Increase Your Awesomeness

Yes, you know how awesome you are.  Now we are going to take that awesomeness to a whole new level.  Our philosophy resides within a revolving cycle of fitness and performance  which is proper exercise, proper nutrition, and proper recovery.  While one may, and sometimes will, make advances and progress with a consistency of two of those three, peak potential can only be reached with all three areas being programmed correctly.  It's like trying to race a high performance race car with only 3 wheels.  

Why even enter the race?  With your health, why would you do any less than what is best for your body and mind?  The answers are time, motivation, dedications, discipline, and lack of knowledge.  Let's take that last excuse out of play.  Listen real close, you will not want to miss hearing these knowledge bombs.
The number one way that you are going to start increasing your awesomeness is planning your recovery.  Everyone has a training program, and some of you will have multiple programs.  Many people will follow a certain diet or nutritional program.  You will even see a statement on most supplements, "when combined with exercise and diet."  How many of you, or people you know, will actually program their recovery? I bet less than 1% of the training(very loosely used term there) population.  That is why the lack of recovery programming is the missing "fourth wheel".  Does that mean that you should sleep a lot and stay out of the "gym"?  Absolutely not.  There are many modes of recovery. Here is a list of a few:

Cryotherapy
Ice Baths
Contrast Showers
Hot Tub/Epsom Salt Bath
Dry Sauna/Steamroom
Massage Therapy

The list above requires little to no effort on your part, and each of them has a unique way to expedite the body's natural healing processes.  Below are a couple of active recovery techniques that will also help improve your performance:

Sled Pushes

Sled Drags/Sled Pulls
Mobility Drills

Foam Rolling
Stretching/Yoga
Pilates/Ki-Hara Resistance Stretching

By implementing sound recovery techniques over the past couple years, I have personally reaped the benefits of increasing my totals over 250 pounds.  My training programs have always been solid.  My nutrition is solid most of the time.  The missing link to increasing my own awesomeness was to make sure that my recovery was programmed.

Here is a sample week:

Sunday-Upper Body training session, Lower body mobility work
Monday-Lower Body training Session followed by a contrast shower
Tuesday-Sled Drags and Foam Rolling
Wednesday-Cryotherapy before an upper body training session
Thursday-Ice Bath in the morning.  Sprints at Lunch
Friday-Lower Body followed by some Yoga
Saturday-Complete Rest, Foam rolling and stretching

I guarantee that, if you choose at least one of these modalities from each list per week, your performance levels and desired results will increase, as will your awesomeness.  All you have to do is program it.  Remember that the revolving cycle of fitness and performance is a proper training program, proper nutritional program, AND and proper recovery program.

-Breaking Records Daily