SHERPA TRAINING: Still Crazy After All These Years

I'm Crazy, and if you are crazier enough, I'll challenge you to Sherpa Training with me on Wednesday or Saturday morning instead of Muay Thai training. I call it Sherpa Training because it will build up every muscle in your legs, and Sherpas have the strongest legs in the world.

Basically, we'll cycle our bikes through the Phromthep hills, down to Naiharn Beach and then up, up, up and further up the hills to Look At Point on the way to Kata Beach. If you want, we can continue to Patong. Its not all up hill, however. We do get to cruise down the hills.

But here's the catch:

When you can't climb the hills because they are too steep, you have to walk the bike up. If you are tough enough, you have to run and push the bike up. And if you crazy enough like me, you have to carry the bike on your back while climbing the hills.

I did it last year when I was between 95-105 kilograms and it gave me greater endurance than a morning session of Muay Thai. And my friend Tim did it yesterday with me, and he was exhausted.

(Thats Tim in the Picture)

6 Easy Ways to Lose Weight Without Starving (from Yahoo News)

1. Fidget: People who tap their feet, prefer standing to sitting, and generally move around a lot burn up to 350 more calories a day than those who sit still. That adds up to nearly 37 pounds a year!

In short, during your off-hours, don't just lay around. In the future I would like to see a swimming pool, ping pong table and foozeball table to keep people active when they aren't training. In the meanwhile, walk around, talk to people, take short bikes rides to the market.

2. Keep most meals under 400 calories
Study after study recommends spacing out your meals at regular intervals and keeping them all about the same size. Eating meals at regular intervals has been linked to greater calorie burning after eating, better response to insulin, and lower fasting blood cholesterol levels. When you eat regular meals throughout the day, you're less likely to become ravenous and overeat.

This is a biggy. Since I eat at the buffet twice a day, I eat way too much at each meal. In addition, my sugar levels drop too low from training so I'm inclined to grab a soda. Keep the meals small and frequent and you won't have this problem.

3. Take yourself off cruise control
Increase the intensity of your everyday tasks, from vacuuming to walking the dog, recommends Douglas Brooks, an exercise physiologist and personal trainer in Northern California. "Turn on some music, add in some vigorous bursts, and enjoy the movement," he says.

Focus less on the number on the scale and more on the numbers of minutes you are running or doing other forms of cardio. Can you run the same distance faster than you did last week? Can you go more rounds? Can you do more sprints while running? Those are the numbers you should be looking at. Again, easier said than done.

4. Drink 8 glasses of water per day
Water is not just a thirst quencher--it may speed the body's metabolism. Researchers in Germany found that drinking two 8-ounce glasses of cold water increased their subjects' metabolic rate by 30%, and the effect persisted for 90 minutes. One-third of the boost came from the body's efforts to warm the water, but the rest was due to the work the body did to absorb it. "When drinking water, no calories are ingested but calories are used, unlike when drinking sodas, where additional calories are ingested and possibly stored," Increasing water consumption to eight glasses per day may help you lose about 8 pounds in a year, he says, so try drinking a glass before meals and snacks and before consuming sweetened drinks or juices.

If its yellow, let it mellow. If its brown, flush it down. GROSS! Let me return to the first one. If its yellow, DRINK MORE WATER!

5. Step it up--and down
Climbing stairs is a great leg strengthener, because you're lifting your body weight against gravity.

For people who have weight issues, I recommend the following for cardio. 20 minutes of power walking on the tread mill, 20 minutes of cyclying or on the ellipitical, 20 more minutes on the tread mill...but with every passing minute or two, increase the spead and incline. By the time you get to the last five minutes, you should be SPEED walking up hill pretty quickly.

7. Eat 4 g of fiber at every meal
A high-fiber diet can lower your caloric intake without making you feel deprived. In a Tufts University study, women who ate 13 g of fiber or less per day were five times as likely to be overweight as those who ate more fiber. Experts see a number of mechanisms through which fiber promotes weight loss: It may slow down eating because it requires more chewing, speed the passage of food through the digestive tract, and boost satiety hormones. To get 25 g of fiber a day, make sure you eat six meals or snacks, each of which contains about 4 g of fiber. For to-go snacks, buy fruit; it's handier than vegetables, so it's an easy way to up your fiber intake. One large apple has just as much fiber (5 g) as a cup of raw broccoli.

