Moved on!

Hello,
LifestyleApex has moved!! To visit the active & improved blog, click here! 

How To Deal With Failure: A Guide

Every one fails and makes mistakes once in a while. I can attest to this, as I’ve failed many times at various things. My grades aren’t always the best; I lost my first kickboxing fight. It’s human nature to make mistakes. (pic:http://www.bitsofwisdom.org/2012/11/15/failure-6/)

But as a society we’re on two ends of the extreme. On the one end is school. If you make mistakes on tests, you’re immediately labeled as a failure. Not only is this wrong, it also negatively influences the mindset of students.  

On the other end is the modern day wannabe philosopher. He or she says that failure is very important and nothing to be worried about. The problem with this school of thought is that people don’t try and fix their mistakes. “Every one is perfect” is a statement that stunts personal growth in people who misunderstand its meaning. The desire for self-improvement is weakened and people start viewing mistakes as good. Therefor, they don’t set precautions in place to avoid failure. Ideally, you should always have a back up for whatever you’re doing.

Backing up the data on your computer, having some extra food at home, having a back up cell phone etc. these are examples for simple precautions that you can take in order to avoid mistakes.

While mistakes are crucial for learning and development, they don’t have to be yours. As humans we poses the skill to learn from others. Why make a certain mistake if you could just read a book and simulate the failure so that you don’t have to live with the consequences in real life? That’s partly why I launched my book club, so that my readers can learn from others without having to go through the same hardship and struggle.

But as I mentioned earlier, failure is something we must all go through. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful is not the rate of failure; it’s the way in which they come back from it.

Successful people learn from their mistakes and adapt. Also, they use it as an opportunity to harden their mental stability and outlook on life. Unsuccessful people make the same mistakes over and over again and let the failure shatter their self-confidence.

You must also be able to quit at the right time. In the words of Tai Lopez, “A failure is an experiment done too long.” Know when the life experiment you’ve been running isn’t working out for you. Have the courage to quit wisely.

Failure is a double-edged sword. To make failure an asset, you must learn from your mistakes as well as that of others. Know when to quit and never make the same mistake again.

If you don’t do this, failure will turn into a ubiquitous theme in your life and it will drag you down.

At LifestyleApex, we are thankful for each and every comment. Please spend a few seconds of your time and leave us a comment in the section below. Thanks!

If you’re enjoying LifestyleApex, sign up above and become a VIP! You’ll be notified whenever a new blog post is out, receive exclusive content and be able to have your book of choice summarized at my book club!

My Morning SuperTea

Some of my readers have asked me if I could post more recipes on my blog. Instead of sharing another meal recipe, I thought I’d share my “SuperTea” recipe with you. Basically, I took green tea and added a few extra goodies to it. Before I get into the recipe, here are a few benefits one can reap when drinking this concoction:

·      Reduced inflammation

·      Increased fat loss

·      Enhanced brain function

·      Anti-aging

·      Improved resilience against disease

What’s in the magic tea you ask? Only three ingredients: green tea (preferably matcha), turmeric and ginger. I consider each one of these a super food, as they bring incredible health and enhanced performance benefits with them.

Green Tea is an amazing beverage, as it helps with fat loss, increases brain function and combats cancer. Thus, if you’re going to make a super tea, green tea is an obvious choice for the base.

Turmeric is a spice I’ve recently started using. Just like green tea, turmeric has numerous health benefits, such as decreasing inflammation, healing wounds, increasing fat loss and boosting brain function. Being a micronutrient dense spice, I thought it would make a great addition to my morning tea. However, I didn’t imagine turmeric going well with tea at all. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Adding half a teaspoon of turmeric to green tea makes for a tasty early morning brew. Convincing in health benefits and taste, turmeric passed the test and was added to me SuperTea.

Ginger is a food I’ve been using for a long time. It’s a tasty addition to green smoothies, hot water and even salmon. Ginger tea itself is great, so why not add it to my green tea and turmeric potion? After all, ginger is a potent anti-inflammatory agent, an immune booster and a digestive aid, just to name a fraction of its benefits.

These three ingredients work extremely well together, as they make you more resilient and improve your body composition as well as your brains performance. SuperTea’s recipe is constantly evolving, so stay tuned for an ingredient update.

SuperTea Recipe:

·      Green tea (1/2 teaspoon of matcha or 2 tea bags of regular green tea)

·      Turmeric (1/2 teaspoon)

·      Ginger (1 thumb sized chunk)

Lifestyle Apex is thankful for each and every comment. Please spend a minute of your time giving us feedback in the comments section bellow.

Our Mission In Life: Adding Value.

Hi guys, I just wanted to write a quick blog post. I’ve been thinking about what I want to accomplish in my life. Upon doing so I’ve identified two types of people in the world: “givers” and “takers”.

