What’s up People!!

Have any of you ever been deep within a dream and all of a sudden come to the realization that your dreaming, then the shock of that realization wakes you up. I had a dream like that and when I woke up I wondered if it was possible to take control in your dreams. I mean they are our dreams why wouldn’t we be able to control them. when we are within our dream and we know that we are dreaming it is called becoming lucid.

Lucid dreams are a gateway to a new universe. The possibilities that lucid dreams give us are limitless. One website I recommend is dreamviews.com this is basically the mother of all lucid dreaming guides. There are ways to train ourselves so that we can achieve lucidity. It all starts with a dream journal. While we sleep we actually have about two or three dreams, you might say that you didn’t dream at all last night, and what actually is going on is that you simply do not remember your dreams. Our dream memory is very short, so short that once we wake up we forget what we were dreaming about. In order to be aware that we are dreaming so that we can become lucid one must first remember their dreams. The dream journal is a regular journal kept close to you while you sleep once you have dream hold still and try your best to remember the dream(when you move around your dream memory begins to fade quicker) then in a few words write what your dream was about, you will notice that as you write certain things more and more memories about the dream will be stirred.

Once you become proficient at remembering three dreams a night you can move on to the next steps. You need to know what are dream signs. A dream sign will let you know that you are dreaming and then once you become familiar with your dream signs you can learn to become lucid at will.

There are also certain ways to force yourself to become lucid. Preforming a WILD or wake induced lucid dream, is a whole game in itself. When you WILD you may go through hallucinations and some of them can be quite scary or alarming. But if you learn to wild then you can basically force yourself to be lucid whenever you want.

In order to preform a wild you need to figure out when you are in one of your deep REM sleep cycles. The stages in REM can be found on dreamviews.com as well as a much more detailed explanation on lucid dreaming and different techniques used  to reach lucidity. So the timing in this explanation may very from person to person. Sleep and set an alarm that is about 6 hours into your sleep it is important that the alarm can auto snooze or turn itself off quickly. when you hear the alarm try not to get to excited or you will not be able to go back to sleep. Concentrate on being relaxed and think of things in order to keep your mind awake, this is when you trick your body to fall asleep before your mind. This way you are conscious as soon as the dream starts. The body will start to check if you are asleep but feeling extremely uncomfortable and heavy. If you can remain still you will begin to hallucinate and hear or see things, this experience varies greatly and is dependent of what you expect it to be. Without getting to excited that you wake or so calm that you sleep, once the hallucinations stop you should be in the dream, preform a dream check, if it checks out you are dreaming !!

This is not meant as a lucid dreaming guide!! So if you are interested please check out dreamviews.com

Have a Great Day !!

Hello World!!

I was talking to one of my buddies the other day and he was asking me how he could improve his arms. we got into along talk about the various things that you can do to get you those eye popping guns. One thing some people do not realize is that about two thirds of your arm is the triceps. The trick to getting nice arms is to workout each muscle on your arm.

Everyone knows about the bicep, when people think about big arms the picture the biceps. This happened to be my favorite muscle to workout when I first started training. There were so many different types of curls, standard, hammer, crouching, static, etc. You could spend days looking at all the information out there about biceps. I am going to try and narrow down what I think is effective to getting the bicep developed. One of the biggest mistakes I have seen when it comes to curling is form. It is important to make sure you get the form down for every single workout. When curling place one foot in front of the other in order to protect your lower back. For a standard curl both arms are extended down with weights in each hand palms facing outward, when you curl up make sure that you keep your chest up and avoid swing your back. keep your elbows in place and avoid swinging them forward. On the concentric motion(curling up) breath out, and for the eccentric(returning to first position) breath out. Breathing helps get oxygen to the muscle and gives you that extra power when your reaching your limit. Getting into good habits early is essential because once you get into a bad habit in weight lifting it is very difficult to fix. If you are looking for size pick a weight that you can do 8-10 reps and if you are looking  for definition pick a weight that you can handle 12-15 reps. When choosing a weight make sure that it gives you a real good burn for the last three reps, it should feel like your arm is burning the last three. A lot of people make the mistake of choosing a weight that is too much for them and they end up using their back to do most of the work. If you are trying to squeeze one last rep and your back sways slightly its no big deal but if possible let the biceps do the work and not the back. Some recommended workouts are :

• Static arm curls
• Standard bicep curls
• hammer curls
• strip set curls
• Twenty ones

