You can’t wait for opportunity’s.

If you spend all your time, waiting for a chance to do something, eventually it will come along. But perhaps, after waiting so long, it is no longer what you wanted. Or maybe you can’t take advantage of the opportunity anymore.

You can sit down and say, “all that I is wait, just for a little while”. But that just isn’t good enough. Some people don’t realize this, they merely sit and wait there entire lives for something which is waiting for them just around the bend.

Instead of sitting down in the road of time and waiting for someone else to walk by, you can go out and try and find your chance. Out in the world there are people to me, goals to achieve, chances to miss, and chances to catch. There are things both good and bad, which will change who you are forever.

But you may never find any of these things which are waiting for you, if you never try.

You can’t think that if you wait, you will be able to do something, weather its a btwist, or sky diving, or asking out that girl(or guy) you always thought looked like a nice person. There are some people who waste there entire lives giving chase to their dreams, and then there are the people who never even try.

Whatever the excuse is you give yourself, it simply isn’t good enough. You might think it is impossible, maybe you think your not ready yet. Maybe you just think its to much work. But that’s all wrong, for whatever reason, and I think everyone has their own, you don’t want to try. For me, well, I’m scared, yep that’s it. Maybe, no matter how hard I try, it won’t be good enough. Somewhere along the way, despite my good natured over confidence, and my eternal overoptimism. I seem to have unknowingly convinced myself that I’m going to fail.

Unfortunately, fear isn’t something that just goes away because you know its there. You just have to ignore it and push on through. Nothing is impossible, we just tell ourselves that it is, because we are scared of what we might otherwise accomplish. Everything you want to do is within your grasp, you just have to get past the thinking it over stage.

This is where a lot of people get stuck, you think about it, you plan, you perfect, and you never actually just give it a try. Want to see the world? well you already have everything you need to do that, start walking! Maybe you want to be the best at something? Not impossible, hard, since your going to have a little competition, but you can do anything you set your mind to.

Maybe you really won’t succeed, maybe your going to fail. Maybe, even though it isn’t impossible, no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t do it. But at least you tried. I may not know a lot of things, but I know one thing for sure, if you never try in the first place, you will never know what its like to succeed….. or fail.

Yakri~

Work out routine?

A general fitness routine for the average noobie. I wrote this for someone on yahoo answers too.

It really depends on what you want to do. I would suggest this to have all bases covered. Put your shoes on and go out and jog for 10-30 minutes. When you get back to your house, go to the area you want to workout at. Once you get there start stretching, (you must do this straight after your back from running) do every stretch you know of.

Now its time to get to the workout. Since I don’t know what your training for, were going to go for overall fitness and working out your entire body. Push ups! They are a good one to start with. Do push ups until you feel the burn, then do a few more, and stop. If you can do a great many push ups (say, 50-100+) do a harder push up variation. Such a star push ups, clap push ups, one handed push ups, and planche push ups. If you do not know what those are, look them up on google or youtube. Push ups will work out your arms and chest, some of there variations will workout various other muscle groups.

Crunches! Ok crunches are great for the abb’s I generally put them second in my workout routine, but the order doesn’t really matter. If you can do 50+ crunches without feeling the burn at all, then you can do some harder variations. These include, leg lifts, 6 inches/suicides, butterfly kicks, and dragon flags (the ultimate, they are crazy hard to do). As before, if you don’t know what these are you should look them up on youtube or google. All of these exercises work various parts of your abb’s, i suggest you do 2-3 of them, i.e crunches AND leg lifts, not crunches OR leg lifts.

Body weight squats. Squats are the best leg exercise ever! They work your the entirety of both your legs as well as your lower back. and glutes. If squats become easy enough that you can breeze through 20-30+ without breaking a sweat, i suggest you learn to do pistols/single leg squats. They build amazing balance and single leg strength, they are a great deal harder then squats because of the even greater balance and skill factor. Please remember that squats aren’t bad for you in anyway IF you do them right, so do try and learn the correct form for this exercise. A squat is when you squat down with your toes pointed outwards and slightly farther then shoulder width apart, until your hips become parallel with your knees (you butt will be slightly lower then your knees). Your back should remain straight and your chest should forward during the entire movement.

Here is the most important part of your workout routine. YOUR DIET. If you have a lousy diet your not going to get anywhere with your workout routine, so even if you don’t like the exercises i have suggested, keep the diet part in mind, please. You need to stop eating/drinking anything with High Fructose Corn syrup in it. (known as HFCS) And your going to need to stop drinking anything carbonated. Your body needs two things to repair muscle. Carbs and protein (this is over simplification, but w/e). You need to get carbs right after you work out, and protein both right after you work out, and pretty much any other time you can consume it.