As the name suggests, “givers” are people who give something to this world, they add value. Researchers are “givers”, as they add knowledge to the existing knowledge we posses. Police officers (good ones) are “givers”, since they look to secure our safety and protect our well-being.

“Takers”, are people who take away from this world. They destroy (good) things that other people have built up over time. A more common version of takers are people who add nothing of value to this world and otherwise drain resources. On the one side of the bar you have mild “takers”. Most of us fall into this category. We “add” our fair share of CO2, consume food etc. As you can see, these things are nothing to be ashamed of (although lowering ones CO2 emission is in fact important) as they’re inevitably going to happen if you lead a normal life.

On the other side of the bar are the extreme takers. They are the worst sort of people, as they destroy what good people have done and deliberately seek to take away from mankind. Terrorists would fall into this category.

Your average taker however, will be a person who does a meaningless job, is unfriendly to the people around him and does nothing to protect the environment. By meaningless job I’m referring to a job that is either only there to put money in ones pocket, or a job that is counterproductive to the development of our society.

The message I want to convey is this: be a giver. Add value to the world. The only reason why we have reached this stage in evolution is because there are givers who discover and build new things, which they then share with the rest of mankind. Back in the day givers were hunters who discovered new techniques, which they then shared with the rest of their tribe. Nowadays, givers can be innovators like Elon Musk.

But you don’t need to be the next serial entrepreneur and philanthropist to add something to this world. Merely being friendly is a simple way to give back something positive to the people around you.
Getting back to the thought that lead me here, what do I want to accomplish in life? I haven’t got an exact answer for that yet (I have a few business ideas), but whatever I do, I want to be a giver. I recommend that you do the same.

Why You Don’t Have To Work Out Daily

 For a long period of time I started my day off 1 hour earlier than I needed too.

My alarm would go off at 6am with the notification “Get up and train!”. Slowly, I would roll out of bed and proceed to put my sport gear on for my morning run. Most of the time it was still dark outside.

Feeling like a character out of The Walking Dead, I would make my way to the front door, put my headphone buds in my ear and turn Till I Collapse from Eminem on. 

The first few meters of the run were always the worst, as my legs were stiff and I had to get used to the ice-cold air blowing against my face. Looking back at those days, I don’t know why I did the daily running. Was it for the cardio, the fat loss or just general health? All I know is that it was a pain in the ass. Only now do I realize however, that it wasn’t worth it as far as health and longevity are concerned. 

Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean you should move less, quite the opposite actually. You should be moving more, and running can definitely be a great addition to your health and longevity protocol.

All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t over do it! Many people will sacrifice sleep and time spent with their families just to get another workout in.

There is a time and place for workouts, but they shouldn’t interfere with other important activities that are equally essential for your health (sleep, social interactions with friends and family). Just make sure you’re leading a balanced lifestyle.

Many people would benefit a lot from skipping a night out with their friends and instead doing a workout in the gym. Others however, spend enough (maybe even too much) time training, and would benefit by letting loose and going out every once in a while. The key is to lead a balanced life, as this is the healthiest for you and the people around you.

On top of leading a balanced life, you should tailor your training towards your goals. When I was doing my morning runs, my goal was in fact gaining muscle. To accommodate that goal I would have been better of sprinting 1-2 per week. Not only would this have been more effective at helping me reach my goal, it would’ve given me more time to sleep or work!

Tailor Your Training Towards Your Goals.

The intensity and frequency of your training solely depends on your goals and what your body is capable of. For some reason, workout regimens for the average Joe have turned into a monumental schedule similar to that of a professional athlete.

However, that in itself isn’t the problem. Depending on what your goals are, you might have to train twice a day, five days a week. When I was getting ready for my amateur kickboxing fight, I was training hard throughout the entire week, taking one to two days off.

At the moment I’m only training a couple of days per week, as I’m doing a lot more “academically-based” work. It always depends on your goals.

Most people want to maintain a healthy body fat percentage, be decently fit and have a reasonable amount of muscle mass. To achieve this, you won’t have to kill yourself in the gym 7 days a week. Instead of harder training, you should focus on working out smarter.

Circuit training, sprinting and heavy compound lifts are just a few ways to get in great workouts. Trust me, if you implement these training methods in your regimen, you physically won’t be able to workout more than of 4 days a week. But more on exercise later.

Overtraining.    Recovery is underestimated. As far as exercise goes, the world we live in is rather black and white. Either you’re not exercising (enough), or you’re overdoing it. There are few in between who are doing it just right.

The best workout regimen will vary greatly depending on what your goals are. Full time athletes will do different training, at different intensities and in different amounts compared to an entrepreneur who’s goal is to maintain his or her health. Thus, it is crucial that you clearly define what you want to achieve with your physical exercise and build on that.

An athlete’s body will be more capable of enduring all the training, as their body has gotten used to it and they have more time to recover. If you haven’t done exercise since high school, it would be a good idea to start slowly. Otherwise, the chances of getting injured are significantly higher.

