Category: fitness

When we put this picture up earlier, we forgot to highlight the most important part — she is heavier after she slimmed down! Most people just do not understand this — fat takes up more volume than muscle. When you exercise properly and emphasize lean tissue gain, your fat percentage goes down and the amount of muscle you have goes up. You look better but you are also stronger than before.
This means that your scale may be lying to you! Just because your weight is going up doesn’t mean you’re getting fat! And for all of you that just want to be thin, just having the scale go down can be a very bad thing! Losing muscle can make your weight go down and that can cause a lot of hard to solve problems like having your metabolism crash.

“We should only be positive. We shouldn’t criticize others.” Take a look at this picture on the left. Look at the label. See anything wrong? The number of carbs listed is 12g and protein is listed as 1gm. Now there are 4 calories in one gram of carbs or proteins. So 12+1=13 and 13×4=15, right? Wait, what? 13×4 doesn’t equal 15, it’s 52. So it’s 52 calories, not 15. The label is wrong.
How do you feel about this? How would you feel if you were trying to lose fat while drinking something like this and found you couldn’t lose weight? Would you like that?
Tell me the truth, wouldn’t you want someone to point this out? Well then how do you do that without being critical? How do you point that out and “stay positive”?
The answer is you don’t. We should point out things that are wrong. That IS positive. Not calling out what is wrong is weak.
At Formosa Fitness and Kettlebell Taiwan, we want you to be strong. We want you to know what’s good and bad. And honestly, don’t you want to know these things? Don’t you want to know when you’re being mislead? I would.
We hope that through reading our articles and following our stuff, you can become a better consumer, someone that is able to discriminate between the good and the bad. So keep your eyes open and keep training hard.

By Dave Chesser
The difference between powerlifting and strength training isn’t widely understood. The difference is strength training is done for beginners with the sole purpose of getting them strong. Powerlifting is joining competitions where you compete in bench, barbell squat, and deadlift. If you aren’t competing, then you aren’t a powerlifter. There’s no need to say “we aren’t powerlifters” if you aren’t competing because no one would think you were anyway.
There seems to be a serious effort in the so-called strength and conditioning field to avoid getting strong on the basic lifts like overhead barbell press, barbell back squat, deadlift, and barbell bench press. The reason is simply this – most trainers are not doing these movements themselves and do not know how to progress them, let alone train clients with them.
Instead, what we’re seeing is a type of dong-yi-dong mentality where you can pretend that rack pulls are the same as deadlifts (they are not), quarter squats are the same as full barbell squats, and half range bench presses as the same as full range bench presses. Many trainers are using movements with a very small range of motion and telling people they’re the same but they clearly are not, as anyone who has done full range movements will tell you.
Many times assistance moves are substituted for the major movements and that’s a huge mistake. The assistance moves only exist to assist the major lifts, not replace them. If you as a trainer are avoiding the major lifts then you’re doing yourself and your clients a huge disservice because the only way to measure strength to any kind of standard is through lifts that have an established standard and that’s the major barbell lifts.
Powerlifting has actual standards for their lifts or the lifts don’t count. If the hip isn’t lower than the knee, the squat doesn’t count. No one cares what a great athlete you were in high school or what you quarter squatted one day in the gym with horrible form. No cares about the deadlift you think you did where your hips didn’t extend at the top or the PR you sent in bench press where you bounced the bar off your chest and had your buddy do half the work in helping you rack it.
So while we aren’t powerlifters (again, something that doesn’t need to be said), the standards set by the powerlifting community serve our purpose in helping us get strong. Without standards, we have no way of knowing if we’re getting strong or not.
In my opinion, trainers that want to talk about strength and conditioning need to stop avoiding the issue and stop reading endless amounts of articles about training and actually spend time under the bar getting experience. Anything less is a great disservice to the clients!

by Dave Chesser
I saw this written about our kettlebells on the Internet. Someone said they wanted to buy one but they were afraid they would get hurt.
Something that we have to keep in mind is that if a thing is powerful, then there is some element of danger to it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be powerful, would it?
Think back to toys made for babies. These toys are very safe: no rough edges, very soft, very flexible. But kids soon grow out of them and want something they can do more with. Why? Because the soft, safe toys are boring and prevent the child’s growth and they can sense that.

Workout equipment is the same. If you learn how to use it, some equipment can be very useful and help you transform your body. Sure, if you use it incorrectly and do something crazy with it, then you might get hurt. But it’s the potential to get more out of it that gives it tremendous benefit. Don’t try to do something with the kettlebell that you aren’t ready for and you’ll be fine.
The fact that you have to learn how to use the kettlebell is seen by some people are a negative aspect to it, but this is not how winners think. Winners seen the benefit to that potential downside — the fact that you could hurt yourself with it means it has tremendous power and when you learn how to use it, you’ve gained real skill that makes you different from the people that are afraid. Do you see the difference in mindset between those two reactions?
So don’t be afraid of something that thousands and thousands of people have learned how to do safely. Conquer your fear, don’t let it conquer you.

By Dave Chesser
Yesterday saw the publication of the first training plan I’ve written for the public on 17Fit and I need to address who should do plans and who should not.

I get it – a lot of people go to gyms to play around and if that’s what people want to do then that’s fine. A lot of people go to watch TV, play on the machines, use the sauna, etc. In fact, most of the people that join don’t even go and that’s fine, too. I have no interest in talking to folks like that because I have nothing to say to them. They aren’t my crowd and training plans are wasted on them.

However, people that look at Formosa Fitness and see that we have women that do pullups and deadlift 100kg eighteen times from the ground and wonder how we do it should look at the training program I wrote yesterday. That is how we do it. People that see our members compete in the Tactical Strength Challenge and wonder how those people were able to do that should also look at the plan because all of our members that joined the competition were on a plan like that.

One of the biggest problems I see in the fitness community is the disconnect between fitness goals and workouts. Apparently people want a certain fitness result then they go into the gym and do random nonsense in hopes that they will eventually get there. It’s like starting at the bottom of the map and wandering all over the map until you reach your destination. That’s insane. Why not just plan out a route to get there? Would you try to bake a chocolate cake without a recipe?

This is one reason I watch videos of people lifting and we don’t see a lot of people getting stronger. How many female fitness celebrities do you see squatting or deadlifting an empty bar? Most of them, right? Why aren’t they getting stronger? Where is the progression? They’re giving you advice on fitness but where is the proof that their methods work?

The difference between people that are making steady progress and those that are not is usually due to a lack of a training plan or sticking to one.

Publishing the training plans is my attempt to help those of you outside Formosa Fitness that want serious results. I understand that you aren’t hearing this advice from many other people in the community and that’s fine, too. Hopefully in the future more people will catch on and some of you will lead the way. If that’s you, then you’re my kind of athlete and I hope you find our stuff useful.

So the choice is yours. If someone just wants to play around then that’s fine but if you’re serious about getting fit then it’s time to get serious about what you’re doing. I hope you find the plans useful and we welcome your questions. Have a great weekend.