PJ’s Fitness Blog
A blog about a fitter you. Come find out what is on the cutting edge of fitness science and be a part of the ongoing conversation.
As of July 1, I will be exclusively at the Alki and Kirkland X Gyms per the divorce ruling. Evan, Joanna, Steve, Mike, Kailyn and I are all going to Alki, and the Alki crew will be at the Belltown club. It will still be called X Gym, and as far as I know, the protocols will stay the same too.
I have formed many close friendships at the Belltown club and hope to keep in touch with everyone. I can be contacted any time through my email (pj@xgym.com), the website (www.xgym.com), and the club phones at Alki (206) 938-9496 or Kirkland (425) 822-9496.
Losing any of the 3 clubs is a tragedy for me and I am extremely sad to say goodbye to Belltown. I wish to thank all the members there for their friendship, patronage, and help in making it the most successful X Gym ever. It was a blast!
The Belltown club will always have a special place in my heart. It was my first X Gym, and the one I bought over 11 years ago from my very first personal training client and dear friend, Melissa. There are so many fond memories there. It will be extremely difficult to tear myself away, but life throws us curve balls sometimes, and we just have to make the best of them.
With change comes opportunity as well, so I’m looking forward with wonderful anticipation to the changes I can now bring to Alki with my “A Team” of senior trainers. Evan, Joanna, Steve and Mike have been at the Belltown X Gym the longest, and are amazing at what they do. Kailyn will bring his ideas for growth and skills in customer service as well. I know the Alki clients will be thrilled with the improvements in store for them!
We will also be rolling out a new online schedule system for Alki and Kirkland members, a new website, and an outdoor boot camp (see video below).
Thanks again for the memories Belltown! You will forever bring a smile to may face and warmth to my soul.
Here is the new outdoor boot camp teaser clip. It’s pretty corny, but that’s what you get when you shoot, produce, and publish in one afternoon:
Stairs are the perfect activity for getting in shape fast. They are also one of the best fat burning workouts I’ve ever discovered I’m not talking about the StairMaster either, or even the Stepmill. I’m talking about real stairs. There is a big difference! X Gymer “Proby” pictured here is a good example of stair fitness success. He’s our last year’s Biggest Loser winner and one of our fastest stair climbers now!
Climbing real stairs in a building is both mentally and physically beneficial – beyond what you can imagine. Physically, it causes a visceral/instinctive reaction in your body that makes your heart and lungs change faster than any workout (outside the X Gym of course). It also burns fat better than anything besides X Gym methods.
When you push yourself hard up stairs, your body thinks you have moved to the mountains somewhere, and there are lots of sabertooth mountain goats chasing you. It then (more…)
Did you know that your brain burns 15-25% of your daily calories? Even though your brain makes up only about 3% of your weight, it accounts for a very big part of your metabolic rate! Most people think of muscles as their only calorie burner, and while they are the main engine for that, the huge amount of energy the brain requires is hardly ever discussed.
The reason this is important is because a healthy brain uses more energy and therefore contributes more to your metabolic rate. Keeping your brain healthy is pretty easy too if you know how. Some of the ways are: (more…)
Got Mercury?
Some of you have wondered why a Seattle personal trainer like me writes so much about food and so little about exercise. I do in fact own the X Gyms, so wouldn’t it make more sense for me to talk about exercise more than food? The reason I write so much more on nutrition than exercise is because most people want to lose fat as their top goal, and this is accomplished mainly through eating right. In fact 70% of it is due to proper nutrition and only 30% to exercise!
In this post I want to talk about toxins in fish. The reason this is so important is because toxins are stored in your fat tissues, and that makes it harder for the body to empty them back out. Clean fat cells are liberated quite easily, so fat loss is many times over easier to achieve. Your liver must also be healthy to burn fat off your body, and this can only be accomplished if it isn’t kept busy processing toxins. I just talked with an X Gym member this morning whose only meat source is fish. Many people are in this same boat, and there are very important things to know about toxins that build up in large, old fish – especially mercury.
Mercury levels in the Northern Pacific have already increased a staggering 30% in about 15 years, and are expected to rise another 50% by 2050 if China continues to build more coal-fired power plants to fuel its industrial revolution. Asia is an important source of mercury in the Pacific not only because prevailing winds carry air pollution over the ocean where it rains down, but also because ocean currents carry the pollution throughout the basin.
