As a personal trainer in Singapore, I get asked alot about diet, nutrition and supplements for losing fat and gaining muscles.
One common mistake that people in Singapore make when it comes to fat loss and muscle gain is a lack of meat! Simply not enough.
The Singapore diet has too little of it. A bowl of fish soup has a few pathetic slices of fish. A plate of Char Siew rice has a few slices of roast pork… TINY.
When I talk about meat, I mean alot of it. at least a kilo per day for men (more is better as long as your digestive system is good!) and 500g per day for women.
"But meat gives you all kinds of problems"… like - kidney problems, gout, hypertension (high blood pressure) etc…
NO
The problem is not the meat, its the "meat".
Let me explain.
Meat is like a Mozart composition. If you heard a Mozart piece played by me who is an average (or worse) piano player…you would think Mozart was a crappy composer! But it’s not his fault, its mine!
Similarly, people who get problems from meat have bad habits in general and eat BAD meat. Which I don’t even consider meat at all!
Smoked meats, preserved meats, sausages, hams and other varieties of "meat" are not meat! They are random animal parts mixed with massive amounts of bad artificial flavoring and preservatives.
Real meat causes no problems. In fact it’s so good for you that its been known for men in hard labor like soldiers or explorers to eat 4-5kg of meat per day!
So, don’t blame Mozart and eat good quality meats!
Helping Singapore residents cut through misinformation is part of all our programs. Meat is involved in getting lean and fit as part of Singapore’s best personal training program, as well as performing well and recovering well as an athlete in our Singapore athlete program.
As a personal trainer in Singapore, I certainly don’t advocate anger! Anger just makes you stressed, and then you store more fat. Yuck. haha. But some "anger" can be motivational as long as you keep it positive and healthy.
Are you comfortable with your current fitness?
Are you settling for sub optimal results? - you should be lean, healthy, strong, fit and attractive! Just the way you were created to be!
Settling for your current level of health? - "oh being sick once in a while is ok" - NO ITS NOT
Settling for the amount of energy you have for life?
Settling for your current level of productivity?
Are you in a comfort zone?
If you want to break out of the stagnant state….
Get MAD…
Get mad at mediocrity.
Don’t settle for less than you deserve.
If you are not as fit at the end of 2008 as you wanted to be you should be UPSET!
Then use that anger as fuel to drive you to be better in 2009
Let it push you to step out of your comfort zone and work a little harder.
Try a new program?
Make the changes that needed to be made.
You deserve to be successful, so you should be angry if you’re not there yet.
So get a little mad today…then make the changes that will lead you to success.
I always like to encourage social support in our personal training sessions. Even among the coaches here at out gym, training together makes us improve together. Today on a public holiday, we invited our current and former cleints to join us for some free training. No need to pay:) Membership has its priviledges.
But its good for them to see strong people training. Derrick and I were working on olympic lifts and squats. We train together and encourage each other with positive words and coaching cues.
Admittedly, as we get more advanced in training, its harder to find suitable training partners who can keep up! But hey, at the Genesis Performance Center right here in Singapore, if no other clients can keep up with you in your personal training groups, we have the coaches who can:)
Derrick went up to 190kg x2 in the squat despite just recovering from a groin strain, and I hit a single 190kg despite not back squatting for 3 months. A good training session I would say!
Olympic Lifting is fun, challenging and makes you strong and fast! But there is a problem. Heavy lifts need to be dropped onto the floor because lowering them slowly is dangerous to do. In Singapore there used to be NOWHERE for regular people to do olympic lifting. All the olympic lifting platforms in Singapore are in the training centers reserved for national team members in different sports like silat, track and field, and of course weightlifting.
In those training centers, athletes lift on lifting platforms that are made of rubber and wood to protect the floor of the building.
That’s good, but there is only one problem. Those places are on the GROUND floor which is hard to find in high rise Singapore. There had to be a better way for the rest of us who train in high rise places (I’m on the 7th floor) There is alot of vibration reduction to be done to make the lifts neighbour friendly.
But smart, passionate men like my staff and I will FIND A WAY! Indeed we have!
We built lifting platforms using hard rubber and wood as the center pieces, and soft playground mats (16 layers of them!) as the areas where the weights will drop. We covered them with a tough black rubber mat to protect the softer playground mats and strapped the whole thing up with nylon straps.
SILENCE!!
We are gonna have some fun with the olympic lifts now! As an added bonus, its nice and easy to load plates because the platform is so high up haha.
Step 1: Make the Center Piece - This can be plywood, hard rubber, whatever it takes. Ours is about 20cm high.
Step 2: Get the pink playground mats from toy stores they are 1cm thick so buy as needed.
Step 3: Place Black rubber mats on top
Step 4: Strap them all together using nylon straps like those used in camping bags. (about $40 for 50m of it)
Step 5: Drop anything you like on them and hear no sound!:)
Thats Derrick and I in the top picture standing on our 3 hours of hard work (Edwin, Ray and even some clients also contributed but were not there to put in the finishing touches and take the macho pics!)
The 2nd picture is a Closeup of the thicker platform where heavy stuff will be dropped! BTW you can see the difference in length between a women’s lifting bar (in front) and a men’s one (behind) 15kg vs 20kg too.
Just thougt I would share something I was reading lately about an interview with investment expert Warren Buffet. A young investor asked him during a forum: "What is the one biggest piece of advice you would give to a young investor like me?"
