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A few weeks ago I sat down with @jeremyknies from @banksjournal to shoot some photos and tell my story about how I ended up in LA, how I got connected with the banks crew and what got me into the health space. These guys have supported me along this whole journey and I’m super grateful to be a part of such an epic team. I also put together a Journal Jams playlist with a bunch of songs that I think encapsulate the changing headspace I move through on a weekly basis. You can find the link in my bio and if you make your way there, be sure to have a look around the site because the new holiday range is on point.

2 Rights & 2 Lefts from the weekend in a chlorinated pool.

Active Recovery. Often times when I discuss recovery methods with clients, the assumption is that recovery means to simply sit back, do nothing and wait for our body to repair itself and for energy levels to be restored. Many days this is what is needed but there are also activities that we can categorize as active recovery methods, which can speed up the pace of recovery, allowing you train, surf or party harder and more often. Here a couple of examples of what you can try:... Aerobic Work. Building your aerobic base, your ability to use oxygen efficiently, is probably one of the best things that you can do to improve your recovery time. This means long duration, low intensity exercise at a pace where you can comfortably hold a conversation or maintain nasal breathing. You could run, walk, bike, swim, yoga, stretch, dance or row and as long as your heart rate stays below 70% of your max, then you can consider it aerobic training and can also consider it to be active recovery. This helps you move the byproducts of more strenuous exercise out of your body, pumps nutrition into your body and obviously does great things for your cardiovascular health. Stress a different system of your body. My favorite way to do this is thermal stress. Cold plunges or saunas are a great way to stress your body, creating a favorable adaptation without overburdening it through more exercise. In fact, regular sauna use has even been shown to improve cardiovascular fitness and endurance in the absence of specific endurance training. If you don’t have a sauna, you can still get similar benefits by running a hot bath and soaking for a good 20-30 minutes, which can also build a nice sweat. Tai Chi. This is a practice that has stood the test of time, with its origins dating back over 700 years. Tai Chi develops endurance, increases bone density, improves coordination and balance and is intended to fill your body with energy by circulating chi throughout your system. Combining gentle movements with focused breath work, this form of exercise is a great way to recover actively from more strenuous types of exercise, providing more energy than is expended. YouTube has plenty of classes @ Venice

Here is a simple set up to help you get more range of motion out of your shoulders in less time. Most of the PAILs/RAILs setups I know work one side at a time. I love this setup for shoulder external rotation because you get twice the work done in half the time. If you have cranky shoulders, limited range of motion and want to create some more wiggle room in your capsule whilst improving the tissue quality and neuromuscular control, give this one a go.

Finding Balance Last night I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine about how finding balance in ones life is completely different from person to person based upon their circumstances and life goals. He’s an actor, who for the past 5 years, has been going hard working on a TV show and in this time has struggled to find what he believed to be a balanced lifestyle. He said that when he looked around at all of our friends, everyone seemed to be so good at keepin...g their shit together and keeping a healthy mix of work, rest and play. Over the course of the conversation and after delving into the different circumstances that all people on this earth have to deal with, he came to realize that his life wasn’t as out of balance as he previously thought and it required a shift in perception to be able to see this. 2 Forces There are two creative forces that govern the natural laws of our existence and the Chinese named these yin and yang. The yin and yang are in a constant dance, finding momentary periods of stillness, only to be shifted into flux again moments later. We can look at our actions and behaviors in this way, with our outward and expressive behaviors being considered expressions of yang energy and our inward or introspective behaviors being expressions of yin energy. When someone is seeking more balance in their life, usually it means that that they are spending too much time emanating either of these types of energies. Time Often times people feel out of balance because the construct of time that they are using to frame their situation is too small. To demonstrate what I mean by this, I want you think about some of the Northern European continents and how in the different seasons they can have up to 20 hours of darkness per day. If you were to visit Sweden for example in the Winter, coming from somewhere much closer to the equator, you might think that this is a completely unbalanced way to live. However, for the residents in that area, this is just a normal phenomena of the natural world which, for the person with a more expansive concept of time, they understand that this will be balanced out in the Summer by the same amount of

Many of us have been lead to believe that the solution for rolled forward and slumped shoulders is to simply pull them back and down. While this advice isn’t bad, there are still many more ways to keep your shoulders strong, mobile and consistently being challenged at their end range (which is where I think a large portion of your training should be done). Give this exercise a shot and let me know how you go in the comments below!