Is Your Blood Sugar Playing Tricks On You?

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Today’s Health Upgrade

Monday motivation
Is your blood sugar playing tricks on you?
Workout of the week

Arnold’s Podcast

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Arnold’s Corner
Monday Motivation

I wrote the article below in The Pump App because I worry people overthink fitness and want everything to be perfect when it never will be. When you use that much brainpower stressing and beating yourself up, you are wasting the energy you can use to get moving forward.

I also believe that you can take the lessons from the gym and apply them to life.

It was a big hit, and a lot of the members of the village said they were inspired, so I wanted to share it with all of you.

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I heard from Daniel that there are a lot of questions and some frustrations that I don’t try to tell you how much to lift. There is a reason for that.

To me, the gym is a laboratory.

I have lifted for 62 years now, and when I had most of my best lifts, they all came through trial and error.

If you don’t learn the beauty of trial and error and improvisation in your workouts, you won’t get the full benefits of the gym.

And if I tried to guess what you can lift, or if a machine tried to guess, I think there is a good chance that it will sell you short.

I chose the photo below for this article because you’re going to see that the weights aren’t all perfect like you see in powerlifting competitions today.

That’s because I surprised everybody — and myself. I felt so strong on my first lift that my second lift was already a PR — that’s not the normal strategy in a competition, but it made sense for me that day. They were running around trying to find extra weights for me from a nearby gym, so I could make my final attempt.

My best deadlift ever was 710, and I didn’t even expect it.

I remember when Daniel was at a plateau when he was chasing his 600 pound deadlift. He kept pushing and trying, but I noticed two things when I watched. He was thinking before he lifted. And as he started to get off the ground, the bar was slipping out of his hands.

I told him that in his next workout, I wanted him to forget about going for the 600. I wanted him to lift 315 for as many reps as he could to train his grip because I thought that was holding him back.

He sent me a video doing 30 reps and FaceTimed completely pumped up and breathing heavy. He couldn’t believe he could lift over 300 pounds that many times. A week or two later, the 600 pounds went up.

Let me tell you a secret: one monster set wasn’t enough to strengthen his grip that much. But it was enough to remind him of the joy of surprising yourself in your workouts and break him out of his slump of overthinking.

You have to learn to turn off your brain in the gym. You can surprise yourself.

If I told you, or if a machine tried to guess, that you could bench press 135, I could be giving you a break.

Or I might be crushing you, and I hate when I see trainers doing this to people in the gym, brutalizing them with weights they can’t handle with good form because the person will be sore and think the program worked.

I know from your comments we have a lot of perfectionists here. We have a lot of people who tend to overthink.

I want you to know that’s OK. It is natural and everyone does it. We want to be our best, and we don’t want to screw up.

But the gym is no place for any of that.

In the gym, I want you to turn off your brain. I don’t want you thinking about what’s coming in the workout. I want all of your focus and energy on the current set.

In the gym, I want you to embrace failure. I want your mind to be free of the fear of it. Failure in the gym is what made me the Arnold you know today.

You think I bench-pressed 500 pounds my first attempt?

Of course not. I failed. I think I failed more than 10 times and had Franco helping me get the weight up.

And then, one day, I succeeded.

Do you realize how much you learn from that… how much it benefits you?

Yes, it benefits you because when you train without overthinking or fear, your muscles and your strength grow. But it changes your thinking for the rest of your life, too.

You learn that failure isn’t fatal. You start to realize failure is just a stepping stone to success.

Once you learn that lesson, it frees your mind. You learn to improvise and take risks. You aren’t locked into overthinking.

I want you to think of all of your workouts as reps to train your brain.

If I asked you to start with 15 reps of bench press, and you put 135 on the bar, and on your 7th rep,you get to those hard, slow reps where you know if you go for 1 or 2 more you’ll fail, that’s not a failure. You just learned.

Put the weight down, write 7 reps of 135, and then drop the weight for your next set of 12.

Don’t repeat the set trying to make every set perfect. It never will be.

On the opposite side, if you get to your 15th rep with 135 and the weight is still moving fast, don’t put it down and try to do another set with a heavier weight. Just keep doing reps until you find those hard, slow reps. Maybe you’ll get to 20. If that happens, don’t redo the set to be perfect. Just write 20 reps and 135 pounds and increase the weight for the next set of 12.

