Coaching football has taught me one of the secret exercises for fat loss – wind sprints. Intervals of sprinting mixed with jogging or walking. Running as fast as you can several time in a row with minimal rest. Wind sprints have become fashionable by other names like HIIT but wind sprints have been around forever. It’s not a new invention. Add strength training and proper food to wind sprints and you’ll get a transformation – physically and mentally.
I have seen my football players transform themselves with wind sprints and the weight room. Not small changes… transformation. I use a warp-speed no –huddle offense – one play every 8 seconds. It’s the equivalent of a 3-hour workout with 8-seconds rest. It takes intense training but every player on every one of my teams has achieved it. The majority of my players are not genetically gifted, naturally talented athletes. The majority started like all of us – the farthest thing from an athlete. The transformation included wind sprints – during practice and after practice.
Players start every season with the same attitude toward wind sprints – running has the same appeal as root canal. The announcement that starts formal sprint time is met with the same repulsion, like they’ve been asked to give up money. About 98% will not do sprints on their own. They need a coach yelling at them to do it. About 2% willing run sprints without having to be yelled at. But then it changes. We run sprints during practice to simulate the 8-second no-huddle. At fat peels off, as stamina grows, as they get leaner and meaner, everyone buys into sprints and lifting. It’s the feeling that becomes addictive. The feeling of being lean and mean.
Sprints never have been a secret but they’re one of the secrets to fat loss. Anyone who has experienced football practice knew about the secret long ago. Football training is life-altering – weight room and running are detoxifiers, mentally and physically. A cleanse that rids the body and mind of built-up toxins. If you take out the full-equipment full-contact part of football practice, the rest of football training can be done by anyone. There’s nothing like it.
Gino Arcaro has written 12 books. He started his writing career by writing 6 best-selling academic law enforcement textbooks. Then he changed his focus and wrote 6 non-academic books to compete on a new stage. The first book is Soul of a Lifter, available in paperback and e-book. The book is about how lifting is a life-saver – lifting others and lifting weight. Dual-purpose lifting. You can review all Gino’s books them by clicking here.
I was taught the best core-strengthening exercises in 1973 long before the word ‘core’ became fashionable. Nothing compares. Since then, I’ve incorporated the entire program and ideology in my own workouts and every single football practice I’ve ever coached. Nothing builds stronger midsection. Nothing increases athletic performance better. We’ve published the principles and give them out with every X Fitness membership. #HardCore
Contrary to popular belief, the fitness industry did not invent the concept of core strengthening in the 21st century. Humans have been building core strength since the beginning of civilization when humans started carrying around heavy things during primitive times. Now we have researchers actually studying the science of carrying around heavy things. They recently concluded that carrying around heavy things builds core strength. What a revelation. Twenty-first century ‘experts’ believe they have unraveled the mystery of building core strength. Spare me.
Sorry to break the news but manual labourers have been building core strength since cavemen days. Here’s the secret – do manual labour any you’ll build core strength. Push away from Facebook and Twitter and go carry a loaded wheelbarrow. Or just push a lawn mower. Or carry some grocery bags instead of pounding back their contents. Or go shovel a ditch instead of shoveling junk food.
The reason for the postmodern obsession with core-strengthening is the sedentary life that society leads. Our ancestors didn’t need fitness experts or researchers to tell them the obvious – sustained manual labour builds core strength. And it burn tons of calories.
My father worked like a beast of burden in Italy and then when he came to Canada penniless. He worked out like a farm animal, day in and day out. Not in a gym but in the fields, then in a war, then on construction, then in a factory for his entire life. He didn’t spend hours sitting behind a screen reading useless news feeds and meaningless Tweets and playing mind-numbing video games. And he was the strongest man I’ve ever seen. He never did a plank in his life but had old-school functional strength that has become a thing of the past. Now we have a society of people planking hoping to look athletic… like manual labourers.
I have coached football for 40 seasons and I can teach you a core-strengthening program that will change your life. I’ve used core-strengthening exercises myself for 42 years and have taught them to student-athletes who developed into elite athletes from scratch. If you want to build core strength like they, I promise I can bring out your very best.
