me with my original question to answer: will I abandon my usual practice and go on a foam-rolling frenzy. Probably not. For one this study only looked at flexibility and not warm-up. I still believe the best way to warm-up is to do the actual movements you are about to perform to both get blood into the muscles but also get the CNS firing the rigth places. But I must admit that this study perhaps will have me spend some more time foam-rolling, not the least in times where I feel tight in some areas.

There you have it – science now backs foam-rolling. That must be the news of the week from the fitness world, something that is hyped and actually seems to work. It is even affordable if you get the basic version from amazon: BLACK High Density Foam Roller or if you want the Rolls Royce: Trigger Point Performance Foam Roller, Orange

And finally of course the link to the actual study: The foam roll as a tool to improve hamstring flexibility

Drinking water vs absorbing water

Most people probably drink too little water. They kill their thirst with some sort of bottled or canned alternative containing either none or lots of calories. Steering somewhat clear of that discussion I will focus on the ones who actually do turn to water whenever they feel thirsty and only uses the bottled and canned alternatives as a treat once in a while.

Once you find yourself in the latter group, you’re golden right? Not quite – but if you feel you’ve already done all you need to – then do not read on – but if you’re interested in one little missing piece of the puzzle, then please; read on.

There are somewhat differing views as to how much water we actually need each day. Of course this also heavily depends on who you are and what you do. Luckily our body is pretty well suited to telling us when we are thirsty – if then only we remember to answer this calling with the right substance – meaning water. But adding to this, a little tip is that you can also monitor the color of your pee as this is a pretty good indicator of your current water levels in the body. It should be almost clear – the more yellow it is the more you’re in need of water. Of course your morning urine will almost always be yellow – but from there it should be pretty close to clear.

But even this advice will not necessarily keep you in the sweet spot – because you can also have too much water – then you start excreting all the nice vitamins in your body – which by no means is the goal. I was in this group. I drank lots of water and had always done so. But my frequent trips to the toilet left me questioning whether I actually absorbed any of this water or it just sort of had a fast-track route through me.

Researching a bit on this lead me to a somewhat controversial mineral; salt. Lots of people almost swear that this kills you as fast as saturated fat did some years back. They will scan through all ingredients in everything they buy looking for this big read flashing sign saying “RADIOACTIVE” or “salt” as they sometimes spell it. Of course this is not the way to do it – just as well as only eating food covered in salt isn’t. As with anything – moderation is king!

Your body needs salt especially in regards to the topic of this post – absorption of water. Salt plays a vital role in your cells absorption of water. And why is this important – the important part must be just drinking the water, then the rest takes care of itself. Well not quite. As mentioned earlier if you aren’t absorbing the water it just sort of runs through you without actually doing any good – or as much good as it’s supposed to.

For your cells and your muscles to work properly they need the water, but not just running past them – they need it to enter. This is where salt comes into play [reference].

But then how should you go about having the right amount of salt to absorb the water? Is it a matter of putting more salt on your meals?

In my experience this doesn’t quite solve the problem. It is as if you need rather large quantities of salt on your food to get around this issue and to be fair you probably do not drink all your water around your meals. And now you can probably see where we are going…

Adding salt to the water itself. But if you’ve ever heard good ol’ advice on how to make people puke you will probably connect the dots and look like a big question mark. Saltwater is very efficient at making people puke if they have eaten something they shouldn’t – but the amount and quality of salt is key here.

You shouldn’t add kilos of ordinary table salt to a small glass of water and call it a day – or you may – because you’ll be feeling very bad afterwards if you manage to drink it. What you should be doing is buy some quality salt and only adding very little to your water. My go-to type is himalayan salt like this: Himalayan Crystal Salt – Dark Pink but no need to buy it of the internet you can probably find it in your local shop. If it looks something like this – then you’re probably golden.

I add a small pinch between two fingers to my can of 2 litres – which equates to 8-10 small pieces. It doesn’t taste like salt at all and I am very adverse to the taste of saltwater, so I wouldn’t be able to drink it if it did.