You didn’t screw up the workout. You learned. And as long as every set ends in hard reps, you grew.

Don’t stress. As I always say, it doesn’t f*cking matter.

That doesn’t mean nothing matters. But I am telling you that 99% of the things we stress about don’t make a difference. They take our energy away from the things that do matter.

What matters in your workouts is that every single set ends in hard reps. You know they’re hard because you slow down. You start to struggle.

You might even fail the last rep and drop the weight on the safety bars. Again, that’s not a failure. That’s a lesson and a benchmark for your future workouts.

I want you to go into every workout with a free mind, willing to surprise yourself, willing to fail, willing to improvise.

I want you to think of the gym as your lab. Trial and error is how you learn in a lab. And it’s how you learn in life.

I don’t just want our workouts to train your body. I want them to train your mind. I learned all of my best lessons in the gym.

I learned the power of big visions and goals.

I learned not to fear failure.

I learned that you can improve anything if you’re able to do the reps.

I learned that we work best with other people with the same goals surrounding us.

I learned to have an open mind and try new things and if they worked, use them, and if they didn’t, don’t worry about it.

If you go into every workout like a robot, thinking if you don’t do this exact weight for this exact number of reps, you’re not going to learn those lessons.

We tell you the movements. We tell you the sets. We tell you how many reps we want you to do. We tell you how long to rest.

We do that so that you can turn off your mind.

All you have to do is work your ass off. Hit every set with intensity.

When you aren’t training, you can turn on your mind. I recommend reading all of our articles here. Start in the recommended articles and work your way through. Many of our members (even Daniel, who has been training with me for two decades) have said some of those articles changed their training for the better.

Use the resources here. Adam is a training and nutrition genius. Daniel trains as hard as anyone I know. And I think my credentials are pretty, pretty good.

Since I decided to give you all a lecture, and I’ve got a flight today to San Diego to meet with some of our great sailors at a Navy base, I am going to hang around to answer questions about training.

If you’re in the gym, hold your questions until you finish. Remember, I want that brain switched off.

Health
Is Your Blood Sugar Playing Tricks On You?

Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) promise to revolutionize how we personalize nutrition by showing how our bodies respond to different foods in real-time.

But new research reveals a critical flaw: your glucose response can vary wildly from day to day, raising questions about how reliable these tools are for guiding dietary decisions for non-diabetics.

Scientists investigated how glucose levels respond to identical meals in adults without diabetes. The results challenge the idea of “one-size-fits-all” nutrition, showing that even the same person can have different responses to the same food depending on various factors.

CGMs were initially designed for diabetics to help them control their blood sugar. But, more recently, they’ve become a device recommended to help avoid foods that are “bad” for your health.

But there are a few problems. First, blood sugar increases are completely normal following meals. What you want to avoid are prolonged and sustained increases in blood sugar for many hours after a meal. A spike after a meal isn’t unhealthy — it’s a natural reaction. So, avoiding all foods that increase glucose can cause you to avoid plenty of healthy options unnecessarily.

The new research adds another issue: many of the latest CGMs use data to recommend what foods to eat and avoid. However, the news study suggests that everyone responds differently to the same foods, and the same person won’t respond the same way to the same foods each time.

The research found that you might need to eat a food 66 times to accurately determine how your body responds.

So why the variability? Factors such as sleep, stress, physical activity, and time of day influence how your body responds to a meal.

This research shows that managing blood sugar isn’t just about the meal on your plate but also about your lifestyle, stress levels, and overall health. Your body is a dynamic system, and every day is different, which means “optimizing” can lead to overthinking that could do more harm than good.

Fitness
Workout Of The Week

There are a little more than 3 weeks left in 2024, and if you want to end the year strong, this workout could help you get the job done.

While Arnold is known for his “double-split workout,” a twice-per-day routine he would use leading up to competitions, his foundation was built with intense full-body workouts that were as challenging mentally as they were physically.

It’s one thing to focus on just one body part. But it’s deceptively difficult to combine squats, presses, and rows into one workout. It’s an approach that leads to shocking good results.

This workout gives you a taste of The Foundation approach. The secret: treat every set like it’s your only set. Don’t just hit the number of reps. Make sure the weight you use allows you to be within 1 to 3 reps of failure. If you can do more, then the weight is too light.

Give it a try, and let us know what you think!