During this workout, I trained my legs with the following exercises:
Front Squats (5-6 sets)
Regular Squats (1-2 sets)
Leg Extensions (5-6 sets)
Hamstring Curls on the exercise ball (both legs and one leg at a time)
Leg Presses (4 sets)
Donkey Calf Raises (3 sets)
Sitting Calf Raises (2 sets)
I also (unexpectedly) reached new maxes on the front squat, the leg extensions, the leg presses and the donkey calf raises and in the video, I talked about how gains come when you don’t expect them to (as long as you put in the work to get your body ready for them). I also talked about how we perceive weight and how we tend to let pre-conceived notions dictate to us how much weight we can or cannot lift. It’s important to approach each set with only the expectation of getting the most benefit out of it. Don’t pre-program yourself for any specific weight, because who knows how much you can truly lift? Why limit yourself?
In this video, I wanted to share my thoughts on the importance of two things:
The proper fit of a shoe, and here I mean its length, width and arch support, and
The habit of walking barefoot one day a week.
When it comes to the fit of a shoe, it’s even more important to watch its width, not just its length. A shoe of the right width for your foot provides proper ankle support as you twist your feet. You may not find it an important criteria for your shoes until you twist your ankles or worse, break them, which happens quite a lot with ill-fitting mountain boots and ski boots.
Adequate arch support is obtained by trying on lots of pairs of shoes and knowing what to look for, or with the aid of inserts, which I do not like, or best of all, by getting measured with a proper mold for bespoke shoes. This involves stepping into a box filled with a special pressure-sensitive foam that conforms to the exact shape of your foot and stays that way, allowing the shoemaker to make a shoe just for you.
I believe it’s important to walk barefoot one day a week, for the following reasons:
It provides you with a pleasurable sensory experience to step over varying textured surfaces, relaxing your mind and your body. Try walking barefoot on cobblestone, pebbles from the riverbed, sand, grass, marble or hardwood flooring and you’ll see what I mean.
It allows your feet to breathe and stretch out. As much fun as it is to wear great shoes, our feet need to “breathe”, to be free of the confines of a shoe, every once in a while. Your nails will look better after having seen the sun and your bones will re-align, helping you regain your proper gait.
Walking over textured surfaces will stimulate pressure points on the soles of your feet, points described by the practice of reflexology. Stimulating these points will allow your body to function better, more freely, with less stress.
Having your feet in contact with the ground will initiate a process called earthing, which will release negative electrical tensions in your body, letting you breathe easier and sleep better. It’s the same concept as the grounding wire in your electrical outlet.
In this video, you will find out why it’s important to use a proper battery charger-analyzer and how using one helped me spot bad batteries in the batch of Ni-MH batteries used in my electronic equipment.
Before I got my charger-analyzer, I always wondered why some of my batteries seemed to last so little when I put them in my camera’s flash or in my keyboard or some other piece of electronics. It turns out some were of inferior quality, some were at the end of their life and some were just plain gone. Unknowingly, I was mixing good and bad batteries in my electronics and expecting them to perform properly.
The simple chargers I had previously used were reporting the batteries as fully charged when they were actually defective. This is why anyone who depends on batteries for their work should get a serious battery charger-analyzer, which has the circuitry and the capability necessary for proper testing of the batteries it charges and the ability to spot bad batteries right away.
As I say (repeatedly) in the video, I’m not trying to advertise any particular model of battery charger-analyzer but if you want to get the one I’m using, it’s the MH-C9000 from PowerEx.
From my personal experience, I can also recommend the following brands of Ni-MH rechargeable batteries to you:
Sanyo Eneloop (the best ones I’ve seen so far, I love how long they hold their charge)
This May, YouTube introduced a new design to the channel page which is easier to customize and resizes itself automatically on screens of multiple sizes, be it desktops, notebooks, tablets or phones. We can customize the videos that appear on the channel page much better than ever before, making it easier for visitors to see a variety of videos from our channel’s library. Best of all, we can create a channel trailer that helps those who are new figure out what our channel is about. It gets shown automatically to those who aren’t yet subscribed. Those who already are see viewing suggestions instead. Here’s my channel’s trailer:
Raoul Pop 