How To Tell If You’re Overtraining.

Fortunately, there are various ways to tell if you’re over trained. Common symptoms include chronic fatigue, poor sleep quality, chronically elevated heart rate and loss in appetite. For me, monitoring my heart rate variability and analysing my sleep have been the most reliable ways of gauging my body’s physical state.

1. Heart rate variability app.   Heart rate variability refers to the time change between each individual heartbeat. A high heart rate variability (HRV) means that your body is reacting optimally to micro changes in your environment. This “primed” state is where you want your body to be in (unless you’re an athlete 2-3 weeks before competition, however that’s a topic for another day). A low HRV occurs when your body is stressed and doesn’t react optimally to minor changes in your environment.

Thus, monitoring your HRV will help you know if you’re stressed (physically and mentally) or not.

You can monitor your HRV with different devices, but I use the app “HRV4Training”, which gives me reliable information on how intense I should train that day. Using your smartphones camera lens, the app can detect your HRV when you place your finger on it for a minimum of 1 minute.

It’s best to measure your HRV daily and at the same time (preferably in the morning).  Over time, you’ll see what your average HRV is. If your HRV is getting lower, that might be a sign for you to take a day off or train at a lower intensity.

2. Sleep monitor app.  The other self-tracking device I use to gauge my physical state is the “Sleep Cycle” app. I’ve mentioned this phenomenal app in various blog posts, as I couldn’t live without it. It may well be the number one self-tracking app on the market. For only $3, the app analyses your sleep and wakes you up in your lightest sleep phase in a set time frame (e.g. between 6:00-6:30 am). Furthermore, Sleep Cycle shows you a graph from your night of sleep as well as the percentage of quality of that night.

If you monitor your sleep quality over a longer period of time, it will be easier to detect patterns of poor sleep. Using the apps “sleep note” function, you can readily detect the things you do and eat throughout the day that have the largest impact on your sleep quality. If you increase your training intensity and/ or volume and experience a chronic decrease in sleep quality, you may want to think twice about your new training regimen.

Your New Training Schedule.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not telling you to just exercise less and move as you did before. Movement is paramount to health, longevity, success and overall happiness.

The main problem I see nowadays is that people work at a desk all day and then hit the gym and lift weights. No stretching, no walking, no bodyweight exercises, no foam rolling and no warm up. This lifestyle in which you are sedentary for the majority of your day and then push your body really hard is a recipe for injury and impaired health.

Research has shown that 1-2 hours of physical exercise per day will not undo the damage done by sitting! Fortunately, the issue of sitting too much can be side stepped by setting a few precautions in place.

1.     Set up a standing desk or treadmill desk at home or at your office. This will allow you to spend a lot more time on your feet.

2.     Research has shown that 52 minutes of work followed by 17 minutes of break is the best work schedule. Whether this is your schedule or not, take breaks every 30-60 minutes and wind down. Walk, do bodyweight exercises or stretch.

3.     Do low intensity and low impact movement daily. Go for walks, ride your bike and get out in nature. If you feel like this is time wasted (which it isn’t), listen to informative podcasts and audio books or spend time just thinking.

4.     Install a gym in your office at work or at home. This allows you to spend time otherwise wasted working out. Do a few kettlebell swings, pull-ups, bodyweight squats, curls etc. in your breaks and get your blood circulation going. I’m overcoming my biggest weakness, pull-ups, by doing a couple every time I walk past my pull up bar situated at home.

5.     Spend 5-10 minutes every other day doing self-myofascial release. This is best done by foam rolling as well as tennis- and golf- ball massaging. Increased flexibility and diminished chronic physical pain are just a few benefits of regular self-myofascial release (SMR). The following YouTube links lead to videos showing you how to do SMR properly and specifically to fight the affects of sitting as well as pain reduction techniques.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7sBMicSn14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSSDLDhbacc

6.     Workout 2-4 days a week. As mentioned earlier, these training sessions should be a mixture of heavy lifting (e.g. deadlifts, squats and rows), circuit training (e.g. rounds of push ups, kettlebell swings, jump squats…) and sprinting. Additionally, I’d recommend you do physical activities you actually enjoy doing. For me this would be martial arts training and light running. Other people enjoy cycling or playing basketball. The point is that you find an activity you enjoy doing to let off some steam. If you haven’t got a sport you like doing, try a martial arts training session. It’s fun, tiring and you’ll learn how to defend yourself.

The 6 principles I outlined above are something I really want you to experiment with. It’s a healthier way to exercise and I find it to better suit most peoples daily schedule.

So give it a shot and report back your experiences in the comments section, I appreciate your feedback!

(picture above: http://www.acefitness.org/acefit/healthy-living-article/60/493/what-does-overtraining-mean/)