Exercising In the Yellow Zone – Pumping

Happy Monday!

I hope your week was productive and your weekend was restful.

Today in my blog I will share:

1. My vblog presentation on how to effectively exercise in the yellow zone looks how you can maximize on active rest for enhanced recovery and improved overall performance.

2. Angie and baby Mana in Milan, Italy

3. The Blood Moon

Exercising In the Yellow Zone – Pumping

My video blog (vblog) today adds to my previous series titled The Red-Yellow-Green Of Exercise: Part 1-3.

If you missed those vlog lessons, you can loop back and watch them so my presentation today has more context.

In my blackboard diagram above, I share the key points of my previous vlog on yellow zone exercise.

In my program today, I demonstrate some exercises that can be used when you feel rested enough to perform your regularly scheduled workout, but find that you don’t have the snap, the energy, or freedom from discomfort you thought you had prior to starting your workout, you are in what I’m referring to here as the yellow zone.

I use the Charlie Francis 1-3% rule to determine when I’m in the green or yellow zone:

The 1-3% rule suggests that if you can’t exceed your last training performance by 1-3%, you don’t belong in the gym…you should rest.

Though I agree with that methodology of determining when you will get the most bang for your buck in training, I also know how much benefit we can get from skillful application of active rest.

In my ebook, The Last 4 Doctors You’ll Ever Need – How To Get Healthy Now, I explain the three chief classes of rest (active, passive, and total).

When we are in that place where we feel energized enough to exercise, but once we get started, we find that we are more sore or tired than we realized, most athletes will push through it.

These athletes either try to follow their training program as written, execute a no pain – no gain philosophy, or nourish their psychological need to vent stress through exercise.

Today I share my methodology for nourishing my body-mind’s need for movement at intensities higher than the work-in intensities attributed to the red zone, yet, lower than the intensities I’d use in the green zone to comply with the 1-3% rule.

I begin by explaining that with yellow zone exercises, we can get many of the same benefits we get from working-in.

We also get a chance to harmonize our biological oscillators (brain-heart-intestines), creating a meditative state that offers overall body-mind harmony.

I share that if we harmonize our movements to our breathing at low (30 rep) intensities, we actually get anabolic (tissue building) effects similar to work-in exercise, as well has having an opportunity to reestablish good form in our neural network.

I demonstrate yellow zone exercise technique and how to pattern your breathing to facilitate movement based on respiratory mechanics.

This allows you to restore and/or maintain optimal breathing and movement sequencing, while reprogramming yourself to avoid the compensatory (faulty) movement patterns often created when we ignore the 1-3% rule and train in, or further into discomfort because we don’t understand the 1-3% rule, or are either misinformed or addicted.

If you’d like to learn what I teach our CHEK Exercise Coaches and CHEK Practitioners Levels 1-4 regarding the mechanics of breathing and movement so you can get the best performance in your training and minimize your risk of injury, study “Heavy Breathing DVD” by Dan Hellman (hot link here)

The exercises that I demonstrate in my vlog today are:

1. The Single Arm Cable Push with Reciprocity
2. The Single Arm Cable Pull with Reciprocity
3. The Kettlebell Swing
4. Clubbell Swings

I hope you enjoy my 13:00 video blog presentation today, and that you enjoy the benefits of these simple, powerful exercise methods I’ve developed to help others and myself.

Angie and Baby Mana in Milan, Italy & Penny in London this week

Things are quiet at home right now. I’m alone with Angie’s pug, Maggie, while Angie is in Milan, Italy for her brother’s wedding, and a few weeks of birthday vacation.

Penny left for London on Saturday to first to attend a seminar, and then she will pick up her older sister and fly to France to visit their younger sister before she heads to Italy to meet up with Angie.

Penny shared that the weather in London is quite nice, and she’s just grounding and getting over jet lag. She’s enjoying long walks in the park in downtown London and the joy of not having to work so much right now.

Angie arrived in Milan a couple days before her brothers wedding, so she and her best friend Margaret are out enjoying the sights and great food.

Above you can see Angie on her boat tour across the lake to a famous restaurant, where she and Margaret went to enjoy an awesome lunch.

This is the lovely view from Angie’s room in the hotel. She’s certainly enjoying the beauty of Italy with Margaret, and all the great food too!

Angie’s brother’s wedding is today.

Above you can see Angie and Margaret on their way to her brother’s wedding in their lovely dresses; they got their hair and makeup done specially for the occasion too, which I’m sure they loved.

You can see our baby, “Mana” showing off her own apartment in Milan too. Angie is 18 weeks pregnant now, and she’s happy that people now look at her and see “pregnant” instead of “fat”…

Angie LOVES to keep herself in excellent condition, so as much as she was overjoyed to become a mother, she did find it interesting to watch her muscles get covered by water and extra body fat as part of the process of being pregnant.

Angie’s pregnancy was certainly a big surprise to her, Penny and I.

Once we got over the shock, we all held hands and celebrated the chance to honor, love and protect the special soul that chose to have two mothers and one daddy (who never thought he’d be a daddy again; If you want to make God laugh, tell Him/Her you’ve got a plan!).

Penny says she’s just glad Angie has to do all the hard work, and that she can enjoy teaching Mana to read, use computers, understand history, garden, and fly an airplane too.

It’s only been a few days since Angie and Penny left, but I’ve really missed talking to Mana each day and kissing her through Angie’s belly.

She’s begun kicking and moving a lot lately, and it’s quite cool to feel so much life inside Angie’s womb.

It’s quite funny because so far, every midwife and doctor Angie’s seen since she got pregnant have all felt sure she was having twins.

She got a sonogram and we were relieved to find that Mana is alone in her studio apartment.

One new baby in the family is enough for this 54-year-old daddy and Momma Penny too!

Even Angie was thinking, “Oh my…how will I travel and teach with twins?!”, so we were really happy to find that our work load was half what the midwives suspected it was about to be.

Angie bought me a beautiful set of non-toxic body paints for my birthday so I could paint her belly for Mana.

She’s only been gone a few days now, and I can see from talking to her on FaceTime and her photos that “my canvas is getting bigger and bigger”. I’m looking forward to sharing some more art with Mana when they come home in a few weeks.

The September Blood Moon Last Night

I don’t know if you noticed the eclipse of the moon last night, but we experienced a very rare moon event called “the blood moon”.

I was out doing tai-chi and when I saw the moon, I thought, hum…that’s an unusual pattern on the moon…it looks like some form of eclipse.

I didn’t realize that indeed, it was an eclipse and I was watching what may well be a once in a lifetime event…a blood moon. Very cool. I hope you got to see it. It was spectacular!

I hope you enjoy my blog today.

Love and chi,
Paul Chek