How Did I Build Muscle in High School?

The short answer to that “how did I build muscle in high school?” is… I didn’t, but allow me to expand on that. As an athlete who played almost exclusively team sports, I was used to focusing most of my time working with my team. Whether it was tennis, baseball, basketball or soccer, you were constantly practicing with your teammates, and even though you can work on skills independently, there are only so many hours in the day. Before the age of social media, you had far fewer influencers in your life (for better or for worse) so you were heavily dependent on your coaches and parents.

Fortunately for me, I was lifting weights at an extremely early age with my mother. She would take me to the gym and we would perform aerobics at home, but I’d never touch anything heavy or load up barbells with plates. I wouldn’t use selectorized strength equipment either, not until my high school soccer coach brought us into the school’s modest weight room to use the leg press machine. My father, who was a very competitive athlete himself, focused more on spending time “on the court.” That could mean hundreds of lay-ups and free-throws every day, lots of batting practice and volleying on the tennis court.

Hungry on the far right

Mar122018

How to Make Poke at Home

To watch the video on our YouTube page, click HERE!

We’ve always loved Hawaiian food; from the fresh acidity and presence of tons of fish in poke to the carb-heavy and gravy laden comfort dishes like loco moco, Hawaiian food is diverse and delicious. While we have tasted Hawaiian cuisine throughout the US, we knew our familiarity was lacking without a trip to Hawaii, so we went on an adventure to the big island.

Hungry’s homemade loco moco and poke were always good, but after learning a few secrets in Hawaii, the recipes are complete. If you know us, you know we love sharing food, so here is Hungry’s recipe for poke. Actually, here is a real-life video of Chris preparing poke at home. It doesn’t get much realer than that, other than being there with him!

Feb282018

Master of Modification: Adaptive Athlete and CrossFit Sensation Lindsay Hilton

This is a guest post from Carole Klein. She is the manager of social media and content for Unique Fitness Concepts located at their headquarters in Vernon Hills, IL. She has a B.S. in exercise physiology and is a fitness industry expert with more than 20 years of experience as a competitor and personal trainer.

It might be tempting to think that being born without arms or legs would pretty much make it impossible to become a fitness inspiration to the entire world. However, that’s exactly what incredible adaptive athlete Lindsay Hilton has done. Hilton first grabbed people’s attention when a video of her working out went positively viral in 2016. Since then, she’s become a CrossFit sensation and a serious inspiration to people all over the world.

She continues to influence athletes and fitness enthusiasts all over the world as she sets (and accomplishes) new goals, and we personally can’t wait to see what she does next. Here, we’ll take a closer look at Lindsay Hilton and her amazing journey as an athlete. We’ll touch on some of her most noteworthy achievements. We’ll go over a few useful lessons we can all learn by watching Lindsay set the fitness world on fire, as well.

Feb232018

How to Keep Up Your Workout Routine When Traveling (MOTIVATION!)

This doesn’t include one of our notorious hotel workouts. This doesn’t have a ton of exercises and numbers. You won’t find any programming here: No sets, reps, rest, etc. This is strictly motivational and completely intended to help you remember that you can make up as many excuses as you want, but you can also take them away. It is all on you.

Feb142018

Meditation All About Love

Happy Valentine’s Day (or: Single Awareness Day)! To speak plainly, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have that special someone in your life. Love is not always about another person, and even when it is, it doesn’t necessarily need to be romantic. You can love your dog, or your friend, or your coworker, or yourself! Love doesn’t even need to be directed towards a being. Love can just be love. It doesn’t need to be cute or mushy or gross. Love at its barest form is pure and unabashed–without flowers or chocolates or obligations. It’s a powerful force that binds the world together (ignore the slight Star Wars reference). Let’s try just taking a moment today to focus on love and find what good it can do for you. Below is a short meditation all about love to get you in the right mindset today.

Feb112018

How To Take Care of Yourself

This was originally going to be a “review” of my recent trip to High Five Hand Therapy, but let’s talk about something much more important. I think we’re all really bad, or out of touch, when it comes to recognizing our physical and mental/emotional well-being. There are so many people who try to talk themselves into their condition being worse than it is and there are others who try to convince themselves that something serious isn’t so bad. As a result of our extremism in this realm, we often end up ignoring our issues and failing to deal with them properly. At the end of the day, that lack of awareness turns into negligence and eventually makes our problems worse, often creating even more problems.