Another muscle to pay attention to so that you can rock the tank is the triceps. The triceps are about two thirds of your arm. This is the muscle that is in charge of filling up your sleeves. The trick to big full arms is the triceps. The triceps are not all show they aid you in various other exercises. One reason people cannot fully workout their chest is due to their triceps giving out or fatiguing before their chest really starts to work. Also working out all parts of the arm promotes better strength and leads to faster gains. The triceps can worked out with various workouts. One of the best triceps isolation workouts is the dip. The good old fashioned dip can work wonders for your triceps. This move utilizes a chair or possibly two depending on your fitness level. In a dip you put your hands on the edge of a chair and stick your legs out, make sure that your back is close to the chair but not touching. Once in this position bend your arms until they are at 90 degrees then straighten both arms and repeat till failure. Some fun tricep exercises I recommend:

• Dips
• Skull crushers
• over head tricep extension
• tricep kickbacks

One thing to note about form. when you engage the muscle do a three count when both contracting and releasing. The contraction(concentric) will give you strength, the releasing(eccentric) gives you size. One thing I have noticed is people let gravity due the work and they let the weight just fall, doing a three count helps you maximize your results.

Hopefully that helps you in taking your arm workouts to the next level!! Happy lifting!! 🙂

Hello again!

My first time doing P90x was exciting. I didn’t know what to expect I was left wondering what type of exercises we would be doing. Would they be similar to my original routine? Would I even feel a workout out, I felt that an hour was a real short amount of time to train. My original workout out was about three hours and 30min.

The first video we did was chest and back. It was amazing completely blew me away. I had no idea what a real workout was until I did P90X. The program takes care of everything! It makes sure to target all the muscles in your body, provides a variety of movements so that you can avoid hitting a plateau. Everything was taken care of, it is the easiest way to get your perfect body all the complicated stuff on how the body works are put in the video. All you have to do is hit play everyday and give it your 100% and presto your best you is waiting for you in 90 days. I really can not stress enough how utterly beautiful this program is. It will take you to the next level and help you avoid hours of research on which moves might be effective and what moves target which body  parts. It has rep counts, sets, form, and even nutrition. If you have never picked up a weight or step foot in a gym then it is difficult to know where to start. P90X takes all the information out there and puts it into a fitness program designed to help you become your best you. As you can tell I like P90X 🙂

I have basically stuck with the P90X workout out for a while and decided to add a weight vest to the routine. Working out is a part of my life and I will never stop improving. It is just too much fun, so people may say otherwise but, the trick is to make it fun and do stuff that you like to do. Not in love with weights, then go out and hike. If you make it fun for yourself I guarantee that you’ll love fitness as much as I do. The hardest part of workouts are the first few weeks, after that it becomes addicting and you will find yourself anxiously waiting for the next time you get to train. The first few weeks are when your body gets sore and you don’t feel like getting out of bed because every inch of your body is in pain. This feeling will only get better once you continue to workout. I always felt stiff before a workout when first starting out and the soreness was really bothersome but, once you get out there and warm your body up the soreness actually goes away and decreases post workout. If you can make it through the three week hump you are as good as gold.

Exercise is only half the battle! When starting to workout you might feel sluggish, weak, and overall pretty bad. This can be caused by a lack of a nutritional diet. To be honest I feel like the diet is the hardest part of fitness. Once you get into the groove of things your body will start asking you for better foods, those greasy, nasty, unappealing fast food places are not going to cut it. Your body will reject these foods and ask for cleaner nutritious foods. I am all about sweet delicious home cooked foods, this way you take control of quality and quantity. When your body is properly fueled you will be able to really give it your all every day.

I touched on a few thing about work outs and nutrition. There is a lot more I would like to say but I would like to keep all this information general and go into specifics on different posts.

Hopefully you feel inspired to try and get that new you! If your looking for help or just want to talk about fitness leave a comment and I’ll get back to you asap.

Have a good one!!

Hey Everybody!!

One of my all time favorite things to do is to exercise. There is nothing better than pouring sweat, feeling your blood pump through your veins, and feeling like your body is bursting with beautiful energy. I have always been fascinated with how the body can adapt to the level of stress you put it through. No matter how tough the challenge your body is more than capable of pulling through.

