If you want some new bicep growth use this old-school workout trick that saves time and gives you bigger biceps!

Set 1: 35lbs, 8 reps
Set 2: 30lbs, 8 reps
Set 3: 25lbs, 8 reps
Set 4: 20 lbs 8 reps

That’s it! A quick and intense bicep workout you can throw in when time is short and you want bigger biceps to fill out those shirtsleeves.

Give it a try for some bigger biceps and let me now what you think by leaving a comment on the blog, that is, if you can type afterwards;-)

We had an awesome dinner with family on Saturday enjoying our free-range turkey fresh from the farm.

…Coated with natural organic butter from local grass-fed cows this 16 pounder was juicy and golden brown!

Our daughter Matea loved the local Easter egg hunt outside with our neighbours and of course Easter morning with us, I am sure we will find forgotten chocolate eggs around the house for weeks…

Don’t feel bad over having an OCCASIONAL treat just get back on track the next day and even muffins can be part of a healthy diet if you follow this recipe for my Banana Nut Muffins!

Banana Nut Muffins (gluten-free, dairy-free,)

makes 12 regular sized muffins

2 ripe bananas, mashed
7 omega 3 or free range eggs
1/2 cup almond or coconut milk
1/2 cup agave nectar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
3/4 coconut flour, sifted (this is a must — coconut flour clumps easily)
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 cup pecans or walnuts, chopped

Preheat oven to 325 F. Spray muffin pan with cooking spray. Combine the bananas, eggs, milk, agave, vanilla and salt in a bowl. In a separate bowl, combine the sifted coconut flour and baking powder. Slowly add the wet ingredients into the dry and mix until all lumps are gone. Then, fold in the nuts. Pour evenly in muffin tins and bake for 20-25 minutes. Let cool for a few minutes before transferring to a rack.

Enjoy your food, your fitness and your family…

Being fit comes from living the following simple everyday practices.

1. Throw out your big dinner plates. Using small plates at home effortlessly reduces calorie intake and promotes weight loss.

2. Make exercise a regular part of your life. Create a network of accountability with workout partners or by working with  your local fitness expert.

3. Know what you want to accomplish. Visualize the end result of your hard work.

4. Believe in you. I know that you CAN accomplish your goals.

5. Don’t be a wimp. Keep the intensity high during your workouts. Remember that you don’t want to kill time; you want to burn calories and strengthen your body through intense exercise.

6. Drink water all day long.

7. Know when to ask for help.

8. Incorporate High Intensity Interval Training into your routine by doing bursts of high intensity rather than exercising at a single steady pace.

9. Maintain your metabolism by eating a healthy snack or meal every three hours. This food should be unprocessed, low in fat and high in fiber.

10. Forget will-power; it’s about WANT-power. How badly do you want it.

11. Never eat processed foods. These items are high in empty calories and contain a plethora of chemicals that are harmful to your health.

12. Fat contains twice the caloric density of carbohydrates and protein, so limit the amount of it that you eat. Fill your diet with lean protein and carbohydrates from leafy plants and whole grains.

13. It’s OK to be a skeptic. Watch out for products that are labeled as ‘health food’. Always read the nutrition labels and make your own informed opinion.

14. Talk is cheap. Act now and get the job done.

15. Exercise with people that are in better shape than you. This will encourage you to push your limits.

16. Never indulge in negative self-talk.

17. Don’t drink calories.

18. Pay attention to everything that you eat.

19. Keep consistent. Exercise at least three or four times each week.

20. Expect more from yourself.

21. Never eat High Fructose Corn Syrup. It spikes your blood sugar levels and encourages your body to store fat.

22. Eat plenty of whole plant foods. Vegetables, fruits and whole grains are filled with fiber and antioxidants, great for good health and weight loss.

23. Do your cardiovascular exercise after weight training to encourage more fat burn. Your stored sugars will be depleted during the weight training then your body will rely on fat stores to get you through the cardio workout.

24. Breakfast should be a balance of carbohydrates, protein and fat to get your metabolism going strong.

25. If you know that you deserve better…then go get it.

26. Challenge yourself during each workout. Try something new and exciting.

27. Set specific, measurable goals and track your progress.

28. Even if they are whole grain, eat carbohydrates sparingly. Carbohydrates are quickly stored as fat.

29. Put an end to your struggle to get and stay fit. Check out DadFitness to get started on a proven fitness program that will change your life and body forever.

Take these 29 Simple Ways To Be Fit and print this list and place it somewhere that you’ll see every day…

It’s time to make muffins manly and build some muscle with these high protein egg muscle muffins.