In the early 1970s, I learned the true secret of core-strengthening at a flour mill. I built a training program around it. I published it in my latest book, Soul of a Lifter. Every member who joins X Fitness gets a copy with every paid membership. If you want to build core strength the old-school way, I’d be glad to teach you and coach you. I guarantee you will transform yourself.
Where would we be without all the postmodern research that tells us what people have known forever? The concept of ‘core’ is not new. Neither is the concept of core-strengthening. The only thing that has changed is the minimal amount of physical work that society exerts on a daily basis.
Gino Arcaro has written 12 books. He started his writing career by writing 6 best-selling academic law enforcement textbooks. Then he changed his focus and wrote 6 non-academic books to compete on a new stage. The first book is Soul of a Lifter, available in paperback and e-book. The book is about how lifting is a life-saver – lifting others and lifting weight. Dual-purpose lifting. You can review all Gino’s books them by clicking here.
Do an honest inventory of your team, your organization, or your business and find out how much waste there really is. Not what you assume there is. Not what you guess there is. Not what you want to believe. Wasted time, wasted talent, wasted potential. How many people are coasting? How many are giving everything they’ve got? And by what definition? How many people are letting it slide? And here’s the big question for you as a leader – how much do you truly let slide?
Step 1 – Examine your own conscience first. Before you evaluate others for their waste, assess who you truly are and what you truly do and what you truly don’t do. Subjective evaluation is the hardest score to keep because we can’t trust the scorekeeper. Here’s a recommended practice that I use for subjective analysis as a football coach:
i. Won-loss record
ii. Team performance stats
iii. Individual performance stats
iv. Did the gap close? How much improvement was there since the beginning of the season?
The best was to subjectively evaluate your leadership is to measure it quantifiably. Change the evidence. Replace qualitative opinion with quantitative. Physical evidence doesn’t lie. People do. A combination of will get the truth but human opinions have to be credible to have any value. Until we become completely honest with our leadership performance, we nee outside evidence – physical evidence and independent eyewitness evidence. We make poor eyewitnesses until we’re trained to tell the truth. That’s why we need other eyewitness statements to corroborate our subjective analysis. But evaluating credibility of independent eyewitness statements isn’t easy. I have a 10-point strategy that works. I’ll explain it in future articles.
Examining your conscience is a powerful self-evaluation strategy if you let your conscience speak freely. You conscience will tell you the truth. It will send you a brutally honest answer in the form of cognitive dissonance. But if you shout it down or disconnect yourself from the messenger or close your heart to the message, the voice of your conscience gets shut down and the message gets lost.
Step 2 – repeat step one with your team as a whole and with it’s individuals. Dishonest evaluations are the number one cause of losing in any field. If you’re afraid to honestly evaluate your team, you will become the leading cause of misleading and for ending up in dead last. Dishonest evaluations work two-way – not telling the full truth about the good and the bad performance. Spiteful little leaders can’t give credit to where credit is due because of fear that someone else will take the spotlight or pass them. That’s one sign of coward leadership. Then there are enablers who don’t tell the truth about half-assed unacceptable performance – the sliders…those who let mediocrity slide. Enabling makes you an accomplice for team waste by willful negligence. Allowing your team to take their salary without earning it.
If have a public sector leadership role, you are responsible to taxpayers to minimize the waste. If you’re in the private sector, you’re responsible to the business owner who took all the risk. No leader is unaccountable. No leader has the right to let it slide. Conversely , no leader has the right to not recognize the waste-managers, those who excel, who earn their money, those who give more than they receive, those who work to full capacity.
Leadership may seem to be a mystery. Leadership may appear to be a complex dynamic. But there’s an essence of simplicity to leadership. Be honest. – continued in part 3 –
Gino Arcaro has written 12 books. He started his writing career by writing 6 best-selling academic law enforcement textbooks. Then he changed his focus and wrote 6 non-academic books to compete on a new stage. The first book is Soul of a Lifter, available in paperback and e-book. The book is about how lifting is a life-saver – lifting others and lifting weight. Dual-purpose lifting. You can review all Gino’ books them by clicking “Books” at the top of the S.O.A.L. blog.