Training For Women

I don't know much about anything but what I do know is this: men tend to lose weight quicker here than women. Even while doing the all-water detox, men lose more weight each day than women.

Women lose weight--lots, just not as quickly and as much as men. Instead of me advising women on what to do, read an informative email from my friend Michelle. She brings up good points about over-training, under-eating and the importance of cross-training. She did very well while was she was here, but feels she could have accomplished more had she trained SMARTER, NOT HARDER.

"As soon as I stopped friken training (my weight) started to shift again. I got my body composition done over here and spoke to a really great trainer who felt I was just over training. I think it's a bit different for guys in a way, maybe not all, but (my boyfriend)lost 8kg's in 3 weeks of training, and though I know that I lost a lot in my first month I know he would have just kept on loosing.

Look at (our other female friend) for example, she was training like mad and her results slowed like mine. The other thing I was doing when I stopped training and started travelling was eating a little more. That might have had something to do with it. It's amazing how not eating enough can affect you just as badly, and sometimes even more than eating too much. I tell you, getting to know your body is a mother bitch, I can't imagine how I ever would have really gotten to get a better idea on how to treat mine unless I went away and had all that time to focus on it.

Anyway, if I can recommend anything to (women) it's cross train, send her over to Julie at Ganesha to try some Yoga maybe, I found at times when I had a break from the Muay Thai for a couple of days and just did the yoga I shifted some weight.

The other thing is walking/jogging/running, it's the thing I struggled with the absolute most, but in the end it was always the thing that really made the difference. Tell her to join one of the gyms and walk as fast as she can on an incline on a treadmill if she's not comfortable on the road, or jogging. They say a good way too gage that your heart rate is in the fat loss zone is you should be able to talk while walking/jogging/running, but you shouldn't be able to sing. You want to puff and sweat, but don't push yourself out of that zone. I wish I'd focused on that a lot more now!

And diet wise I chose to drop all carbs other than vegetables because I was having bad reactions to the gluten and I don't believe I needed carbs from anything more than vegetables and fruit. A lot of people have gluten intolerances and don't realise, so that's a thing to try.... If she is eating other carbs make sure it's not in the evening after training or she wont get a chance to use them. The other thing is to really make sure she's not under eating. That's what I found I was doing for a while. Some of the symptoms that your body's going into starvation mode is not being able to sleep, your body feeling like it's stressed and tense, and growing a light hair on your body in more extreme cases.

She should be eating regularly, roughly every 3 hours. That's how long your body can hold onto protein for. Great snacks are a hand full of the raw cashews, yogurt, cheese (yes, trust me, say a 20g slice is fine, good essential fats), things like that...will keep the metabolism a churning and happier to shed fat because it trusts you'll be getting sufficient food. Otherwise I stuck to the omelets, stir-frys and salads.

And honestly, this is something I think you need to think about to, your muscles wont recover and grow unless you get sufficient breaks from thrashing them. Bodybuilders will only work out a certain body part once every 3 days to give it sufficient recovery time. And lets face it physique wise they know what they're doing. Not that most people want to be that bulky, but they know how to sculpt themselves, and get their body fat down to nothing, and not all of them are doing it in dodgy ways."

Its Only The Beginning

Dieting, doing cardio and Muay Thai training in the tropics will result in weight loss. But too many people are often too obsessed with immediate results in the beginning. Hence, the popularity of detoxing on an all water diet. Many people--myself included--detox specifically to see numbers drop on the scale. However, most of the weight being lost is excess water weight from a salty Western diet. Its comparable with my obsession with monitoring the amount of weight I lose after a 1-2 hour run. I can lose 2-3 kilos during that time, but its mostly water. After a meal and a bottle of water, I'm up again.

In my experience and from my own observations of others, fitness students lose the most weight in the SECOND month. At this point, our bodies have adjusted to the temperature, the food and the training. We aren't as sore, as hot or shocked by the novelty of being in a new environment.

As a result, students can do more cardio at this point. I can't overemphasize the importance of cardio. If you want to burn fat, you must power walk, jog, run, cycle or run. And its much easier to do in the second month.