These egg muscle muffins are so quick and easy to make and are a great breakfast on the run and yes your wife and kids will love them too!

They are not only good for breakfast as you can freeze them, bring them to work, or pop them in the microwave for a quick snack.

As with an omelet you can add your favorite ingredients like bacon, ham, sausage, veggies, various cheeses, salsa, etc. This recipe makes about 12 muffins.

Ingredients:
10 omega 3 or free range eggs
1/4 cup milk
sea salt
black pepper
garlic powder

I like chopped baby spinach, bell peppers, onions, sun dried tomatoes and old cheddar cheese.

Grease your muffin pan with Pam spray or Coconut oil and preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Whisk together the eggs and spices. Add your meats, veggies, and/or cheeses – and stir to combine. Spoon into muffin pans with large spoon. Fill each mold only 3/4 to allow for eggs rising . Pop them in the oven for 18 minutes, scoop each muffin out with small spoon and enjoy!

Kitchen Hack: Use paper muffin inserts for easy cleanup;-)

Now with these egg muscle muffins you can feel good and manly about baking muffins and have the muscles to prove it, you just might want to lose the apron…

As a big time sports fan into baseball, basketball and of course as a Canadian, hockey, it amazed me how these athletes could perform at such a high level during the season and train hard in the gym at the same time!

I would read articles or even see TV clips of theses pro athletes training hard in the gym to stay in shape for their sport and wonder how they can go out and plan 9 innings or 3 periods of intense NHL hockey after throwing around hundreds of pounds in the gym the day before.

Meanwhile, I would train my ass off in the gym to the point of exhaustion and would be limping around for a week with sore legs or have trouble putting my shirt on because my chest was so sore from “chest” day at the gym. Even being active in my own recreational sports was difficult because of the debilitating soreness from my weight training workouts.

I was always led to believe building muscle in the gym would make me stronger and faster…

I wanted to find out how these guys did it. I know genetics, talent and performance enhancing drugs play a roll in pro sports to enhance recovery and performance, but I knew there had to be more.

It was actually the media frenzy of drugs in sports with the baseball scandals and the Olympics that help lift the curtain on how athletes actually trained and how it was different from bodybuilders and regular gym goers.

More and more TV clips, books and videos on how  athletes workout started appearing and I realized these guys weren’t doing bicep curls and spending an hour on the treadmill to stay in shape for their sport.

More specifically their workouts weren’t split up into high volume bodypart workouts like chest, back, and legs or the isolation exercises that came along with this old school bodybuilding method.

1. Frequency not Failure

As I started reading more about the strength coaches of pro athletes I seen they were using FULL-BODY workouts based around natural compound movements that not only built show muscle, but more importantly, (with millions of dollars on the line), it build GO muscle that was functional and improved performance in their chosen sport.

Basically, instead of pulverizing one specific muscle with many exercises all in one workout once a week (like bodybuilding workouts do) they work all their large muscle groups with just 1 or 2 multi-joint exercises each and every workout 3-4 times a week.

Some still do some basic lifts like the squat, bench press and deadlift but with variations more specific to their sport and focusing more on lifting fast and explosive with light weights than grinding out slow heavy reps to muscular failure.

This is how they recover faster and prevent extreme muscle soreness from their workouts that allows them to get stronger and faster (not necessarily bigger) in and out of the gym because they are stimulating their muscles, not annihilating them.

2. Conditioning not Cardio

The second difference in their training that became obvious was their “cardio” workouts. They didn’t spend hours each week slaving on a treadmill Slowly watching the calorie counter tick away.

They did metabolic conditioning workouts that were based on high intensity interval training. Even with all the high tech trainers and equipment available to these pro athletes they were flipping heavy tractor tires, pulling weighted sleds, sprinting up hill and swinging heavy sledge hammers around to stay lean and increase endurance.

3. Core not Crunches

Not only were these athletes ditching single joint isolation exercises for biceps and triceps like seen in many gyms but they were also avoiding isolating their abs as well with endless crunches, despite sporting some of the best 6 packs seen away from a bodybuilding stage.

With the combination of full-body weight training workouts to build muscle, heart pounding bodyweight interval training to incinerate body fat and specific core focused training to develop strong abs these guys train their core the way it was meant to be used, for spinal stability and support.

By focusing on training the core which includes all 360 degrees of your torso such as the main rectus abdominals, the surrounding internal and external obliques, and the lower lumbar muscles of your back with stability and rotation exercises you work your core in multiple ranges of motion naturally and avoid the back breaking spinal flexion that crunches and sit-ups force you to do.