After doing this my frequent trips to the toilet has stopped. I do not drink as much water but feel better. My body seems to actually make good use of the water instead of just being a fancy water fountain that carries the water from the tap to the toilet. If you can recognise any of the symptoms then try it yourself.

Best bodyweight exercises for abs

L-sit gymnastic rings — Doing L-sit on the beach at Ngapali. Myanmar(Burma)

Oh the famous abs… So many hopeful aspirees, so many teachers and so few victorious in their quest.

What I’ll share of course is the easy, no work all magic pill that transforms your sexy curvy stomach into a flat, tight 6-pack. You’ll only have to work once a year for 3 seconds, so that your awesome well trained attention, do not miss any cat-videos or talent shows.

Kidding aside – this post won’t give you overnight 6-pack or maybe even ever get you near, that’s all on your court. What I’ll describe for you is my philosophy of ab-training. Boiled down to a couple of hard and somewhat advanced exercises that has been my favorites for the past several years.

As you of course should not take advice on how to quit smoking by a chain-smoker, I’ve included a couple of pictures of myself, just to let you come to your own conclusions as to whether I walk the walk or not. Further more you can probably find one or two very recent pictures on my Instagram account.

Having had a 6 pack for the last probably 6 years I think I have developed some sense of what it takes to achieve it – and no unfortunately my 6 year old photos does not include me with long hair or a newspaper to validate the claim, but I can provide ‘em – your choice to trust me or not.

6-packs are as you probably know primarily made in the kitchen, but diet is a complex topic for another day. (Please let me know if you want to know anything specific.) But yes I said “primarily” – not “solely”. They are a function of size and body fat percentage, so you can basically manipulate anyone of them to a degree. Low bodyfat is the main factor, but the size of your abs will determine how low you need to go before they are visible.

So what NOT to do. Don’t train your abs everyday – yes there are stories of people who did this and can show results to match – but it’s just not the best approach. Train hard, then REST- Allow your muscles to rebuild and become stronger, otherwise you are only breaking down and not rebuilding.

Don’t do crazy 50-100 rep sets of sit ups or crunches. Train your abs as you would with your chest or arm – and if you are doing 50-100 rep sets for those… – just don’t. Use weight to keep your reps low or choose a more demanding ab exercise. I don’t believe I have ever done reps past 10 repetitions. But yeah 5-15 would be the target rep-range.

First exercise I will highlight is static. It’s the exercise that I do on the first picture of this post, commonly known as the L-sit. Doing it on rings of course is a lot more demanding and adds much more strain on arms and shoulders as stabilizers, so wait with those. If my target of the exercise was abs alone, I myself would not even use rings, as they would make my arm and shoulders tired way before my abs. L-sit on rings for me is more a transition when doing ring-routines – for core ab work I would do L-sits on the floor, parallettes or between chairs.

So that is where you will start. As a beginner I would start between chairs or similar platforms. Press the surface as hard as you can with your hands, which should force your shoulders down and then contract your abs as hard as possible. If you cannot keep you legs straight, then start with them bent and work from there. You should feel the strain primarily in your abs, it is possible to feel a burn in anything from your hips to legs, but then you are not doing it right, experiment until you feel the burn primarily in the abs. Let’s say you can hold the position for a maximum of 20 seconds, then do 5 sets of 10-15 second holds and try adding 5 seconds every couple of weeks. Your goal is to hold a perfect L-sit for 60 seconds!

The second exercise I will highlight is rather advanced – but delivers bang for the buck like nothing else once you have mastered it. It’s the famous dragon flag or body lever. It is quite hard to find videos of people doing them correctly, but this guy pretty much nails them:

What you should notice is that he keeps his body straight or slightly over arched at all times. Even just a slight kip in the hip will dramatically decrease the difficulty and thereby the effect. Think of leading with your hips and not with your toes and keep a straight or slightly over arched body. But be careful, this exercise is extremely demanding and can cause quite a bit of pain in your lower back if you are not strong enough. I would recommend doing slow negatives until you are strong enough to begin pulling yourself back up. If you have a good solid 20-30 second L-sit you should be able to start working on these as well. Again if you get very advanced, then add ankle-weights instead of hammering out 15-20 reps.

