Matt Struve Fitness - Shoulders and Arms

Here is my current shoulders and arms routine.

The whole thing takes about 45 minutes. I split these muscles up into 4 main super sets. At the end, all 3 heads of the deltoid, upper and lower triceps, and inner and outer biceps will be completely fatigued. I do this twice a week for a period of 3 months. Then switch up the exercises!

I hope you enjoy! Leave a comment!

Matt Struve Fitness - Chest and Back

This is my current chest and back routine.

The whole workout takes about 45 minutes to an hour. I split it up into 2 main power exercises, then 2 super sets. At the end, the entire range of the chest and the full muscle complex of the back will be be completely fatigued.

I do this twice a week for a period of 3 months, then switch it up! So I hope you enjoy.

Leave a comment to let me know what you think!

Love for Science - The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto Agency

SUICIDE MISSION? The core of the superconducting solenoid magnet at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time — perhaps too much time — to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.

The collider was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them together into primordial fireballs.

For the record, as of the middle of September, CERN engineers hope to begin to collide protons at the so-called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts in December and then ramp up the energy until the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece and then, after a short Christmas break, real physics can begin.

Maybe.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in the spring of 2008. It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the collider for more than a year.

Dr. Nielsen called that “a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours.”

He agreed that skepticism would be in order. After all, most big science projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have gone through a period of seeming jinxed. At CERN, the beat goes on: Last weekend the French police arrested a particle physicist who works on one of the collider experiments, on suspicion of conspiracy with a North African wing of Al Qaeda.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.

Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

Dr. Nielsen is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.”

Another of Dr. Nielsen’s projects is an effort to show how the universe as we know it, with all its apparent regularity, could arise from pure randomness, a subject he calls “random dynamics.”

Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true in the physics of Newton or Einstein. According to physicists, all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Sirens of Titan,” all of human history turns out to be reduced to delivering a piece of metal roughly the size and shape of a beer-can opener to an alien marooned on Saturn’s moon so he can repair his spaceship and go home.

Whether the collider has such a noble or humble fate — or any fate at all — remains to be seen. As a Red Sox fan my entire adult life, I feel I know something about jinxes.

Matt Struve - Time for a Supershake Update!

Time for a Supershake Update!

I hope you all are doing wonderfully!

Some good news! Soon after posting the supershake videos, I learned a ton of you guys have started making them! You can’t imagine how happy I am about this. Starting your day off this way offers such a huge blast of vitality to your health and daily endeavors. Stay with it! New invigoration, inspiration and direction of lifestyle will follow suit if it hasn’t started already!

Okay. In the last few weeks, I’ve received a number of messages asking if I’ve modified my shake at all. The answer is, yes I have. So quite a few people replied requesting me to post all the ingredients I use now. Hence this blog entry.

Let’s take a closer look into the supershake, see the ingredient list that makes it tick, and I’ll discuss the latest changes I’ve done as well as a few plans I have for the near future.

Before I get on with it, I just want to say, that since my friend Baard turned me on to making them, which was back in what… late March?, I’ve only missed ONE day. I’ve traveled 6 times since then. Thank god for portable blenders, and ziplocks! Haha I bring this up, because staying consistent is the key!

Our bodies and psychologies adapt to dietary change. Be it a new vitamin supplement, or a new car for that matter. After a short while we get used to the amazement that stuck out so loudly at first. With nutrition upgrades, this is especially true. The contrast of health and new vitality you feel after the first week of introducing new healthiness* Well you know what? I am more than happy to report, I still feel ALL those contrasts that I did since day ONE (okay, day 3 to be honest).

For instance, I’ve NEVER been a morning person. My whole life has been a habit of going to bed after midnight, and waking at the last minute to get my day going.