So there you go, the 3 secrets of athletes workouts and building a body like a pro athlete, not a pro bodybuilder, so you can look better, feel great and perform at the top of your game…

Big Fat Lies

You have been lied to and you have been fed a big plate of Big Fat Lies.

If you are still scared to eat fat, then chew on this, the food industry has been serving you Big Fat Lies for years and you are paying the price with your health.

We have all fallen victim to it… It just means the powerful food industry has done a good job of controlling how and what you eat.

Check out this movie trailer for Fat Head and the Big Fat Lies you have been eating and enjoy some simple spinach salad on the side with my Simple Spinach Salad recipe.

In the movie, Fat Head, you’ll learn:

• How the “lipid hypothesis” began (the myth that saturated fats will kill us).
• How obesity and diabetes develop in our bodies.
• Why lowering carbohydrate intake, and increasing animal fats, is so good for us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Simple Spinach Salad Recipe

Fill half of salad bowl with baby spinach

-Add hand full of cherry tomatoes

-Sprinkle on some crumbled feta or goat cheese

-Dash of oregano, salt and pepper

-Drizzle with olive oil and balsamic vinegar

The Big Fat Lies might leave a bad taste in your mouth but the simple spinach salad is simple, nutritious and delicious…

Hope you’re having a great week!

With spring around the corner, and summer not far off, so many guys are focusing on fat loss for a spring break vacation down south.

I get people asking me diet and workout questions almost everyday.

The easiest diet tip for fat loss I always give them that they can use TODAY is to have a PROTEIN and PRODUCE dinner.

This one small switch without changing anything else in your diet makes a huge difference. Plus, this easiest diet tip for fat loss is easy to do and the tasty meal varieties are endless but the results are almost instant!

By eating REAL FOOD such as lean proteins like chicken, turkey, beef, pork, or fish with some vegetables and staying away from starchy carbs like pasta, potatoes, rice, bread and even beans in your evening dinner you avoid that large spike in insulin (the fat storage hormone).

Most of our activity levels are low in the evening anyway so our bodies don’t need all this excess energy rich calories (carbohydrates).

With this easiest diet tip for fat loss You will get LEANER but also feel a lot better without the drowsiness, bloating and gas that high carb foods cause…

Even if you workout in the evening, lean meats and veggies will provide you with all the nutrients you need to build muscle and burn fat.

Give this easiest diet tip for fat loss a try, enjoy the foods you do eat and more importantly enjoy the results!

I am at 30,000 feet right now flying home on the red eye from Orange County, California after an awesome weekend fitness conference hanging with the top fitness professionals in the world.

Me and Mr. Lean Hybrid Muscle and busy dad Elliott Hulse

Check out what I think you MUST do to stay in shape while traveling and the BIGGEST diet mistake I seen people making during my trip to California.The 4 hour east-west coast time shift was quite the adjustment, so I found myself wide awake at 5am every morning. I like to take advantage of training at different gyms when I travel.

…So it was a great chance to hit the nearest big chain gym for a couple workouts to clear the mind and body after sitting for 8 hours a day in a conference room. I feel SO much better and energized afterwards!

There’s a reason why so many of the worlds most successful business men start their day with an early morning workout and make it the most important appointment of their day. It’s priceless…

As for phoning my wife at 2am east coast time, not such a great idea! (should of changed the time on my MacBook)

…I think making the time for a workout when you travel no matter where you do it is even more crucial, to combat all the sitting on airplanes, meetings and well, the hotel bar stools…I like to even do a little extra foam rolling and warmup to loosen up the tight knots in my muscles.

But the BIGGEST belly buster I noticed while in the US was how outrageous the portion sizes are in the restaurants compared to Canada. Now don’t get me wrong, even our typical food fare is way beyond what anyones needs for nourishment,but south of the border the portions were twice as much!

There is nothing wrong with enjoying a night out with friends for dinner and drinks when you travel for business, but don’t feel obligated to eat everything on your plate or you just might find yourself paying “overweight” when you check-in at the airport.

The key to long term leanness is to learn to enjoy the treat foods you do eat but just eat less. Sounds like a good deal to me…

I hope you are feeling great and have a spring in your step after the time switch this weekend.

I love waking up naturally to the sunshine entering the bedroom OR my daughter Matea jumping on my head, whichever comes first…

We spent all of Sunday outdoors in the sunshine teaching Matea to ride her bike.

Speaking of switches, my friend Craig Ballantyne who I will be hanging out with in California this week during a big fitness conference, emailed me a cool article on “Nutrition Switches for Faster Fat Loss” to share with you.