These two exercises are stables of my ab-training. Ab-rollouts, hanging leg raises in stall bars, v-ups etc. find their way as well, but I honestly believe that my ab strength and size are primarily down to those two exercises.

So to summarize. Train your abs 2-3 times a week, train them hard and heavy, just like chest or arms, use progression and finally and most importantly fix your diet!

Beta alanine tingling and sex

Just reached 100 subscribers, which I would like to celebrate with a little fun tip. I have written quite extensively about beta alanine and it effects on performance here: What is beta alanine – the new creatine? But recently I found a quite fun and different use of beta alanine.

As some of you might know, it is quite common to get tingles under the skin from ingesting beta alanine. This is completely harmless and apparently not everybody seems to get these tingles. From reading peoples experience some even find these tingles unpleasant – if you’re one of them, then this is probably not for you.

For me the tingling is quite pleasant – a little strange the first time, but not unpleasant at all. The tingling is caused by beta alanine binding to nerve receptors and thereby making them fire a little. A lot of these nerves runs right under the skin which gives the tingling/prickling sensation. It usually sets in after 10-20 minutes after ingesting beta alanine.

It is possible to blunder this effect by ingesting beta alanine together with carbohydrates or meals in general – which should also enhance its positive effects on performance. But for this use we are not looking to maximize performance or blunder the tingling effect, on the contrary. If you do not feel the tingle at all, it should be possible to enhance the feeling by ingesting beta alanine together with caffeine on empty stomach. I get the tingling sensation every time, even though I have been using it for several months in a row.

An easy way to ingest it is just by dissolving the powder in a cup of coffee and drink it on an empty stomach – tingling here we go!

Just to set things straight, if you do not feel these tingles, then its not a sign of beta alanine not working. Some people experience them others don’t – there is no correlation between tingles and the positive performance effects of beta alanine. If you don’t feel the tingling then you might not get the enhanced feeling described below.

Now for the fun part. I recently had a serving of beta alanine like 20 minutes before having sex. The tingling had just set in, which as stated earlier I find quite pleasant. This tingling and what must have been caused by the activation of all the nerves under the skin, just made my body extra sensitive. Every touch was magnified, feelings ran up through my neck and spine. Everything was just a little bit more intense and pleasant. It seemed as though it made every sensation just a little more intense and enjoyable. A quite fun and surprising experience!

If you get pleasant tingles from beta alanine and want a little extra spice it might be worth trying. Beta alanine is as safe and almost as thoroughly tested as creatine so no need to worry as long as you stay within the recommended doses. And as with creatine, just go for the cheapest option like this one: NOW Foods Beta Alanine Powder 500G no need to pay for expensive overhyped products. Pills or powder is your choice, I seem to prefer powder and most of the times it also seems like the cheapest option.

Downsides of bodyweight routines: back muscles

I originally planned to write a single post on some of the downsides of bodyweight routines, but as I started collecting notes and writing I realised that it was probably better to write individual posts, each focusing on areas where bodyweight routines seems to be inferior or at least needs some attention to compete with good ol’ weight training.

Having done individually exclusive bodyweight, bodybuilding and to some extend strength routines – I feel I have gained some quite useful knowledge on the strength and weaknesses of each. In this post I will focus on areas where bodyweight routines can fall short on back training. They are little tweaks but can really make a big difference.

On paper bodyweight routines can look like they give pretty good bang for the buck as far as back training goes. There is usually quite a lot of pull-up variations and for the advanced bodyweight athlete there may additionally be levers and strict muscle-ups. But in my experience there are two areas where they seem to fall short.

First is horizontal rowing to get some good volume for your upper back. I know you can do feet supported rows in rings, on bars etc. but my experience is that your arms seems to get tired before your back muscles gets a real good beating. If you’re more advanced you can even try your luck with front lever-rows. They are incredibly hard, but again they seem to activate more supportive muscles that gets tired before your back really gives up. You’ll end up breaking good form before you really hit the back muscles.

