With less than a week to go before the the debut of Tough Mudder in China, Team Olive Branch is ready to take to the obstacle course and test what they’re made of. It’s only fitting that this week’s blog post be centered around being ‘tough’. So what does it mean to be tough anyways? From Merriam-Webster Dictionary: physically and emotionally strong : able to do hard work, to deal with harsh conditions, etc. Sounds
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We’ve all been there. It’s been over 6 months since I’ve done any exercise and I’m out of shape, and out of motivation. Why is the first step getting into shape, so hard?! For some of us, starting to a new fitness routine can be as daunting as public speaking. It’s worse than going to see the dentist because at least that’s over in 1 hour and you don’t have to go back for
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Survivorship Bias Similar, to my earlier blog Misconceptions: Swim, to have a swimmer’s body! this blog talks about the perils of the pervasive cognitive flaw - survivorship bias. Exercise programs that you frequently read on fitness magazines and social media platforms almost always depict a famous athlete giving his/her workout routine and telling you should follow it too if you want to get a big chest, skinny waistline, broad shoulders, slender legs, 6-pack abs,
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How many people do you know who is out of shape and obese? And how many of those people you know hate their bodies? Or maybe you’re reading this now and you have similar feelings towards your own body? To find oneself in this situation is despairing, and unfortunately, it is happening all around us. How did we get to this point in our evolutionary path that our current lifestyle has put us at odds
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Gung hei fat choi! Xin nian kuai le! Welcome back everyone to the year of the MONKEY! Hope you guys had a great holiday, I sure did and I’m feeling recharged! Didn’t get one workout in, but that’s ok, I hit the weights the very next day I got back to Shanghai and although I didn’t hit any personal bests, I did the single most important thing I could’ve done - and that is to
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It’s January 4th, time to execute on your new New Year’s Resolutions, but this time it’ll be different than last year, you’re going to finally lose weight and get that 6-pack that you had back in high school. You’re going to eat healthy and exercise more! All well-intentioned, but unfortunately, the numbers are against you. In 2007, Richard Wiseman from the University of Bristol did a study on 3000 participants and reported that 88% failed
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This is a very interesting piece of content that has helped me to keep an open mind about Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Although, my practice has always been rooted in Western science and methodologies, one thing that I have not been able to discount is TCM. Through the lens of the scientific method, TCM is still an obscure field of study, but this answer further helps to bridge the gap between East and West. It’s
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If you’ve been following my blog for some time, then you may feel that I cite a lot of science - a lot of new science for that matter, especially when it comes to exercise and nutrition. Often times, they fly in the face of concepts and principles that were once thought to be true and that may have also have been based on science - old science. For example, everyone thought that cold stretching
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The final leg of my five part series on Mental Toughness is being able to maintain strict form while your body is extremely uncomfortable. This is a very difficult thing to do simply because your entire body is telling you to do exactly the opposite of what you should be doing. And this is precisely why we are talking about mental toughness - in a sense, it is the aggregate of all the previous sections
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This week’s blog post will continue on from last week’s blog on Fear Management, part 3 of 5 in the series Mental Toughness for which I did the training on for the White Collar Boxers. The next mental tool you can employ when you’re facing fear is to imagine the worst case scenario. This is effective because by imagining the worst case scenario, you have created a lower bound for yourself in which all possible
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