As a professional in this field, this is always on my mind, but it can be hard to communicate with clients since so many people can take it the wrong way. Instead of being reasonable and level-headed, in an effort to create a sound plan to reach a goal, most people take offense to any kind of feedback and in the end, they end up suffering more. We’re all victims of it, to a certain degree, myself included. This was made aware to me, or more aware, during and after my trip to this therapy spot in Garden Grove, CA, which is really far from where we live. Still, since health is an important investment, I decided to take the time and money to go, and I’m glad I did.

Feb042018

How to Measure Your Fitness

Hungry and I make goals every month in a few different categories: Personal, Hungry & Fit, Home, and Fun. This month, one of my personal goals was to create and follow a training program that would help me with the upcoming Tough Mudder we have in a month. Yeah, probably left it a little bit late to start training, but better late than never, right?! Well, as you know from being a loyal subscriber, we are both personal trainers. So in all rights, I could make myself a training plan–I’ve done it many times before. However, even trainers need trainers and I happen to be married to a pretty fantastic one. I whined about making one so he took a pad of paper and drew one up for me instead. Perks!

The first part of this training plan is measuring my fitness aka performing an assessment of sorts. Luckily, since I am a trainer and I know my away around a gym and loads of exercises, Hungry doesn’t have to stand over me and watch. It’s good to do this before and after a training program to test that program’s effectiveness. So if you’re gearing up to start a new training plan (perhaps from us), make sure to do this assessment first.

Jan142018

The Perfect Diet

The perfect diet: a holy grail we have all been seeking for years. Well, turns out–SPOILER: there isn’t one! The purpose of this post is to encourage you not to listen to zealots, but to science. And even more than that, decide on your goal and then decide how you’re going to tackle your nutrition. We want to see you succeed.

Jan032018

Easy Recipes and Workouts for a Healthy New Year

Happy New Year! This is the time to set the tone for the year--to make smart goals, decide on an intention, and kick things off on the right foot. Of course, this isn’t the only time of year to set yourself straight, but it’s a great opportunity. However, this time of year can be daunting–there’s all this pressure on becoming the “new you” and that’s not exactly a straightforward laid-out plan. There could be a thousand possibilities of what to do for fitness or what eating style to go for.

Let us help you in a small way. We’ve gathered five easy healthy (and delicious) recipes as well as five workouts you can do from the comforts of your home. Not sure what gym to subscribe to? No problem. Start with these home workouts first and then go from there. The recipes listed below range from snacks to meals and are all very simple (it’s rare to find a complicated recipe on our blog–I don’t have the patience for it).

Dec212017

Chocolate Chip Meringues

A vivid memory for me as a kid is getting a tin of these fluffy white things (probably from Trader Joes) and delighting to find that they were crunchy, but more importantly–delicious! I’m kind of scared to think back on how many I would eat in one sitting. Yikes. Well, fast forward to today and I now know what they are! Meringues. Beautiful, mind-bending, mouth-watering meringues. That amazing dessert that feels at the same time you’re both eating air and crunching into a godly snack. I’ve never made meringues before. If you would’ve asked me, I thought that the recipe must be really difficult. Let’s face it: I was intimidated! Such a fancy schmancy dessert and who was I to presume to try to do it?

That is, until I saw Skinnytaste’s instagram post of her “Black and White Chocolate Chip Clouds” and realized that maybe the recipe wasn’t over my head. I had a good friend’s cookie bake coming up and I said to myself, “You know what! I’m going to try it!” And I did. And it was a success! I made chocolate chip meringues and I cannot wait to make them again. And guess what? These are a healthy alternative to the normal heavy cookie. Now that I feel comfortable with the recipe, I want to really make them my own. I’m not sure what the hardest part was (the recipe is so easy)–separating the egg whites or waiting for them to be cooked. Yeah, that’s the difficulty level we’re talking here, folks. Just look at the recipe below!