Total change in the last 6 months…

Since drinking this shake consistently, my morning routine is completely altered. Going to bed 3 hours earlier and waking up 3 hours before I used to. Before I would hit up the gym after work. Yes, I’ve tried exercising in the morning before, but was always too tired or unmotivated to switch my routine. Now with this new excess of energy in the morning, there’s a surplus of energy to exercise with. It’s so perfect. Now the rest of my day is completely opened up for other activities, projects, bonding with friends and loved ones. Like I said, the effect of the supershake hit me intensely about 3 days after starting. And seriously, the high continues to last all day long.

Ya can’t go wrong. Okay, let’s discuss the ingredients.

The main problem comes down to cost; let’s be honest, looking at everything in total, it can be a bummer at first glance. But if you add it all up, then average the cost between 60 days, it comes out to be a pretty reasonable breakfast. And with the benefits, and how full you are after drinking it? So worth it!

At first I paid through the roof for everything, shopping at Whole Foods and other local stores. Since then I’ve smartened up, purchasing online and saving big. At first I thought the price was because they were name brand products. Nope. Just a retail price-hike local stores typically do to make their ends.

And trust me, you don’t want substitute these ingredients for other brands that say they contain the same stuff. Stick with what has worked for me and 1000’s of other people! Stick to the brands below, they are the best for the body to assimilate. You can do your own research on how all the ingredients work, or wait until I post a blog about it, but I promise you will feel 5+ years younger by replacing your breakfasts with this shake. And it’s filling. You’ll remember what it’s like to truly LIVE.

WORTH EVERY PENNY SPENT

Okay, here is a list to the prices I now pay for the ingredients. It’s so much less than what I paid at whole foods locally. And again, everything will last an average of about 2 months give or take depending on the product. Here are the catagories! (optional add means I’ve been experimenting, but was not part of the original formula)

Super Foods – The Main Deal

· New Chapter, Berry Green Powder, 360 g

$53.97

· Sambazon, Organic Acai Powder, 90 g

$10.59

· (optional add) Navitas Naturals, Goji Power, Goji Berries, 16 oz

$16.50

· (optional add) Navitas Naturals, Maca Power, Raw Maca Powder, 16 oz

$18.71

· (optional add) Source Naturals Blue Green Algae

$28.04

· (optional add) Source Naturals Spirulina Powder – 16oz

$20.90

EFA’s and Omegas

· Hemp Nuts - Manitoba Harvest, Hemp Seed Nut, Shelled Hemp Seed, 8 oz

$6.89

· Flax - FLAX USA Brand Organic Cold Milled Flax from Costco

$9.99

Protein and Milk

· NutriBiotic, Vanilla Rice Protein, 3lb. (1.36 kg)

$29.97

· Stay away from DAIRY!! So bad! Read why here! Instead I switched to "So Delicious" Brand - Cultured Coconut Milk Yogurt

· Whole Grain Rice Milk or Almond Milk – (I buy mine at Trader Joes) Almond milk has half the calories, and when it comes to grains or rice, "whole grain" anything is better than the alternative.

Raw fruits

· Organic bananas & blueberries

(I scratched the strawberries. Other than flavor, there was no real benefit.)

Steel Cut Oats

· I took them out. I've been learning about food combination and proper digestion. The more you can minimize bad combinations, the more your body will assimilate the nutrients. Plus, the oats were originally added to thicken the shake, adding to the caloric total. Since I've been trying to lean it down, while adding super foods, they had to be scratched. :)

There you go! I really hope you guys check this out, and experience what has totally blown my mind and body away in the last month, and it STILL feels like it’s only getting better and better!

I mean it!

Matt

Ps... here's part 1 of the original video... will probably update another one soon!

Matt Struve - 10 Tricks to Reboot your Brain

By Ann Hettinger

Ever walk into a room and forget why you entered? Or completely space out during an important meeting at work? It's frustrating, but usually normal.

Your brain is naturally primed to wander whenever it can, according to a joint study by Harvard University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Using MRI, researchers found that brain regions responsible for "task-unrelated thought" (that is, daydreaming or mind wandering) are almost constantly active when the brain is at rest or performing a task that doesn't require concentration.

