Did You Miss Me??

SO I’m back after a fantastic week in the mountains with the Missus on our Honeymoon, and I have to say it was a blasty blast. Since neither of us are much for sitting and staring, we wanted to make it the most fun and active week we could.

We did a massive mountain bike ride from Banff to Canmore, through the Nordic Centre (where they did the cross-country skiing from the 88 Winter Olympics) and then back again, totaling about 70 km.

We then played a round of golf at Silvertip, which was Lindsay’s first 18 hole game in ever, and my second in the week. Although I’m terrible, I suck a lot less after that week, and am closing in on shooting under 100. I figure another 10 or 20 rounds and I should be good enough to legitimately say I suck.

Last, we did a hike through Lake Louise

So in spite of the fact that we didn’t necessarily “workout” in a typical sense, we had a big calorie-burning week. That, and the complete lack of bear sightings means that I couldn’t break it down Predator-style with my bear spray and lay out a grizzly like Jebediah Springfield on the Simpsons. I also discovered a lot of people hike with ski poles, and look completely ridiculous while doing so.

Since this was both of our first vacations of the year, we wanted to really enjoy it and sleep in, eat some good food, you know, forget about schedules altogether. Normally when people take a vacation and completely change their routines, weight gain occurs. In my case, I managed to gain only 1.5 pounds in the past two weeks, full of wedding cake, adult beverages, and restaurant food. Not too shabby. I also had some help from aggressive chipmunks who thought my Cliff bar was a bit too carb-heavy for the current plan.

So now it’s back to reality, which means helping people become consistently more and more awesome by the minute. No big deal. With this new start back up at work, I’m planning some testing on my clients, new programs, and other progression analysis, so it will definitely be a back-end heavy (giggle) work week. On top of that, I head out to Toronto on Thursday to attend the canfitpro National Conference, at which I’ll be presenting on Developing Medical Referral Networks for Fitness Professionals. If you’re going to be in the area, shoot me a message!!

On top of all this, last week was the initial launch of Muscle Imbalances Revealed: Upper Body, which had some great success and fantastic feedback. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to pick up your copy, and if not, you’re completely banned from my Christmas card list.

While we were in Banff for the week, I picked up a copy of the new book The Psychopath Test, which I have to say is probably on my top 5 books list of the year if I actually had such a list. I love reading about psychological sciences and application, seeing as how I work directly with a lot of different types of people each day and want to try to understand them all to help them the best way possible.

This book kind of opened my eyes to how some people just like to watch the world burn, and how there may be a disproportional percentage of those kinds of people in positions of power. Interestingly, a lot of the research on psychopathic traits was done in Canadian correctional institutions, and some of the case studies used were popular news feeds that I can actually remember watching over the years. I know, I know, maybe not the best honeymoon reading, but hey, I know how to party!

The downside with the book was that I found the author to be somewhat self-absorbed, repeatedly telling the reader how after taking a course on traits of psychopaths, he had the power to spot them and sleuth them out. Sort of like how some trainers take an on-line certification and call themselves experts, right? That being said, he did make some unique connections, sought out a lot of different opinions, and asked some pretty interesting questions, so it made the book a definite page-turner. I managed to finish off the entire thing in about three days. In all, it’s a really good read, so get a copy for yourself by clicking HERE.

Tomorrow, we’re going to look at something new and really cool, so tune in!!