A Birthday Challenge

Okay, so it's the 29th and I've just turned 29. Hehe. Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm throwing down a little birthday challenge to y'all.

Pick any barbell exercise (squat, deadlift, military press, clean, etc.), and perform your age in reps with one-half your bodyweight.

Next, pick a bodyweight exercise (prisoner squat, lunge, push-up, chin-up, etc.) and perform double your age in reps.

Here's the thing though; one of the exercises must target your upper body and the other exercise must target your lower body. So if you choose a barbell exercise that works the back, chest, shoulders, and/or arms, you'll need to choose a bodyweight exercise that hits the legs, and vice versa.

For example, let's say you're a 210-pound 29 year-old who loves the push press and the lunge. You're going to do the push press for 1x29 with 105 pounds and you'll do 1x58 lunges (and yeah, that would be per leg).

If you need to break up the total reps into smaller sets, that's fine, but try to get through it in as few sets as possible.

This is just a quick little conditioning workout to celebrate this machine that your parents decided to create X years and 9 months ago.

Also, happy birthday to my b'day buddies screen legend Richard Dreyfus, adorable Winona Ryder, and under-rated character actor Ben Foster.

Kevin Smith is Tired of Being Fat

Films like Clerks, Clerks II, Dogma, and Mallrats have always been among my favorites, but director Kevin Smith is doing something new to gain my attention. He's trying to drop some fat, prompted by an embarrassing experience breaking a porcelain toilet bowl.




Smith isn't the first Hollywood heavyweight director to get fit. Iron Man's Jon Favreau has had his ups and downs over the years, and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson made a noticeable change after dropping a bunch of weight during the filming of King Kong.






Smith has said that he's at an all-time personal high bodyweight, and will begin a diet and exercise plan once the promotion is finished for his recent film. In the past he's tried the Optifast diet, a 12-week all-liquid diet, with minimal success.

If he's even considering an attempt at that type of diet again, he'd be much better off following the Velocity Diet, which actually preserves lean muscle, which further increases the metabolism. I know he has a decent home gym, too, so the workouts better be kickass.


And yeah, I kinda compared Kevin Smith to Peter Jackson. Sorry, sir.


Rated R for language.

The Passing of Ben Weider

Sadly, one of the pioneers of modern bodybuilding passed away over the weekend. Ben Weider spent decades of his life devoted to bringing the sport of bodybuilding into the public eye.

Regardless of your opinions on professional bodybuilding or mainstream bodybuilding magazines, Ben, and his brother Joe, helped to lay the foundation for everything from sports supplements and commercial gyms to fitness magazines.

For better or worse, the Weider brothers will stand alongside Jack LaLanne, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Eugene Sandow as some of the most influential and wide-reaching figures in the fitness industry.


Ben Weider, at left, was a supporter and organizer of professional bodybuilding for over 60 years.


If you're at all interested in building muscle, the odds are good that you can trace your inspiration straight back to the Weiders, either directly or indirectly.

My thoughts are with the Weider family.

What Do Women Want?

My good buddy Nate Green took an impromptu survey of several women, to get their thoughts on how a guy should be built. What they said might surprise some of you.

An Ounce of Prevention (or Actually, 5 Grams)

A recent article in Newsday talked about some research into foods that may help to prevent certain types of cancer, including breast cancer.

However, there was one section of the article that I found incredibly disheartening.

...research into foods that combat breast cancer faces a powerful institutional barrier: money. Consumer advocates point out that conducting studies that follow people for years to see they don't get sick as they eat certain foods is expensive. By comparison, drug approval is more efficient.

"The world is still not ready for prevention as a way to handle the medical problems of an aging population," said Dr. Paul Talalay of Johns Hopkins University, the leader on research that suggests the cancer-thwarting potential of broccoli.

Actually preventing the disease (or any major health issue) isn't profitable enough, when compared to pushing another pharmaceutical drug. That's sad beyond words.

Whether we're talking about cancer, obesity, or a sprained ankle, prevention is going to be more effective at addressing the issue at hand, as well as provide more all-around lifestyle benefits, than simply treating the symptoms after the issue has risen.

The article primarily talked about the research showing the benefits of broccoli, but it also mentioned the potential anti-cancer properties of strawberries, pomegranates, and green tea, among others.

If you're like the majority of people who doesn't regularly eat many fruits and/or vegetable, you might want to consider taking about a teaspoon of Biotest's Superfood everyday. (One teaspoon is about 5 grams. See where I was going with this blog's title?)

It's a super-concentrated powder which contains broccoli, strawberry, pomegranate, green tea, spinach, blueberry, watermelon, and about a dozen other food concentrates that have been shown to have powerful antioxidant effects.



If, for some reason, you're not into stirring up a super juice drink, you've got to at least take a look at the recipe in this article for blueberry cheesecake which uses Superfood. Looks like a pie, tastes like a pie, but it's low on calories and overflowing with fruits and veggies.