My cure was iron. Lifting weights SAVED MY LIFE. Several times. Here’s how:
- First, lifting weights helped transform my childhood obesity and dysfunctionalism. Lifting weights was part of the fat-fighting trilogy – lifting weight, running, eating right.
- Secondly, lifting weights saved me from a manual labour Darwinism that chewed up over 90% of my peers. It helped me survive my high school job – grueling factory work carrying 140-lb flour bags 8 hours a day, a merciless Darwinian process that cut 9 out of 10 student workers.
- Third, lifting weights saved me from my grade 9 nightmare – not cutting it in high school football. Lifting weights developed from a lost-cause laughing-stock little league football player into a high school 60-minute varsity first-stringer right from the beginning of grade 9, where I started on both the junior varsity and varsity teams.
- Fourth, lifting weight saved me my professional career goal. It helped me get hired a police officer at the age of 18 on my first shot at applying and helped me survive 15 years in front-line policing.
- Fifth, lifting weight save my football coaching career. After my rookie head coaching debacle of a 1-7 season, lifting weights turned my losing team into undefeated 10-0 champions in just one year. And it has been the primary factor in all our championship since then and the next-level recruitment of over 200 players.
- Sixth, lifting weights saved me from workplace hell and the prospect of retirement hell by letting me become a full-time business owner. In 2001, I opened my lifting business - X Fitness Inc., a 24-hour gym in Welland, Ontario. Best professional decision I ever made.
- Seventh, lifting weight has saved me from aging. I’m 54 and have never been out-worked during a work-out. And never will. I’m in better shape at 54 than I was at 24. Lift weights is an anti-aging miracle.
- Eighth, lifting weights has let me be an athlete for life. Lifting weights is a sport. And I don’t have to retire from it. Retired is for the tired. Tired leads to retired – retired leads to tired.
These life-savers set my future goals:
- To never retire
- Never get tired
- Never get out-worked during a work-out.
- Lifting weights has transformed the lives of thousands of student-athletes I’ve coached and college law enforcement students I’ve taught. I have personally witness miraculous turnarounds. Those who have stuck it out in the gym have never failed to change their lives for the better.
- Start lifting, Keep lifting. It can save your life. – continued
Gino Arcaro is a bestselling author who has transitioned from academic law enforcement textbooks to non-fiction motivational book.
His first book is Soul of a Lifter.
The book is a true story about how lifting is life-saving. Lifting lost souls is a two-way life-saver. So is lifting weights. Soul of a Lifter is about connections between lost souls who become souls of lifters. We all have the capacity to be a soul of a lifter, if we’re willing to lift others.
Get your copy of Soul of a Lifter today here.
Good news. Ongoing discussions with CDFL (Collegiate Development Football League) in New York bring the next-level closer to reality for the Niagara X-Men. Ages 18-24, second-chance to get recruited. No games in Canada. And the charity is over. Decades of charity ends. There’s a price to pay to get anywhere in life. If you can’t afford it, sacrifice a few trips down south, sell your cell phone, abstain from alcohol – prioritize. As always, we don’t recruit players with the conventional red-carpet treatment. We love all of you but don’t expect to be treated like royalty.
I’ve been an unpaid volunteer football coach 40 seasons. Then, my businesses (X Fitness Welland Inc. and Jordan Publications Inc.) sponsored the Niagara X-Men, Canada’s only collegiate club football team that plays in the USA versus Division 3 junior varsity teams and community colleges. Our sole mission was to give high school graduates a second chance to get recruited to the next level – stay in school and get a shot at the pros. It worked. Since 2005, 22 players were recruited by the next-level. Colleges, universities, and pro teams. Both sides of the border. But the cost was steep.