My first experience with traditional weight lifting was back in High School. It was the first day of high school and my first class happened to be P.E. I was about to get put in your normal physical education class, the routine sports, mile runs(which no one enjoyed), push ups, and sit up. Before we got comfortable with who are teachers were they gave everyone an opportunity to switch into a weight training class. I thought it sounded like fun and it gave me and my buddies a chance to get placed into the same class. That class was basically a benching class and every now and then we would squat. We worked in groups and would do circuit training, going from one station to the next after a certain time limit. That is where I got my first taste, it was tough but being with friends for inspiration and motivation pushed me to keep trying to improve. when I first benched I could barely due the bar which is 45lbs.

As time moved on I started to pick up on little tips and tricks given to me by teachers and any information I could scrape up on the web. It was love at first sight, the feel of your own hard work, your body getting stronger, and visually you look better. The first couple of years were anything but consistent, no one in my family had any experience with weight training so I had to figure out everything on my own. I learned the importance of proper form through multiple muscle strains and sprains. Sometimes it would be a few days of recovery and other times it would be months. I started to get a sense of how the body worked, I knew I wanted big biceps and a big chest but, what I didn’t know is that training all the other muscles in the body were just as important.

I started building my own workout plan based on which body parts I wanted to work on. I made the same mistake as most guys do and worked purely on the upper body. Working on legs was just a pain and I was not as fascinated with the legs as I was with arms. when people as you to flex you usually pop out the bicep not your calf muscle.

I felt like the king of the world after getting my workout together and seeing nice results. During high school I would get tons of complements from my buddies on how my body was changing and it felt amazing. There was no better feeling then having people appreciate your hard work. I mean I worked my tail off to improve myself so it was nice to know that all my hard work was not in vain.

One of my close buddies that joined me on my workouts kept on telling me to try a new workout he got called insanity. I felt like my workout was the workout and so I kept telling him I would think about it but I didn’t want to change my routine. After while I gave in and we decided to give it a try. This was a rude awakening, after all that time hitting the weights hard, I felt like I had never exercised in my life.  I would stay away from cardio so insanity was something else. It was the king of cardio and it pushed me to beyond my limits. Eventually I finished the challenge and it was great I was in the best shape of my life and very lean due to the intense cardio. My buddy then decided to get P90x and since insanity was so much fun and took working out to a new level I decided to give it a try.

To be continued….

Hello everyone!! Glad to see that you are visiting my Blog!!

   Now a little bit about myself. I’m 19 years old and currently attending Los Angeles Valley College. I studying hard so i can get my Bachelors in Economics. I figure that an econ major would be helpful to any business out there plus I can’t think of anything cooler than Supply and Demand :).

   I’m your average teen, not really the working type, if I could I would spend my entire life looking up at the sky, letting my imagination run wild. I don’t like the idea of getting a job or working. I have been employed at two different jobs and while the money is ok, so far it is just not my thing. Also I don’t get some people, most people have worked in their life and it is safe to say that we have all had to deal with customers that seem like their sole purpose in life is to ruin your day. I hate dealing with them so every place I go to I try to make it as pleasant as possible. No one likes to be hassled so why take your steam off on some innocent employee. We could make life so much more pleasant for everyone if we just started acting nicer to one another, then maybe working would be such a drag :P. Now I am just focusing on school. The way I see it is that I have the rest of my life to make money and work, so while I still have the option to not work, I might as well enjoy it.

   Right now life is pretty good, I don’t have a care in the world and I am loving every bit of it. One of my all time favorite things to do is working out. I live for the pump and try to become as fit as I can possibly be. For me the workout is not just a place to burn calories but instead it acts like a place where I can tune out all the “noise” in the world and focus on exercise. It’s more therapeutic than anything else. Nothing lets out the stress like lifting weights. I have done the Insanity workout and the P90x workout, both are amazing by the way and if you are deciding whether you should try them or not I recommend them both.

   I am currently doing a modified version of P90x and have been getting amazing results, I use to have my own routine that I would always do and I felt like I was as fit as can be, boy was I wrong. Doing insanity and P90x was a huge wake up call, it showed me my true colors and introduced me to a real workout. If your on the fence about which one to try, I would say if you’re looking to bulk up P90x is the way to go, but if you’re looking for some serious cardio and looking to slim down Insanity is for you. Taking care of your body is important, a lot of problems can come from being overweight, physical as well as emotional. If you are looking to start training your body to be the best body you can have and ready to take that step forward, but you don’t know where to begin, let me know I would be more than happy to talk fitness with you and help you achieve that dream body you have the power to get.

Have a good one guys!! Always happy to make new friends, Don’t be Strangers! Hit me up lol 😀