Fortunately, brain experts say it's possible to corral that brainpower, filter out distractions, and master any task by improving your concentration. Here are their top tips for refocusing during key moments when your mind starts meandering, but shouldn't.

Get organized
If you have several to-dos, decide what to tackle first, and clear all other projects off your desk and computer screen. "Out of sight, out of mind applies," Kane says. "Get rid of memos, e-mails, and anything else that reminds you you're behind."

And go easy on your cubicle's decor. "Even family photos are potential thought stealers," Kane adds, because they're people you're prone to worry about.

Participate
If you daydream during meetings, challenge yourself by thinking of questions and actively joining the discussion, suggests Jonathan W. Schooler, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. You may miss a moment if you're formulating a question, but you'll stay focused on the current topic.

Tie a string on the steering wheel
When you think about the same things during your commute — anticipating the day's workload, or what to cook for dinner — your brain begins to associate the car with zoning out, says Kane. A novel, visual cue such as a colored string or dashboard sticker can snap you out of your "dream-driving" habit.

Play a game
Those involving counting and geography are great ways for kids to pass the time en route — for good reason: The contests use items that you should be aware of while driving. Try tallying all the states represented by the license plates of the cars in front of you.

Take a break
Take time-outs to process the material; mentally recap plot points or a character's motive, for example. "Periodically think over what you've read — it can improve comprehension, probably because it reduces mind wandering," Schooler says.

Go backward
If you glossed over a few paragraphs, read them in reverse — reordering small packets of information can sometimes change how much of it you absorb. It may feel odd at first, but the extra effort required will force your brain back into focusing.

Join a club
A little peer pressure to finish a book by a certain date can go a long way, especially if you're expected to talk about the content. Budget the number of pages you'll need to read daily, and if you own the book, write notes in the margin and mark meaningful passages to boost both concentration and comprehension.

Get it off your chest
Talk about your worries with a friend or family member, either in person or on the telephone, to clear your head. Writing down your thoughts may be as effective as saying them out loud: List ways to address the problem and then move on, recommends Eric Klinger, PhD, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who has studied thought patterns during daydreams. "Committing a plan to paper helps put the problem on the back burner, so you can shift your attention to other things," he explains.

Meditate
Meditation, a proven stress reliever, may also let you tune out distractions, found recent research. Amishi Jha, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, studied attention control in people before and after they learned mindfulness meditation (sitting quietly for 30 minutes a day, focusing on breathing; when the subjects noticed their minds drifting, they gently guided their thoughts back to their breath).

After 8 weeks, they showed significant improvements at "orienting," or staying on task and quickly refocusing their thinking after being distracted. "Meditation trains you to put your attention where you want it and make sure it stays there," Jha says.

Matt Struve - Star Gazing the Right Way Will Heal Your Spirit

Not many things that can fix the soul like laying on your back on a dark night and looking straight out into God.

I remember standing in the middle of Yellowstone state park back in, must have been Febuary of 2000, during a meteor shower. Just standing there, looking at all the shooting stars flare off overhead. All of the sudden of one of the biggest meteors I’ve ever seen blazed into the atmosphere right in front of me. All the colors of heat were visible and I could actually hear it burning away. It was absolutely breathtaking. Soon after it was consumed, I remember being hit by an intense progression of sensations I hadn’t remembered ever feeling before. Just out of the blue. First was an awkward feeling of my body sticking out like a sore thumb on the surface of the planet. It was such a strange yet intriguing feeling! It felt like my body was sticking out like a pin on a sea mine.



I felt gravity pulling me toward the planet’s epicenter far below me. Interesting. I was this pin sticking out held in place by this force of energy, pulling me toward its center. I felt the people on the other side of the planet the same way. Pins sticking out on the other end, suctioned into the ground by the same epicenter. How I could've missed this sensation over the years?

Then a number of feelings started racing through my awareness at once. I remember looking up and realizing I was looking OUT not up. I remember smiling at my own ignorance, how my sense of direction has been so two dimensional the whole time. Up, down, left, right, front, back, but hardly any time feeling the depth of ‘inward’ and ‘outward’. What hit me was a feeling of directional relativity, a new spatial outlook. No matter where one looks out at space on this planet, they are simply looking out, and if you let your mind reflect on this, it starts to feel quite surreal.