Soaring gas prices made a mess of our budget. Equipment and insurance policies cost a fortune. Passport requirements to cross the border added to the cost. We gave players extraordinary opportunities to play, to get evaluated on film, to improve skills, and to reach next-level strength & conditioning. FREE gym membership at the 24-hour X Fitness. FREE strength training from a system I used to train and develop hundreds of players to the next level. Here’s what happened – more and more players become less and less committed. Fail to appear dramatically rose – not showing up for lifting workouts, practices, even games.
I saw another rise – vacations, luxury cars in the parking lot, every electronic toy imaginable, Facebook posts and pictures of drinking and partying. Essentially, we wasted tons of money. I foolishly put my business at risk in a horrible economy while players vacationed in exotic places around the world and partied and drove in style. I became an enabler by rewarding laziness. Spoiled players. I never gave this much charity to my own daughters who had to work for everything they have. They had to earn it.
So the charity stopped. There’s been a seismic shift in commitment and prima donna attitudes. Many factors are to blame. I have several theories — true love of the game is diminishing and too many players are absorbing the adoration and coddling of pro athletes and university players. The recruiting process from high school to university and university to pros has become nauseating. Unrealistic. Where else in the real world do entry-level unproven rookies get courted by adoring recruiters? Where in real life do the untested get red-carpet treatment on national signing days and draft days? I can’t and won’t contribute to this mess.
The football culture loves to announce its “character-building” elements but football has lowered its standards like all other sports by spoiling athletes. Spare me with character-building when recruiters fall all over so-called star players like dating services. I’ve spent a small fortune giving student-athletes opportunities-of-a-lifetime but the return has diminished. Over-the-top investment and low-level return. That’s why the charity ends. We will continue to give players golden opportunities to change their lives. But we won’t pay for it any more.
# earnit #keeplifting
Gino Arcaro has written 12 books. He started his writing career by writing 6 best-selling academic law enforcement textbooks. He then changed his focus and wrote 6 non-academic books to compete on a new stage. The first book is Soul of a Lifter, available in paperback and e-book. You can find previews to all Gino’s books by clicking here.
(excerpt from my next book)
It took me two years to change my childhood obesity. It’s taken another 40 years to keep it off.
I lift or run or both almost every day of my life. On a typical day, I run 45-60 after my lifting workout. On average, I work out at least 26 out of 28 days. Usually more. I rarely take a full day off from any kind of exercise for two reasons: habit and need. This is the only way for me to control fat.
I realized as a child that fat loss doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t happen overnight. And it doesn’t happen with minimum investment. There’s a steep price that has to be paid to get in top shape and an even bigger price to keep it. Fat grows faster than muscle. In my case, my fat cells grow faster than gas prices. My genetics are horrible. There are no athletes in my ancestry. But I refuse to use that as an excuse to give up. I have never given up working out and never will.
My training program is as hardcore as it gets. It’s not easy. There’s nothing comfortable about it. In fact, 98.6% of people who have tried to workout with me have never come back. I never have an never will get “buried” in a workout. Not pound-for-pound and not by pace. Why? Fear. Fear of getting obese again and fear of wasting the only life I will have on this planet. I have all the evidence I need that nothing just happens. It doesn’t happen automatically. And I doesn’t happen overnight. Making it happens takes time.
The unrealistic desire for instant gratification is the top reason for frustration about fat loss. The human body works at a high-investment, low-return yield rate. Without accepting that fact, you will suffer frustration and quit working out. Here’s the secret to fat loss: learn to enjoy the struggle more than the outcome. If you don’t, you will be stuck to the scale and tape measure and the mirror and your measurements will give you a false reading. If you try to quantify progress with numbers, you’re suffering from broken focus. The true measure of progress is the thrill of spilling your guts.