In addition, cross train. Don't do the same routine everyday. PLEASE, PLEASE, PlEASE: Take Wednesday and/or Saturday off and cycle for a couple of hours, especially if you have sore ankles from too much running or Muay Thai.

In short, focus less on the numbers and more on changes in your cardio routine. Try to run further, faster and for longer periods and distances over time. And I'll try to do the same.

Lastly, remember this: training here isn't the cure to your weight issues. I lost 14 kilograms during my first 10 week stay here last year. More importantly, it set the foundation for continued weight loss after I returned home since I continued to train and diet. If I made a movie based on our weight loss experiences here, it wouldn't finish with the "THE END", but "TO BE CONTINUED."

THREE THINGS

I can't overemphasize three things when trying to lose weight here at Phromthep:

1. Diet. Its most important. Danny places a lot of emphasis on green smoothies. Try his program and see if it works for you. If it does, stick with it until you plateau. Then, alter your diet.If it doesn't work for you, change your diet. This is what my friend Antonio Graceffo recommends based on his experiences:

my diet: no carbs, no sugar no soda, no bread, no noodles no pasta no potatoes. eat only meat, vegetables and fruit. i buy grilled meat and fruit on the street in Thailand three times a day. my cost for food drops to almost nothing and the weight just peals off.em>

In short, if you don't recognize the food in its natural state, don't eat it. And stay away from the rice. And stay away from the Buffet.

2. Cardio. Cardio is more important than Muay Thai training, in my humble opinion. You should do both, but if you have to choose, go with cardio. Do Muay Thai AT LEAST once a day--morning, but cardio two or three times a day: morning power walks, swimming with the swimming group, cycling or my favorite: walking up Phromthep hill to watch the sunset.

BUT DO THE CARDIO AND DO MORE AND MORE AS THE WEEKS PASS BY!

3. Change Things Up:

Take the morning off and bike ride at least twice a week for 2-3 hours. Head down to Kata Beach. I did that when I was between 94-103 kilograms last year. If you can't bike the hills, walk the bike up the hill. And if you are nuts like me, carry the bike on your back and try to jog up!

And if you need someone to bike with, just ask me.

Recommendation for Fitness Students.

For Fitness Students, I think 10-12 weeks is the perfect amount of time to considerably change your body. If you look at weight loss programs such as P90x and Body For Life, they also advocate a 3 month program.

Regarding training in Thailand, first things first: Be natural and GET OUT OF BED when the sun comes up.

6:00-6:30: Wake up, shower.

6:30-7:00: Stretch and do some light cardio depending on your ability. You can walk the street, speed walk, ride your bike, jog, hop on the elliptical or do some sprints up the hill. And do your stretching with Johm in the morning.

7:00-9:00: You should really, really, really take advantage of the group training classes. As a beginner, you'll get a lot more specialized attention. You'll learn how to jab, punch, hook, elbow, knee, kick and block. Its intimidating watching the fighters hit the pads at times, buts its also motivational. That will be you in several months!

Most people are discouraged by the group training. However, the best part is this: you can walk away whenever you want. If you want to stop at 8, then stop at 8. But at least you got in an hour and half of exercise! That's more than the average person back home.

9:30-10:30: You are in the tropics. Take advantage of the beach and water. Head down to the ocean and either swim some laps---if you still have the energy, practice your Muay Thai in the water or just relax and float around.

10:30: Breakfast.

FREE TIME and SLEEP TIME

2:00 or 3:00 Do a VIP with one of the Thai trainers. And tell them your goals. Make sure they know you are more concerned about weight loss and fitness than muay thai technique.

Lastly, I recommend one of two things: Either do a Yoga class down the road at 5:00 or do one last cardio session at night, after dinner.

Keep the meals frequent and light and don't worry too much about the eating if you are doing lots of cardio. Just don't eat a lot before going to bed (unless you find that you don't have the energy in the morning to train).

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: Change up the routine if you find yourself getting bored. My first year, I usually didn't train on Wednesday morning and Saturday morning after the first month. I would go for long bike ride, 2 hours at least. Usually, I would ride by bike over the hills to Kata beach. If I couldn't bike the hills, I would just run with the bike.

Likewise, my friend Liz and Michelle started to do a session of Yoga at 5 at night instead of their afternoon Muay Thai group class, and my other friend opted for afternoon weight lifting sessions at the local gym.