Mr Buffet answered: "Think for a moment that you are given a car and told this is the only car you would get for the rest of your life. Then you would make sure that your car is taken care of well, it is oiled and detailed every now and then. You would make sure that it never gets rusted, and you would garage it. Think of yourself as that car. You just get 1 body, 1 mind and 1 soul. Take care of it well. Invest in yourself that would be my advice.”
Bravo…
Exactly. That’s exactly the way we need to think of fitness. And anyway your body is way more important and special than any car! If you think about it, it’s a lot more complicated and impressive too.
Just a quick example is your heart. It pumps the equivelant of 3x oil supertankers worth of blood around your body during your lifetime. Your heart would average 2306880000 beats during your lifetime. (60 beats per minute average) It’s got to repair itself, and it’s not allowed to fail (that would be very bad news for it’s owner).
Invest in your health. That’s a stock that never depreciates or loses it’s value:)
One of my clients just came back from an ACL surgery.
He is highly motivated, and willing to do different things to get back to health FAST.
When I talk about FAST I mean no nonsense, 3x faster than normal FAST.
10 days after surgery he was back in the gym training his upper body and his uninjured leg (this has benefits to reduce strength loss in the injured leg)
3-4 weeks after surgery he was doing exercises such as deadlifts off a block which don’t require too much bending of the injured leg.
Now, 6 Weeks after he is deadlifting fully from the floor, and starting to do partial range squats on his injured leg. We are at 80% of pain free range of motion.
One big reason for the progress is a new supplement I recommended to him called sinew-plex from Poliquin Performance. This thing is a kinase (signaling mechanism in the body) that signals the body to "repair soft tissue". It speeds up recovery ALOT. Along with an agressive rehab protocol and a motivated client who wants to get back into athletic training FAST, this is the way to go.
Performing the olympic lifts. Almost nobody coaches or performs them properly. But luckily on our staff we have a national team weightlifter, Derrick Kim. He has been helping me with my technique. This process is NEVER ENDING and is built up bit by bit. Hey thats the Kaizen principle I wrote about!
It starts off here: really ugly and bad techinque! Arms bend too early so I lose power that is supposed to come from the hips…I also don’t extend my body fully so I also lose power. And I also look Uncool…
But hey, improve little by little right!… So, I improved the extension part so the pull is more forceful…but still the bar is too far away from my body…
So I have been working on that "bar close to the body" problem… and its alot better now, my hips extend more forcefully. And the weight I can use is now 115kg when previously it was only 100kg.
The cool thing about the kaizen principle, is that as you focus on small improvements during the PROCESS, the RESULTS improve automatically! This is applicable in all ways… eat too much cake? next time just take a bite instead of the whole piece! Don’t exercise at all? Start proper training at least once a week… and focus on the process… the results will come.
The only mistake you can make is SITTING ON YOUR BUTT and doing nothing!
Personal training in Singapore is also about coaching skill. One thing that I encourage you to have is to live with the Kaizen Principle.
The Kaizen Principle is a Japanese idea where we see constant measurable but small increments in ability/progress/skill etc.
You can see it in "japaneseish" kind of industries like cameras and cars… each year brings a new model with small tweaks and improvements at a slightly better price point than the previous
This is logical yet AGAINST what we like to hear: "Instant results RIGHT NOW"
Yes I take pride in getting clients great results, but still it doesn’t happen overnight. It is a process.
But that process is measurable, fun and educational.
Lift a little more each week. Change an unhealthy nutrition habit to a healthy one each week, switch an inactive hobby for a more active one… etc
If I could lift even just 0.5kg more each week, In 2 years I would be the world record holder in every strength sport in the world! Thats how powerful the kaizen principle is. (Although this is not possible due to other limitations… its just an example of the high standards that can be reached with constant but slow progress)
Meanwhile… I got my some positive comments on my piano playing (which is NOT an area I’m particularly good at… so encouraging! haha) Another area of life I’m trying to improve little by little!
I’ve looked through the issue of Mind-your-Body you mentioned. There is one article that says red meat and dairy products contain a type of sugar that a paticular kind of diarrhea-causing bacterium likes to bind to. Is the article wrong about that?
Then there is another Mind-Your-Body article that extols the virtues of lean lamb meat (high protein, B vitamins, iron, zinc, low saturated fat and low cholesterol). Is there a health distinction between lean red meat and fatty red meat?
Can white meat do the same thing for digestion and hormones as red meat, while avoiding some of its pitfalls (e.g. cancer risk)?
Does it make a difference if the meat came from grass-fed animals rather than corn-fed?
Last but not least, how do you help your clients to fix their digestive systems?
Thanks!
Answer:
If you get diarrhea when you eat food, your digestive system needs to be improved. We are designed to be able to eat, digest, and ENJOY red meat:)
Yes lamb is fine. And it does have all those benfits. Saturated fat is fine so fatty red meat is fine. Thats what cavemen ate and they were healthy. But remember to balance out your fats with unsaturated fats and omega 3’s. Saturated fat is good but it is infalmatory so you need omega 3s to balance out because those are anti inflamatory.
White meat is fine! But it doesnt have the fat content of red meat. This is bad. Your body doesnt learn to become "fat adapted" if you don’t eat enough fat. I.E. You don’t learn to burn fat for energy so its harder to burn BODY fat!
Yes grass fed is better. And if you get meat from wholesalers, it is affordable.
Digestive system fixing is done through testing of zinc and stomach acid levels, then supplementation according to an individual’s needs.
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