ISSUE #84 - September 6th, 2019

ONE

STRENGTH - In order to set the new world record for natural bench press (no stupid contracting shirts or odd chest straps), power lifter Julius Maddox needed FIVE spotters, FOURTEEN 45-pound plates and a specially reinforced bar.   During 'Boss of Bosses VI', an annual lifting competition of the strongest men on earth (what, you didn't watch 'Boss of Bosses V'?) that took place last week, Maddox benched an absurd 739.6 pounds, which for those of us who lift, seems impossible. That's more than the weight of TWO 300 lb. presses on each side of the bar! The math makes my chest hurt. Also, huge credit to whoever put Samuel L. Jackson's speech from Unbreakable over the lifting footage. Here's the video if you want to see it.

TWO

 GENIUS - I don't always have brilliant ideas, but when I do, Netflix agrees with me and tells the world. Let me explain...  If you're like me, you probably repeat phrases like "do your homework" and "clean your room" to your kids roughly 5,000 times a day. On Tuesday, I finally reached my talking-to-myself limit, so I got creative and decided to put reminders to my kids in the one place I was 100% sure they'd see them: the Netflix home screen. Spoiler Alert: I got their attention. Then, I shared the idea on Twitter for other parents and I even had several call me the 'G' word... Yeah. Genius. THEN, Netflix shared the post on their main account with some cool applauding hands emojis and my parenting hack has now been validated by thousands of people. Check it out here.

THREE

SNACKS - We've reached a place in the diet/nutrition/fitness world where companies are now slamming together fads to try to create new fads out of nowhere. Intermittent Keto. Alkaline Atkins. Paleo Cleanses. Carnivore Enemas. It's nuts (I may have made up the last two). But there is one trend I can get behind.  And that trend is the number of products (bars, snacks) coming out that only use a few simple ingredients, instead of the dozens of long chemicals we've never heard of just to make what amounts to a protein candy bar. I recently got my hands on a Rise Bar, which is billed as the 'Simplest Protein Bar'. I tried the Almond Honey bar which only lists almonds, honey and whey protein as the ingredients. It was really sweet and really good and had 20g of protein. Here's their site. They have other flavors I'm looking forward to trying as well.

FOUR

BRUCE LEE - Bruce Lee's brief appearance in Quentin Tarantino's 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' has brought about a nice little revival of the action hero and martial artist's career. There was a time when I could list most of his movies and remember a few favorite scenes, but alas, no more.  If you're like me and want a refresher, I found the perfect Top 10 Bruce Lee Scenes Video (it has about 90 million views). It's only eight minutes and goes through some of his greatest fights. I forgot that one key to his appeal was that he had a sense of humor during his fights and rarely missed an opportunity to get you to crack a smile while he was cracking someone over the head. I enjoyed this.

FIVE

AN EXCELLENT QUOTE ABOUT FOCUS

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”   – Bruce Lee

Thanks for reading! - Jon  Questions? Ideas? Comments? E-mail me (reply to this e-mail) or hit me on Twitter HERE.   And don't forget to FORWARD THE FF5 to a friend! *  *(If you do, I'll send you an awesome "Mean" Joe Green bookmark)