Your lats can certainly get a good workout with bodyweight exercises, but your upper back will most certainly be underdeveloped. So in order to pull(pun intended) yourself out of this compromised state add some heavy rowing to your routine. This can be bent over rows, cable rows, dumbbell rows or whatever – just go heavy on those and high volume to make up for what most bodyweight routines ends up being; rather front dominant.

The second area where bodyweight routines fall kind of short is your lower back. You can do hypers and in a lot of the static levers you need to keep your entire core tight, but if you want a bulletproof back I would seriously consider doing some deadlifts. Deadlifts should in my opinion be a stable of just about any bodyweight routine. They tick so many of the boxes where bodyweight routines seems to fall short. They hit the upper back, as I mentioned as a weak-point earlier. They hit the lower back and they hit your legs once you start pulling some serious weights. They won’t hit your legs as squats, but if you’re seriously into bodyweight training and want to do advanced stuff – then the last thing you want is really heavy legs. But this is not the same as to say that you should not work them at all. Get a knowledgeable individual to show you the right technique and then start pulling from the ground!

Deadlifts can further more act as a measuring tool for something that can be a bit hard with bodyweight – a measure of progress. You can add good old progression on the deadlift to measure whether you are going in the right direction or not. I know it won’t say anything about your ability to perform bodyweight exercises but it will tell you whether you are getting stronger, are close to a burnout or are stagnating. Just program it with something real simple as Wendlers 5/3/1 for instance.

From my own experience the upper back is certainly the place where I lost most of my muscle mass when I did exclusive bodyweight routines. It is one of the things I keep telling people when they ask me for input on their bodyweight routines. And generally people needs to up their pulling whether we talk bodyweight or old school weights. There is a clear tendency to focus more on the front – which of course you can see more easily in the mirror – than the rear. The average lifter would probably be better off with a 2:1 ratio on exercise selection, in favor of pulling instead of pushing.

There are way more impressive fronts than rears – be the guy/girl who stands out in the crowd.

Just try it

If you have followed my instagram account you will probably know that I have started sprinting at a local track & field club. At age 29 this sure is a little late to win the olympics, but I have always been extremely fascinated by sprinters and wanted to try and actually train like them under supervision of someone with real experience in this field.

The fascination of sprinters is both due to their lean muscular look, but also due to their beautiful aesthetic explosiveness. Just seeing these athletes during warm-up is a study in elegant display of fitness. The way they shoot forward with absolute ease and jump high into the air just to loosen up the muscles is to me very fascinating to watch. It displays human performance at its peak, like few other sports can match.

This is not the first time I started square one at a new sport, in a relative late age. At 23 I started doing gymnastics or more precise the branch of gymnastics known as teamgym. This fascination with flic-flacs and backflips roots back to a film known as Ninja Kids where one of the main characters does flic-flacs on the last stretch of a baseball pitch to celebrate and win the match. Since I saw this movie at probably 10-12 years old I always wanted to be able to do that. But I knew of no one who did gymnastics and therefore no easy way to start. And at that time I was too afraid to start from scratch.

Fast forward to the age of 23. I loosely get to know some gymnasts through riding motorcycles and low and behold – now I had the courage to start. As a total rookie, un-flexible as 9-10 years of strength training and general certainty that I was going to make a big fool of myself for quite some time – I started. One of the best decisions of my life! I have made so many friends, transformed my body from un-flexible/unuseable to quite flexible and very useable. And generally just had so much fun learning something new.

Now the time has come to try out sprinting. The first few sessions has been a lot of fun. So many instructions on how to run correctly, so much soreness the following days and generally just a feeling of happiness from the fact that once again I am a total rookie and has so much to learn.

If you have something you were always fascinated by and wanted to try, then do not use age as an excuse. Never say it is too late. Just try it and see if it is something you like or not. Beginners are generally received with open arms. If not, then perhaps try another club, persist or pad yourself on the back for actually trying and showing up in the first place. Find somewhere with good instructors – gymnastic elements in crossfit is not the same as doing gymnastics – HIIT running on your days of from strength training is not the same as sprinting under supervision of an experienced coach. Find a good coach/club and embrace the steep climb paved with failures.

Just try it!