Are you looking to donate to assistance groups to help with the recovery in Oklahoma? Several links are below. Please let me know if you would like some added, or if there is reason to remove any links.
Please choose one donation organization below and make a small contribution if you can. Anything helps. I know there’s a lot of organizations so it’s a little overwhelming, but please choose one.
Mail check to The Salvation Army PO Box 12600 Oklahoma City, OK 73157 (note: you must write “Oklahoma Tornado Relief” on the memo line of the check if you donate this way)
REGIONAL FOOD BANK OF OKLAHOMA
Text “FOOD” to 32333 ($10)
Website donation link here. Note: seems to be nonspecific to this particular disaster, but it seems likely most/all current funds from the group are headed that way.
Send check by mail to United Way of Central Oklahoma, P.O. Box 837, Oklahoma City, OK 73101 (note: you must write “May Tornado Relief” on the memo line of the check if you donate in this fashion)
FEEDING AMERICA
Through its network of more than 200 food banks, Feeding America, whose mission is to “feed America’s hungry through a nationwide network of member food banks,” says it will deliver truckloads of food, water and supplies to communities in need, in Oklahoma, and will also “set up additional emergency food and supply distribution sites as they are needed.” * They do not have a donation link specific to Oklahoma tornado relief, but you can donate here.
OPERATION USA
The international relief group, based in Los Angeles, says it is “readying essential material aid — emergency, shelter and cleaning supplies” to help Oklahoma’s community health organizations and schools recover. * They do not seem to have a donation link specific to Oklahoma tornado relief. You can donate through their website here. * Text the word AID to 50555 (Note: this is not necessarily specific to Oklahoma tornado victim relief) * Send check to: Operation USA, 7421 Beverly Blvd., PH, Los Angeles, CA 90036.
Unless you are personally affected by this disaster, please do not go to the following link so that server loads can be reserved for individuals who need to use the website: Please spread this Red Cross website where people can list themselves as safe and well - https://safeandwell.communityos.org/cms/index.php
I am located not 15 miles from where this storm took place today. Back in 1999 on May 3rd a violent tornado ripped through the EXACT areas that the one today did and took 36 lives on that date in 1999.
All of my family members are accounted for, but there are many, many people in my state without homes, power, transportation, or anything that they’ve known for their entire lives. They are missing their own family and friends.
Moore, OK looks like an apocalyptic style warzone.
I hope that any of my followers out there that live here in Oklahoma are safe and well. These tornado outbreaks have also ripped through some of Texas and Kansas, so again for all of you living in those areas as well I hope that you and your family are safe and sound.
This tornado today, what they are saying is the worst one in history, ripped through neighborhoods, elementary schools, hospitals, businesses, and farms. The devastation here is unreal. There are so many children and people still missing.
Now, the point of this post. I am asking for help for my state.Please help. Not for me, but for my neighbors, friends, and for people who are in desperate need. Please.
The best way to assist families is to make a donation to http://www.redcross.org/okc or http://www.redcross.org or by texting REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation. If you’d like to donate to Salvation Army instead you can text STORM to 80888.
I don’t really self-post much anymore, but today, well, today is my birthday.
Currently, I have a pulled left calf muscle, I’ve been sick for five days, I just finished finals (which I aced them all, another 4.0 semester since returning to school), I haven’t lifted in weeks due to the previous three reasons, and I haven’t pulled over 350lbs in something like six months because of a previously herniated disk.
Blah, blah. blah.
It doesn’t matter. Even with all of those things going on I still took care of my business in the gym this week and set PRs for my bench (+40lbs) and deadlift (+45lbs) at the end of my first cycle of The Cube Method. I didn’t test squat due to my calf and I will guarantee you now that I pull 500+ in two months.
Oh, that is also a PR on my beard up there and yes, that is a “Ponies Forever” t-shirt. Both increase pounds on your total. Guaranteed. Oh, and pop-tarts helped too.
The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past…we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude…I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our attitudes.
Ask any big guy how he got to be 250 pounds or more and I guarantee his answer isn’t going to be, “I ate really clean and had non-starchy carbs, and I got hooge.” That has never been said ever. That said, there seems to be a trend right now of “eat clean and be lean” year around and a general discouragement of excessive bulking and dirty eating.
Eating clean year around is swell if your goal is to continue to look like a soccer player who does curls, but if you want to reach the hallowed “damn, you’re a big guy” status, you need to down some calories. A lot of calories. More calories than your damn chicken breast and organic brown rice will provide.
Certain rules must be adhered to when eating to get big. Eating an entire pound of seared dead animal flesh is a good way to start. While in the long run, these dietary guidelines will likely enlarge your heart and leave you sweating bacon grease walking up stairs, they are guaranteed to get you hooge in the short term. Lift heavy, pack in the meals, and watch your numbers climb. If you’re serious about gaining weight and need to put on size now, man up and get ready for some truly epic eating.
Disclaimer: This diet doesn’t constitute sound medical advice. It does, however, contain awesome advice, which is even better.
There are those people that want to be lean and ripped getting stronger or bigger at a snail’s pace and then there are others that just want to be huge and strong without taking it as slow. This article is for the latter.
Diet programs revolve around a proven principle: if you burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight. The calorie is the defining metric. And so, in the interest of public health, the Food and Drug Administration requires most packaged foods to list their calories, among other data, on labels. To help combat obesity in New York City, the Department of Health requires most chain restaurants to post calorie content on their menus and fines those who don’t comply. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, a national program will soon follow.
In theory, this is a valuable reform. But there’s one glaring problem. According to the F.D.A. and the city’s health department, no one verifies the accuracy of these calorie listings. The system essentially runs on an honor system. Food vendors can list whatever numbers they want, until someone (somehow) catches a problem and files a complaint. So, as an obsessive calorie counter myself, I wanted to find out: how accurate are these labels?