That time in Yellowstone, I was standing on a vista. I could look out and see a pretty wide horizon line. It really hit me at that moment. The “feeling” of the roundness of the planet I stuck out from. The feeling that just beyond that horizon, it gradually curves downward over a vast distance! Wow, it really felt more round like a huge ball I was standing on, than ever before. Even more intense was the feeling of spaciousness that lay beyond its curve. I felt this ball of a planet zooming through this MASSIVE open space!

The thing that really brought it all together was the bright meteor. It’s fiery tail indirectly made me feel a sensation I hadn’t felt before. The depth of our atmosphere. From the moment it lit up, was the moment it entered the biosphere. I watched it slow down through the thickness of what we call invisible air. Like a bullet shooting into water. It’s supersonic at first, but the liquid’s thickness slows it down fast. Same thing. That triggered this new range of depth perception I had always missed before.

It was absolutely amazing. How can things so obvious to all of us remain so overlooked!? I remember reeling at how such a simple observation could start such a chain reaction of epiphanies.

I also remember star gazing with a few friends one clear night a few years back. As we gazed into and felt space’s visible depth in front of us, one friend suggested, “The answers we are *really* looking for lie behind that blackness between the stars.” It lies beyond the visible threshold. Maybe the human eye can’t see that far, but the mind’s eye can.

This really made sense during a weekend hiking trip to a place called Serene Lake out beyond Mount Hood. It was a monstrous hike on the way up. At one point we lost the trail under a huge snow blanket. We had to use intuition to find the trail again. Haha. Good times (in hind sight).

The hike back on the other hand, was excellent. At one point we took a break by this brook. It was so peaceful. That perfect summer day. The evergreens swaying in a gentle breeze, bugs lit up by the sun flying in the distance, fluffy clouds floating by. It was perfect. All of us were quiet, taking it in. I pulled out a clif bar, sat on a stone near the brook, took a bite and looked into a big patch of peat moss near my feet. At first, I only saw the peat moss. But as my eyes defocused, all the movements of the bugs came into view. So many of them! Now the peat moss was HUGE to me. My mind zoomed into one of the bugs, crawling through the various peat moss tunnels. The twig next to it felt like a huge fallen redwood!

Then I turned to a fly that landed nearby. As it rested, mindlessly rubbing its front legs together, I wondered if it could see me. I wondered if any of them could see me, my arms or head. I was about 5 feet away. How far could they actually see? I raised my hand and slowly brought it toward the fly. About 3 feet away, it flew away. Who knows if it saw my whole body the whole time, but what I wondered was what the blur beyond its eyesight looked like? Was it a solid grey, or white? Maybe some other blended non-descript colors? Haha, I bet that fly took it for granted though. I bet it thought the grey, blurry, “vision boundary” was a ceiling in its narrow reality. Hmm, the same way most of us reduce the blackness of space as a ceiling?

Now you’re a fly. All of the sudden, a big strange looking object slowly emerges out of that grey blur ceiling! And as it takes visual shape like a huge space craft, with a large center body, five smaller cylinders protruding in different directions, it continues forcefully moving closer and closer. Better fly away! Now imagine if that fly could not only conceive of what that huge object was attached to beyond it... a human body, but that there were others sitting nearby. Not only that, there was a city called Portland about 70 miles further away! And it was only a small section on a huge planet, held in orbit position by a giant nuclear ball of fire!

So what about our own vision boundry? We can see pretty far away, comparatively, but not that far. Sure we can make things like Hubble telescopes, but even it still reveals a ceiling of blackness between the galaxy clusters it CAN see. So what about Hubble’s vision boundry? Is relying on vision a boundry in and of itself? Hmm.

