“Magnificent desolation”, those were the words that Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin used to describe the moon forty years ago today.  On July 20, 1969, the United States succeeded in accomplishing the goal that President Kennedy had challenged us to achieve, putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade of the 60’s was over.

Although I was less then a year old at the time, that accomplishment has inspired me and continues to inspire me each and every day.  Such a lofty, seemingly impossible feat was the moon landing.  Yet, with a singleness of purpose, NASA and it’s thousands of contractors would deem failure not an option. 

Yesterday I got the opportunity to meet three of those hero’s from the moon landing days, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Alan Bean.  What you come away with is that these “ordinary” guys set out to achieve something extraordinary.  And in doing so, they themselves became extraordinary.

Use the model of the moon landing in your life so that you to can become extraordinary.  It’s the classic set a goal, set a timetable to complete it, write it down and go to work.  I’m not suggesting to you that you need to walk on another world.  What I am saying is that you should not accept normal and average as the standard by which you live your life. 

Your fitness goals should be lofty and they should have a definitive completion date.  Don’t say that you want to just slim down over the next six months, make your goal definable.  I will loose 20 pounds by October 1rst, or I will weight 160 pounds by September 15th, or I will be a size 4 by November 5th. 

You want to set a specific goal with a specific timetable in which to accomplish it and you want to set check points along the way to measure your progress by.  Come up with your ultimate outcome and a reasonable time in which to achieve it.  Then break it down into quarters so that one, it will become manageable in your mind and two, you can evaluate along the way to make sure your headed in the right direction.

Performing 100 kettlebell snatches with a 24kg bell can seem like a daunting task, maybe even impossible to you.  Breaking it down by saying that you will perform 25 kettlebell snatches this month and 50 next, and 75 the month after that and finally 100, that becomes more reasonable in your mind. 

Goal setting if pretty straight forward and as long as you do something in the way of setting goals, you are ten steps ahead of the normal average person.  I would even say that you are well on your way to becoming extraordinary!

Yours in Health

Dennis

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If something works, and has been proven to be effective for a couple hundred years, maybe we should take the time to investigate. 

About 10 years, I was looking to spice up my training regiment and add new life to my workouts.  By this time I had been weight training in one form or another for almost 20 years and I needed something new, something I could get excited about.  I started looking around and found out about an extraordinary gentlemen by the name of Pavel Tsatsouline.  I can’t pronounce it either so we will just stick with first names here.

Pavel introduced me to a whole new philosophy and appoach to powerlifting.  The Russian approach.  I figured, why not, those guys were always the ones bringing home the world championships and the olympic gold medals so I started to study his teachings and implement his techniques.  My strength levels soared to new hights and did so in a very short period of time. 

After a couple of years of following Pavel and reading everything I could get my hands on with his name attached to it, he introduced kettlebells to the western world.  I thought to myself, that’s interesting man, check out this new piece of workout equipment.  Only it wasn’t new.  It was in fact a couple hundred years old.  But hey, if something works, stick with it.

So I bought myself a kettlebell and a book and dvd on how to use the thing and off I went.  Wow, was I amazed.  Again, Pavel had opened up a whole new world for me and again me strength and conditioning level soared to new heights.

The moral of this story is that sometimes old is new.  I had tried everything as it relates to strength training in the past and never got the results I had hoped for.  And when I say everything, I mean everything.  If there is a book on the subject of strength training or a magazine written in the past 25 years, I own it and have read it.  Probably twice.    

Pavel knows his stuff and his stuff works.  I am living proof of that along with thousands of others.  Hell, the elite Russian Special Forces, Spetznaz believes enough in Pavel to trust his training methods, so I guess this stuff works.   

Yours in Health,

Dennis

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