So enjoy, as I gotta get packed for my 1st trip to”Cali”, can’t wait and will have lots of good fitness tips to share with from the conference!

5 Proven Nutrition SWITCHES for Faster Fat Loss
By: Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS

—> Download The TT Simple Nutrition Guide

Every day in March, I’ve committed to sharing a Training and Nutrition “SWITCH” to help you lose fat. Here are 5 of the most popular nutrition switches I’ve posted so far:

Nutrition SWITCH #1 – No More Dessert for Breakfast

If you want to lose fat, stop eating dessert for breakfast.

Let’s be honest, most of what people eat for breakfast would qualify as dessert if served at any other time of day. So stop with sugary cereals, muffins (let’s be honest, we all know that muffins = cake), granola bars, and bagels.

Nutrition SWITCH #2 – Switch Your Eating Schedule

If you find that you often “binge snack” at night, try having a bigger late afternoon healthy snack, and then having a later healthy dinner.

There’s no magic to not eating after a certain time. I often eat a big healthy dinner and go to sleep within 30 minutes. That won’t make you fat. Eating a pint of ice cream & bag of chips every night while you watch TV makes you fat.

Nutrition SWITCH #3 – Minimize the Junk

Your house doesn’t need to be stocked like the local 7-11. Keep the minimum amount of treats at home to avoid mutiny and keep treats out of sight & hard to access.

Make healthy foods (giant bowls of fresh fruit) visible and places encouraging notes to eat the fruit in the kitchen.

Put ready-to-eat produce in most visible part of the fridge & hide junk in the back. All research proven to increase healthy food consumption. And when it’s your time for a cheat meal, you can enjoy it guilt-free.

Nutrition SWITCH #4 – Go From Processed to Natural

When possible, switch out all processed or “modified” carbohydrates and replace it with a fruit, vegetable, or nut.

For example, instead of toast with eggs, have an apple and add spinach to the eggs. Instead of a processed carbohydrate with your morning coffee, have 1oz of raw nuts (almonds or walnuts). With steak, eat broccoli, not mashed potatoes or French fries.

Nutrition SWITCH #5 – Cut the Sugar From Your Post-Workout Drink

If you’re focused specifically on fat loss, you do NOT need to add sugar (or any variations of sugar) to your after training drink.

I interviewed top nutritionists about this in 2010, and they all agreed that for fat loss, you don’t need to force post- workout sugar into your body. So take it out.

BONUS Nutrition SWITCH – Become Your Own Nutrition Expert

Stop getting fooled by fad diets. Become an expert yourself by going through a 2-week “intensive nutrition course”.

Here’s how:

Eat a wide variety of food for 2 weeks and record all of your meals. You’ll quickly know the calorie counts of all foods and proper serving sizes AND most importantly, what works for YOU. Very simple. Very effective.

Research proven tips to help you eat better.

—> Download The TT Simple Nutrition Guide

You had your workout, you ate healthy all day, only to be ruined with those late night munchies while you sit back with your wife and wrestle with the remote control.

After a long day, and the house finally quiet with the kids in bed, these evil evening hours can bring on the snack attack that can make the difference between being a fit or fat father.

From chips, candy to chocolate, whatever junk food you have in the house will eventually being eaten, despite your best efforts. It’s one of the basic laws of the universe, if food is in your house, it will end up in your gut. So shop smart and don’t take it home with you when you leave the supermarket. That’s half the battle right there.

Now to win the war on the snack attack I have 3 quick and nutritious healthy snack recipes that are salty, crunchy and sweet. They only take minutes to make, are high in nutrients AND taste, the perfect win-win!

1. Krispy Kale Chips

1 bunch of kale
1 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp of garlic powder
1 tsp of sea salt

2. Perfect Pistachios

3 tbsp of natural butter
1/4 cup of Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp of cumin powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2  tsp ground cinnamon
4 cups shelled dry-roasted pistachios

Stir everything together in a bowl, tossing to coat. Place pistachios in a single layer on a parchment lined baking sheet.

Bake at 350° for 10 minutes, give em a shake and stir and bake for another 10 minutes.

You will love the smell coming out of your oven and they taste even better the next day stored in a air tight container.

3. Guiltless Greek Garlic Dip

1 cup of plain Greek Yogurt
1 tsp of Clubhouse Roasted Garlic and Pepper Spice

Add to bowl and stir to mix. Takes 5 seconds to make and probably 5 seconds to eat with some homemade whole wheat pita chips!

Now you and your wife will be fighting over the food instead of the remote…

Give these a try and let me know in the comments below who got the last bite!