Removing Negativity and Barrel Lifting Advice

Hope everyone is having a blessed Christmas season.

Just a quick note to tell everybody what's going on. We're about to split for Savannah to meet with Dennis Rogers. I'm very excited about that! To watch his show and learn from him is going to be an awesome opportunity!


REMOVING NEGATIVITY

Negative energy is an insidious force in everybody's life. It takes away from your ultimate goal achievement and from the happiness with which you can live your life. It's also sneaky. It embeds itself in your life in hard to deal with ways. Everybody knows somebody that they HAVE to deal with be it business or family who is always a down person. You can't sever your association with them so you have to constantly deal with their negative attitude.

But I'm telling you there is a place you can get to through having your spiritual matters settled and practicing disciplined peacefulness and positivity that these people can't effect you. I don't mean a Mary Poppins, all happy with no real back up kind of delirium . I'm talking about a kind of deep, peaceful assurance in your direction and flow of life.

Here are a couple of steps to move toward that.

1. Search your own attitudes for times and areas where you have negative thoughts that you don't realize and change them. Change is a decision.

2. Resolve to have a real plan for what you want to do. Not just a goal, a plan to achieve it. If you have simple laid out steps to do something, it's much easier to achieve as well as easier to stay positive about.

3. Step back and consider the blessings you have and resolve to handle things in the light of that. For the most part, most of us aren't dealing with major tragedy. We're dealing with things that should be treated as minor stress and handled accordingly, not given any more power than they deserve in our life.

4. Peace comes from God. When you seek good things, you are seeking God. Only you know where you stand with God and you must be settled in that relationship.

5. Beyond a relationship with God and His giving us the power to treat things in a peaceful manner, peace is a choice. Choose it and refuse any other emotional track. It's easy for us to work out every day, or go to work every day or eat the same way all the time, or not drink too much, or whatever the case may be. Peace is the same thing. You must access that frame of mind and then use the discipline that you've built in your life to not be knocked out of it. The more you practice it, the better you get, the happier you get, the more successful you get and the better you're able to deal with people who cause you problems.


BARREL LIFTING

I went back through and watched a lot of our videos this week and what I noticed is that we were incorrect in listing how many different exercises were shown in each video. I have a tendency to work very off-the-cuff so to speak, so that even when I tell you that I'm going to show you five different things, while I'm working, speaking and thinking, I'll actually have shown you 10 and not realize it. That's just a personality quirk and blessing with me. So I wanted to give you a quick workout with some of the variations that were shown on our barrel lifting video.

Barrel lifting is just a brutal hard core workout. You don't get any tougher. Everybody should at least work through one course of barrel lifting in their lifetime, because as an odd object it teaches you all of those things that are so important for real strength. Balance, coordination, the body as one piece, lifting things that weren't meant to be lifted. This work out you're just going to do the clean and press with a barrel you can handle for reps.

I like to use a keg because it's a good size to work with and allows you to do a lot of movements that give you that odd object type of strength without being so unwieldy or large that you can't get your arms around it. This workout I want you to do one set of each type of clean and press for as many reps as you can in one minute, then rest one minute and go one to the next type of clean and press.

Here are the variations: (Remember to use good body mechanics is as much is as possible. Bend the legs, tighten the abs and back, pressurize your air and lift. Also do this outside or somewhere you can drop the weight.)

1. Parallel grip. Grab the keg by the chins with both hands on the same side. Clean it to the shoulders and press it. This is the toughest way to do it and why we put it first. It's extremely hard to balance.

2. Double under grip. Grab the keg by the chins with both hands under the bottom. Clean it to the shoulders, then readjust the hands to either a split grip or a parallel grip and press.

3. Split grip. Grab the keg with one hand under the bottom and one hand on the top chin. This is the most efficient way to lift a keg and it will balance best especially if it's only partially filled with water. Bring it to the shoulders and press. It will be over the head, but at a tilted angle. This helps it balance.

4. Knee kick. Grab it which ever way you like. Bring it up and as you begin to get it to the shoulders shove one leg under it and help kick it up with your knee as if you were going to kick a pair of dumbbells up to bench press them. Then set your grip and press.

5. Seated clean and press. Grab a bench that's relatively high or something you can sit on that takes your legs out of the movement. Then grab the barrel with a split grip and clean and press it. This makes the movement solely arm and shoulder dependent from moving the weight. It's also very heavy on the abs to stabilize as you press.

6. Crooked arm under. Tilt the barrel over, wrap one arm underneath as if you were holding a baby, grab the bottom by the chin with the other hand. Clean to shoulder, readjust your grip and press.

7. Clean the barrel one time any way you like. Then dependent on if you've been strict pressing or push pressing in the first six sets do the opposite on this set and then get as many reps as you can.

This ought to keep you busy and really work your shoulders, grip and everything else from head to toe.