You can find out if food has protein/carbs and how many of both, by looking on the daily values label, just above the ingredients. Fruit normally has a lot of carbs in it, good sources would be bananas or apples. You may of noticed earlier that I said “REPAIR muscle” not build muscle, this is because you become stronger by putting your muscle under stress, say, lifting a heavy weight repeatedly, this causes micro tears in the muscle fiber, then when the muscle is repaired, it repairs itself stronger then before so it will be more resistant to similar types of damage. I guess you could say that becoming stronger is a defense mechanism.

So, what has this got to do with your diet? Well, your body needs to have all the materials at hand for repairs, if it doesn’t, it will take longer to fix your muscles. Think of it this way, you have a massive work force, ready to put up a building, if they don’t have all the necessary materials then some of the men won’t have anything to do, but if you have everything ready to do, you can have all of your workers start building at the same time, utilizing the maximum capacity of your work force. The point is, if your body has all the protein it needs to repair muscles, then it can work to do so at full power, if you don’t eat enough protein daily then it takes longer. Junk food is bad, because it completely counter acts the entire point of working out, carbonated drinks stop your muscles from properly absorbing oxygen, and HFCS limits your body’s ability to convert sugar to energy and the HFCS itself goes straight to fat.

Whats more, these drinks and snacks lack any useful components such as proteins, or helpful fats (Nuts, like almonds, and fish, and a few other things, have fats your body needs to work properly, trans fat, and saturated fat, found in many snacks, will go straight to body fat, because your body can’t process them properly.)

So, the whole point of all this rambling I am doing here, is that if you don’t eat healthy while working out, don’t work out in the first place, because it will just be a waste of your time.

Yakri~

HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT BY THE END OF THE SUMMER

Alright, there are a million and one kids out there wondering if and how they can slim up by the end of this summer, and i wrote out a really in depth reply on yahoo answers and I wanted to post it here too.

If you have a public pool, start swimming 7 days a week, one hour per day, if you can’t do that, do 3 days a week.

If you don’t, jog for 30 minutes or more(but less then 2 hours) each day. in addition, after you jog, stretch out and do push ups and crunches (not sit ups, there is a difference)

Now for diet. From now until school starts, do not eat any candy junk food or soda. this includes but is not limited to; energy drinks, soda, Gatorade, energy bars, slim fast products, frozen fruit juice and anything that has high fructose corn syrup in the ingredients list.

You also need to drink a gallon (yes 1 full gallon) of water per day. Do not drink anything other then water, unless it is ORGANIC milk, and then, only drink about 1-2 glasses a day, the majority of non organic milks are very unhealthy.

You should also try and eat a lot of food with high protein content, like tofu, eggs, and organic tuna. And foods with good fats in them, all nuts and many fish (like tuna) have these.

Rather then 3 meals a day, you should eat 6 small meals a day, this is more important then you think.

The diet is the most important part, if you don’t do the diet, you are just wasting your time.

If you drop all the junk food, drink only water, eat 6 times a day, and stick to the workout, you should impress your friends significantly when school rolls around.

Remember, if you stop working out and eating healthy, your going to regain weight again, so if you do this and like the way you look at feel, stick to it, it only gets better as you go.

I would be using this and swimming if our god damn public pool was open, but they are staying closed all this summer.

Feel free to email me with questions at yakrii@yahoo.com or you can leave a comment on this blog and i should reply within 24 hours.

Yakri~

Building blocks of tricking and parkour shortened.

Well, I made a post a while back called Building Blocks of Tricking, Parkour, And Martial Arts. Part 1, and Its a lot longer then it ends to be, so I want to summarize it here.

Parkour

1)Parkour is a great form of exercise, but that isn’t going to get you far if you don’t eat right, and sometimes training in a gym to get stronger, or build more endurance, is better then just doing parkour for it, mostly because it won’t be as hard on your body.

2)A lot of great traceur’s have very little in the way of serious injuries related to parkour. This is because they don’t do stupid shit. Basically, remember that the goal of parkour is to get from A to B as fast as you can, not to show off. Breaking bones and what-not also isn’t supposed part of it.

Tricking
1)In tricking, training in the gym and at home is very very important. Its pretty easy to hurt yourself enough to take you out of sports of a notable amount of time in tricking, and conditioning helps reduce the risk of that happening. condition three times as much as you trick, and you will be tricking for a long time.

Condition, diet, then train.

2)Don’t go overboard, working out for two hours a day every day and then spending an hour tricking afterward, it won’t help you. Remember, stop while your ahead, if you land a trick perfectly, do it a few more times, and then stop before you get tired. This way the correct form becomes more firmly implanted in your muscle memory. And don’t condition and trick on the same day if you can help it.

That’s all I’m putting in here, I think this explains the important parts better.

Yakri& friends first video

Yay, we finally made a video, and I’ll tell you, it was one major pain in the ass to edit this, fing quicktime video format….

Yakri~