How To Surpass Your Performance Goals

When you're training in the gym, working out, outside, doing a yoga class, whatever your form of exercise is, your brain is just as important as your muscles. But sadly, a lot of people neglect actually training their brain, training their nervous system when they're working out. And so they wind up having deficiencies in the way that their body moves or the way that their brain communicates with their body. For example, if you look at strength training, it's very easy to go into the gym to lift heavy stuff like doing dumbbell curls or bench presses or squats or deadlifts, and then walk out satisfied with the fact that you've worked your body and you've built a little bit of muscle, but you haven't worked things that have actually been shown to be just as crucial, if not more crucial, for elements like performance or longevity in terms of actually coordinating your mind and your body to work as one cohesive unit when you're training. One perfect example of this is speed. Many, many people never work speed when they work out. Speed in a very straightforward way is simply how fast you can accelerate a joint through space. It's somewhat similar to another concept that's almost equally as important, power, how quickly you can generate a force over a period of time. But speed, the ability to simply move quickly, is something that we often don't do enough of when we're working out. But it's incredibly crucial for things like performance, for strength, for longevity, and for many of these things that turn you into a complete human when you train. So when it comes to speed and building speed, I've got a few tips for you. I at one point did a podcast interview with a guy named Nick Kherson, who runs a website called Speed of Sport and works with some of the top athletes on the face of the planet. And one of the things that he does with those athletes, from MMA fighters to professional football players, is instead of having them hoist heavy amounts of weight around the gym, he simply has them move light weights very quickly, light weights as quickly as possible. What this means, for example, is that if you go to the gym and you normally do, let's say, 10 pushups, you would actually, instead of doing 10 push ups, push up from the push up position so quickly that your hands leave the ground. And maybe if you're a real rock star, you throw in a clap in between. Or for example, if you do a set of pull ups, rather than simply pulling yourself up very slow and down very slow, which is good for things like strength and muscle mass, you instead jump pull yourself up as quickly as possible, lower yourself and then pull as quickly as possible, again moving the muscles so quickly that it almost makes your brain hurt. Another example of this from a cardio standpoint would be riding a bicycle. If you've ever tried to ride a bicycle at a very, very quick cadence or run at a very, very quick cadence, you'll notice it takes more focus, it takes more mindfulness, and that's because you're training your nervous system to fire more repeatedly. You're training speed when you say run at 90 rpm or cycle at 120 rpm. So the first thing that you can do to train speed is to take a workout that you normally do and figure out a way to do it much more quickly. The second thing that you can do is you can introduce food based compounds into your body that actually optimize nervous system function for speed. Two of the most important ones are DHA and also an entire vitamin B complex that's vitamin B like boy. But one of the best sources of getting the dha, which would be something like wild caught fish in the form of sardines or mackerel or herring or salmon, or any of those type of fish based compounds that are high in DHA or also algae based derivatives like chlorella or spirulina. From a vitamin B standpoint, a good plant based source of vitamin D are simply dark leafy greens like kale, bok choy, Swiss chard. Including those as staples in your diet is very good for the nervous system. And believe it or not, one of the top sources of vitamin D or vitamin B is organ meats. So you're looking at something like liver. And yeah, I actually eat liver on a weekly basis. I get some good liver and I dredge in a little bit of egg and coconut flour and fry it up with some onions and some bacon and you can actually make it taste pretty dang good if you know what you're doing. So the idea here is that there are also supplements that you can introduce into your body as well. One of the best ones for speed is what's called egcg, which is a component of green tea. Simply drinking green tea prior to a power or speed based workout or using some kind of a supplement that has green tea extract in it, is a perfect complement to the type of DHA and the type of vitamin Bs that you're going to get from food. And you put all this together simply as simple as getting vitamin B and DHA moving very quickly in the gym and then using something like a green tea extract, and you'll find you can move faster and build speed and power more quickly. So after watching this video, what I want you to do is try one thing. The next time that you go to the gym or you do your exercise session, not only do I want you to try to move whatever you're moving or do the exercise that you're doing far more quickly and explosively, but if you're running or you're able to hunt down a bicycle, what I want you to do is see if you can run at a cadence of at least 90 steps per minute or bicycle and at a cadence of 120 plus RPM. And you can just do very short bouts of 20 to 60 seconds just to see what it feels like to increase the cadence and to train speed and to pay attention to that component of the nervous system that a lot of people actually neglect when they train.