About 40% of all U.S. exposure to mercury comes from eating contaminated tuna from the Pacific, and roughly 75% of all human exposure to mercury comes from eating fish, according to U.S. officials. Mercury poisoning, even very small amounts, early in life can lead to (more…)
I always find it interesting that the drug commercials on TV seem to spend much more time listing the side effects of their medicine than its benefits. Well, if one of those commercials listed only the top 20 side effects of extra body fat, it would have to read somewhat like this blog below (this article is largely adapted from the Scientific Laboratory of Food Intolerance, so I wanted to be sure to give them their props right off the bat).
Carrying around excess weight is becoming an epidemic in North America. While one of the initial concerns with obesity is usually all about how you look and how you feel about yourself as a person, the longer the problem exists for you, the more medical problems are going to arise, some of which can be fatal.
Obesity is a growing concern especially because overweight rates have doubled among children and tripled among adolescents. This increases the number of years that they are exposing themselves to dangerous health risks associated with obesity. While it is difficult to truly predict the future impact of obesity, there is strong scientific agreement that (more…)
Seattle personal trainers really are the best in the country. X Gym personal trainers are the best of the best, so when X Gym members have to move out of the area, they always ask me how to find a good personal trainer in their new town. This doesn’t have to be as tough as most people make it, and I’m going to walk you through the 7 easy steps in finding just the right trainer who will help you reach your goals as fast as possible.
1.) Look online and see if any show up in a local search. Just type in your city and “personal trainer”. Don’t bother looking past the first 3 pages on the search results. If they aren’t creative and motivated enough to figure out how to get ranked well, they probably won’t be creative or motivated enough as your exercise coach either. A good rank means they are popular too. They might have a website or a blog. Look for YouTube videos of them or other things they might have done. Once you learn their name, do a separate search that way. Find out their education and/or certifications. See if their body looks like you would want yours to look – which brings me to my second point: (more…)
Let’s get something straight right off the bat: I am a researcher, not an medical doctor. This gives me an advantage over medical doctors however, because I don’t have a medical bias that can cloud my judgment. I also haven’t been brainwashed by drug companies or through pharmaceutical education.
I do however, spend many hours each week making sure I am current on the latest information in fitness and nutrition, and this brings me to many studies and websites on health as well. I decided to write this blog for the benefit of the hundreds of clients at my X Gyms as well as others who might be worried about the latest flu outbreak.
I am only presenting the best information I have found so far, so you can do with it as you please and come to your own conclusions.
The facts however, prove that this is not just another swine flu outbreak. This particular strain also contains genetic material from the human flu and the bird flu. I haven’t found a credible expert yet who says that combination can occur naturally . This leaves only one other conclusion: that it is man-made. You can draw your own assumptions as to whether it is a weaponized version, or if it was released on purpose or by accident. There is plenty of information out there for you to look into those issues yourself.
To keep this short and simple, here are some links to the best sites I have found so far: (more…)
If God wanted us to be vegans, he would have created us with a mouth full of molars and four stomachs. Since we were meant to eat meat AND vegetables, vegans have to supplement their diets with certain micro nutrients if they want to truly thrive.
I’m not dissing vegans here. I do respect anyone’s commitment to a cause for any reason as long as it’s moral, but it is certainly more difficult to become healthy, and especially more difficult to be truly lean as a vegan.
I am an omnivore, but the majority of my calories come from grass fed beef, wild fish, or free range organic white meat. The rest of my calories come mostly from dark green vegetables.
At the end of each day, my total calories consumed are 4,000 or more. Since I own the X Gyms, I am mostly administrative. This means my activity level is low, my job is sedentary, and I workout a little less than 1 hour per week.
I know that my metabolism isn’t anything special, because back when I was eating different foods to the tune of about 2,500 calories a day, I was struggling to (more…)
SAY NO TO NANO!
I’m sure you have heard of nanotechnology, but have you heard of nano foods? They are microscopic bio engineered ingredients that alter the way your taste receptors work, and you may be eating them already if you’re consuming processed foods.
A nano food that tricks you into “tasting” sugar or salt when it is not really there is already being used as an ingredient in many common foods. It allows the manufacturer to claim it contains “Less Sugar” or “Less Salt,” while still offering the full taste of the previous version.
Senomyx, the biotechnology company behind this particular food additive, has already developed several chemicals that,
The topic of how sleep affects fat loss is discussed more extensively in my book, “Cracking Your Calorie Code,” so be sure to check out the big picture there, but since I finished writing it, there have been some other interesting research studies that have come out teaching us even more about how we can strategically use sleep time to burn fat.
In a study to be published in the upcoming May Journal of Psychoneuroendocrinology, scientists found that insufficient sleep disrupts the hormone balance responsible for signaling the body when it’s full. Before this study, no one had evaluated nocturnal levels of the two key energy balance hormones ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin stimulates appetite, and leptin (more…)