I the two years it took to transform my childhood obesity, I didn’t cheat. I developed a preternatural work ethic in the weight room and on the pavement because my childhood obesity made an enormous negative impact on my life to the point I needed to escape it. That made up my mind. No choice. But I didn’t lose fat overnight. Technically, I didn’t lose fat. My fat cells shrunk. That’s how it works. That the reality of having to fight fat. Fat cells don’t disappear. They shrink. That has made me into a expert fat-fighter. I have fought fat my entire life – fighting the comeback of fat cells.I became fat by the combined effect of several months of inactivity caused by a severely broken leg that immobilized me on my ass with a cast that weighed more than my body weight. After months of sedentary life and eating carb-rich food, my pudginess turned into full-fledged obesity. My social dysfunctionalism worsened. After the cast came off, my leg had atrophied to the size of a stick. I had to learn to walk again. That took months. I got fatter and fatter. It didn’t stop until I got a message – a little league football coach at halftime singled me out as being responsible for losing. Said I was “too fat and chickenshit” to block for the star running back.
Word-of-mouth spreads at the speed of sound. When someone in a position of perceived authority says something and instant childlike credibility is given to what is said and if it’s dramatic enough, word spreads. Suddenly, I was not just the joke of the team but of the neighbourhood, and then the entire school.
Here’s what I believe. Society has a bias against obese people. I’m not just basing this anecdotally on my own personal experience. I’m basing it on mounds of evidence. When I was a cop, the public made fun of overweight cops (“Have another donut, you fat pig!”). Overweight cops made fun of obese cops (“That fat pig can’t even make it up the stairs.”) Coaching football taught me that adolescence is merciless. Fat rookies and fit rookies are treated differently by their peers. Then, college teaching and coordinating college law enforcement program brought fat to the forefront – employment of the fittest. (“What are these fat people doing in your program?”) I could write a book stating all the evidence I’ve gathered. Fat causes bias. Fat is painful.
I found my cure. - to be continued
Gino Arcaro has written 12 books. He started his writing career by writing 6 best-selling academic law enforcement textbooks. Then he changed his focus and wrote 6 non-academic books to compete on a new stage. The first book is Soul of a Lifter, available in paperback and e-book. You can review all Gino’s books them by clicking “Books” at the top of this blog.
Psychology of Leadership – Part 1 (excerpt from my new book to be released in 2012)
Waste.
Waste is the greatest threat to any team, any organization. Everything other threat is secondary. Wasted time, wasted talent, wasted potential. The psychology of leadership starts with waste management.
Leadership theory is stuck deep in an abyss of myths. Leadership has one primary purpose – waste management. Managing waste builds winners. Winning by any definition on whatever field and in whatever has one objective – earn your money. Give everything you’ve got to those who have invested money into what you’re doing. True winning is emptying the tank, spilling your guts. True winning is not cheating your team, your organization, yourself. True winning is a by-product of a team that refuses to cheat.
Here’s a surefire workout guaranteed to work out for game-day or just to test what you’ve got: 84/24 split. Back + Shoulders. Underhand pulldowns + military press – 8 sets increasing weight, 4 decreasing. Total 24 sets. The key is the rep-range. Re-defines the concept of heavy weight. #liftheavy #dontquit
This workout is just one example of how the Explode works, the X Fitness workout system.
Explode is not just s singular workout routine. It’s a limitless workout system. I’ve been working out for 42 years and have coached thousands of student-athletes. The system has been used to develop both men and women from scratch. That’s what makes the Explode system different. It can design workouts for rookie lifters and veteran lifters.
I have anabolic fat cells. They seemingly grow for no reason.
The most important factor in fat loss is most often obscured. We’ve been conditioned to believe that fat loss centers on magic – magic diet, magic pill, magic workout. But the real magic is typically overlooked. The magic of mindset. It’s the top factor in fat loss. I learned as a 12 year-old obese dysfunctional child that fat loss starts at the top – mindset. I was self-taught. No coach, no mentor, no program. I learned it myself. I read voraciously, learned the basics, then put them into action. Contrary to popular myth, knowledge is not power. Applying knowledge is power. Stored information is the fuel. But without starting the motor, fuel just weighs down the tank. If a dysfunctional, obese 12 year-old can do it, so can you. The good news is that I won the battle with fat. The bad news is that the war against fat has never stopped. My fat cells seem to have a mind of their own. I have anabolic fat cells. They seemingly grow for no reason.