“What’s behind the blackness?”, it makes you wonder doesn’t it? If Portland lies beyond the fly’s vision, what lies beyond ours? Certainly not something related to our human world. That’s human reductionism. What lies beyond is assuredly more of the body of God! The spiritual proof that drives me forward! Higher complex structures inconceivable to any relatable pattern our senses have experienced on this petri-dish of a globe. So amazing.

Below is a picture of the known universe. What you are looking at is a massively “tele”scopic illustration. Strings of galaxy clusters, none of their celestial boundaries physically touching, yet bound together by forces still mysterious to the best of scientific minds.



Now, here is a picture of a cluster of nerve cells. A “micro”scopic photo of strings of cells held together by forces still theoretically analyzed by our most brilliant minds.



As you can see, there are obvious pattern layers in how God’s body has stretched out through this dimension.

So again, are you only looking up? You would be if the world was still flat like it was 600 years ago *wink*. But it isn’t. It’s round. Remember, you are looking “out” each and every time. Up = out. And down = toward.

Ask yourself, when you look out into space, do you feel its depth? If I went 25 something years before it really dawned on me, I have to imagine how many others haven’t felt it. Perhaps conceptualized it from movies, but I’m talking about really feeling it. I believe only a few people really do, perhaps most astronomers. To the majority of us, s[ace has the same feeling as a domed ceiling, with white dots speckled all over it. Seriously, how many people do you know that really FEEL the depth to space.

Remember those days when you can see the moon and the sun in the same sky? Have you ever felt how the moon is closer to you than the sun? Yet they’re both about the same size? That’s because the sun is that much bigger, and that much farther away! Same realization and feeling for the stars behind the sun. You can really see them, but they’re there. What about a clear night when you can see the Milky Way? Did you realize you were looking edge-wise at one of the spiral arms of our galaxy? AMAZING! This photo below is a 360 degree compilation photo of our milky way taken from an observatory. It captured the galaxies nucleus in that photo! There are only a few places left on the planet that you can see the Milky Way’s nucleus with the naked eye. How exciting is that? How inspirational would that be??



How amazing is that photo?! How 3Dimensional! You can feel how much further away that spiral arm of the milky way is from the planets horizon line!!

So, how exactly can star gazing spiritually heal you? It can if you gaze out with enough of an open mind, with enough open sensory, and allow the elegance to emotionally resonate within you. Though insignificant in the size of what our eyes see, we are vastly significant in the grand truth of existence. You yourself are a infinite universe to intelligent life within you. Feel it! Your existence itself is the admission ticket to enter the infinite mind and soul of God. What spiritually heals your mind, is the same thing that can physically heal your muscles. Stretching them. Star gazing, space feeling, or what I like to call God feeling, stretching the muscle fibers of your soul -- vibrationally moving your mind, in a dimensionally intimate manner, closer to God’s own. Reflecting on and ‘feeling’ it’s size, how it stretches out, pushing your governor’s limits.

It heals the spirit when you truly realize you are looking outward into the body of God.

All of this is to help you unlock what holds your sensory back, so you can *really* feel the Body of God you exist within. That’s what this is all about. AWAKENING!

I just LOVE this stuff!

Ahh, and last but not least, comedian Joe Rogan, a really cynical guy, but quite hilarious at the same time. I think we can all relate with him. Here is his humorous look into how we all take space for granted.



May the Force of this amazing multiversed body of God be with you,

Matt Struve

PS - I think one of most amazing ways of entering this state of cosmic appreciation is meditation! Not just any old relaxation though, a technique to open the doors beyond ego and human perspective, to enter a realm of heart centered awareness and intuition driven sensory expansion... The meditation I use does just that. Message me if you want to know more.

Matt Struve - A thought about wellness...

The ritual of eating is one of the most intimate encounters we have with our world; where what we take in becomes part of our body.

But other experiences are equally important, such as emotional and mental balance, regular physical activity, the well-being of our environment and ongoing life reflection and spiritual growth.

Have you been meditating lately?

Slow down for a second & consider how aware you are in each of these areas. :)

Namaste~