Let me try to explain my philosophy on eating out when trying to count calories or macronutrients in order to be accurate with your daily intake. It should be done sparingly, limited primarily to special occasions or social events. Whether the restaurant (or eatery) puts up the caloric content hardly matters as they are always, always, always inaccurate. There is always a margin of error, but just how big is the margin of error is really the question.
The best way to more precise with your daily intake is to prepare your food at home. This allows you the ability to weigh (by far the most accurate method) and control the exact portions. Now, I’m not saying that you have to be a religious in weighing your food, in fact, I hope that you wouldn’t ever feel like you always have to. However, you should try it out for a minimum of a few weeks to get an idea of the portion sizes that you should be consuming and the caloric content of those portions.
My last thought is that if you’ve never counted your calories, weighed your food, and prepared it yourself then you really have never known in a given day how much you’ve eaten. How could you? I talk a lot to people that are frustrated with being overweight, yet they don’t count their calories. When I ask why they will swear up and down that they “don’t eat that much” each day. Typically what I find out is that after having the person track their caloric intake for two weeks to a month that these same people come to realize that they truly had no idea how much they were eating each day and it’s usually a bit too much. Oftentimes this is due to what I call “mindless eating” or eating out of boredom and is easily corrected when you realize you’re doing it.
Christina Warinner is an expert on ancient diets. So how much of the diet fad the “Paleo Diet” is based on an actual Paleolithic diet? The answer is not really any of it.
Dr. Christina Warinner has excavated around the world, from the Maya jungles of Belize to the Himalayan mountains of Nepal, and she is pioneering the biomolecular investigation of archaeological dental calculus (tartar) to study long-term trends in human health and diet. She is a 2012 TED Fellow, and her work has been featured in Wired UK, the Observer, CNN.com, Der Freitag, and Sveriges TV. She obtained her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010, specializing in ancient DNA analysis and paleodietary reconstruction.
Let’s not forget that there is this little thing called the principle of specificity in regards to your training.
Specificity is the principle of training that states that sports training should be relevant and appropriate to the sport for which the individual is training in order to produce a training effect.
The Specificity Principle simply states that training must go from highly general training to highly specific training. The principle of Specificity also implies that to become better at a particular exercise or skill, you must perform that exercise or skill. To be a good cyclist, you must cycle. The point to take away is that a runner should train by running and a swimmer should train by swimming.
While there may be other ‘principles’ of training you will find on the web and in text books, these 6 are the cornerstone of all other effective training methods. These cover all aspects of a solid foundation of athletic training. Once put together, the most logical training program involves a periodized approach which cycles the intensity and training objectives. The training must be specific not only to your sport, but to your individual abilities (tolerance to training stress, recoverability, outside obligations, etc). You must increase the training loads over time (allowing some workouts to be less intense than others) and you must train often enough not only to keep a detraining effect from happening, but to also force an adaptation.
What I mean to say is that where as Jamie Eason’s LiveFit Trainer can be a good program for some people it is not optimal for everyone, especially me given my personal goals. I’m not sure if wearing Jamie Eason’s wardrobe is part of the program, but I’m fairly confident that I wouldn’t look as good in those outfits… or would I? Maybe I should rethink my goals.
Something you always, always, always have to understand is this notion of “it depends” when you’re answering a training question. Does the program work? Well, it depends on what your goals are. Want to add poundage to your total for competing in powerlifting? LiveFit Trainer isn’t going to get you there. Nor will Starting Strength or Madcow’s if you are far enough beyond the beginner/intermediate stages.
All programs work, but not all programs are optimal for your current goals. Experiment, test, and research. Find what works best for you and what will put you in the best position to get closer to your goals.
Now, the last thing I want to bring up here is that there are some elements of training that do work for absolutely everyone. None more important and effective of course than progressive overload (duh), but methods such as speed work, rep work, max efforts (80-95%), deloads, and hypertrophy styles of training are right there behind progressive overload. If you don’t think that these things have an important place in making your training more effective and getting you stronger, bigger, or sexier (depending on your goals) then you need to wake up and smell the ammonia.
Ask anyone around you and I’m willing to bet the majority will tell you that organic is somehow superior to conventionally grown crops. Whether it be the taste, the micronutrient quality, the overall freshness and safety, or the gaping hole it burns into your wallet, organic foods have been touted as “nutritionally superior” almost everywhere you look. But is this true? Is there really any benefit from eating organic as opposed to conventionally grown crops? I hope this blog post will help shed some light on the topic and hopefully by the end of this, I’ll be able to answer those questions. Let’s jump right into it. Most people preach going organic for the simple reason that there aren’t any synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, food additives, GMOs, etc. used when growing them [1]. Conventional crops, however, allow for growing out of season, greater resistance, and a much higher yield of crops.
If you don’t think that “buy organic” is a marketing ploy to take more of your money then you need a serious wake up call. Don’t be sheep when it comes to your health.
Let the take away from the post be about how there is negligible difference in nutrient composition, but a major difference in price. Being healthy isn’t costly. Understand that you’re paying for the word “organic” being on a product.
Don’t like the article? Read the studies (like you should be doing) and develop your own opinions. Don’t be sheep.
Welcome to The Spartan Warrior, a blog dedicated to bringing the truth regarding nutrition and fitness to the public.
This website provides it's visitors with an ample amount of information backed by up to date science and research to arm them in the fight against 'broscience' and misinformation. Not only will you be provided with invaluable research, but you'll find easy recipes for healthy and delicious meals, sources of motivation, and a place where you don't have to leave feeling confused about your health.
