NELSON LOPES
World Champion in Fitness & BodyBuilding Made In Portugal
Nelson Lopes is a well-known World Champion in Fitness around the World.
At a first sight, for his more than evident abs and outstanding physique.
Born into a life of fitness, his skills in sports such as gymnastics, swimming, football, judo, and mixed martial arts have been his most potential sports to build his extremely good looking physique and mindset.
Unfortunately, life took him onto a “pause” due to a serious knee injury.
This made him rethink about stopping from playing sports and thinking about his approach to training. After a positive full physique recovery, Nelson started to develop more himself on strength training over his other sports.
Nelson has been constantly moving from France to Spain and, recently also moved to the UK where he has worked as a Personal Trainer in high level specialized gyms.
Not less important, we must also highlight that due to his perfect balance both in hard work and mindset he is now become a figure competitor and a worldwide Top Model.
The relation between building your body (bodybuilding) and your state of mind.
Bodybuilding as name says means building your body, and it can be any kind of exercise. Bodybuilding is not just necessarily pushing weights and competing in bodybuilding shows, “it’s a state of mind”. Thru “bodybuilding” or building your body with any kind of exercise you can achieve self confidence, health improvements and longevity.
For me this is the ultimate form of meditation. Meditation by most people’s standards is the act of sitting still and controlling one’s emotions and strengthening the mind.
The reason why I consider this an act of meditation is because to truly obtain the physique of your dreams you must be disciplined, work hard, and be patient and learn how to be in tune with ones self patience, discipline and self reflection are two of the main things that are taught to new meditation students when they are starting their meditative journey.
How this psychologically effects is in a couple of ways:
The act of stress on your body makes it easier and easier for your body to deal with other outside stress sources as you become mentally and physically stronger.
Being consistent for years on end teaches you patience and that the end goal is not going to come easy and this can be applied to every aspect of life. Bodybuilding teaches you that the end goal is not what we live for.
In bodybuilding there is no true end goal. It is a constant process of work and discipline and this teaches you to ENJOY the process rather than wish for the goal.
The better you understand how your body reacts to stimulus the better bodybuilder you become, this skill carries over two fold in other aspects in life.
Therefor bodybuilding strengthens you psychologically sometimes more than it even strengthens you physically. It teaches consistency, perseverance, dedication, determination, patience and an overall appreciation of life.
Bodybuilding has been the largest most influential indirect source of wisdom I have ever come across.
No matter how big or small your fitness goals are, living the bodybuilding lifestyle can help propel you toward your goals that much faster and make them a reality.
Whether you plan on, or have already engaged in, lifting weights or any kind of exercise to improve your overall health and enhance your body composition by adding mass and/or stripping away body fat, one thing is for sure – you are, in one way or another, “a bodybuilder.”
No matter what your fitness goals may be … to compete locally, to compete nationally in hopes of obtaining a pro card, to just simply lift weights, cycling, playing soccer, doing group classes in order to build up a skinny/shapeless body and feel better about yourself, or to gain some muscle and lose some excess fat for health reasons, living the bodybuilding lifestyle can help propel you towards your goals that much faster and make them a reality.
When I say “bodybuilding lifestyle”, I am talking about the many big and small aspects that help to create and maintain a healthy way of living cornered around correct exercise, eating, and recuperation. The quality of work you perform and the success you obtain in the gym will also reflect on the quality of your life outside of the gym, and vice versa. Each one benefits the other, and a lack of attention in one area can easily spill over and affect the outcome in the other areas of your life.
Your health is your life, and bodybuilding is one of the number one ways to improve your personal health, allowing you to acquire and enjoy the most that every day has to offer.
What’s Entailed In Living The Bodybuilding Lifestyle?
In order to get the most out of bodybuilding and to reach your fitness goals, certain variables (such as diet, training, and recuperation) must be adhered to consistently – day in and day out. The best way to make sure that you are successful in achieving the results you seek as quickly as possible is to incorporate these variables as part of your everyday life, instead of viewing them as mere chores, which can then seem like inconveniences more than key elements to living a longer, healthier, more prosperous life.
To help maintain your consistency with diet, training, and recuperation, smaller variables, such as cutting down on heavy partying, not smoking, passing up on unhealthy fast food, checking over nutrition labels of foods you buy, training with high intensity, setting goals, and giving yourself 8-10 hours of sleep nightly, should be implemented as much as possible into your lifestyle. Take a step back and look at your day-to-day lifestyle in general.
I believe that most of those precursors were determined by the stress and the lifestyle choices of our ancestors. So by making better lifestyle choices we will not only give ourselves a better chance of living both strong and long, but we will help our future generations as well.
What Is The Key?
* Lowering Our Mental Toxins: Dealing with our emotional baggage from the past and looking forward with an optimistic attitude. Do not bury some unresolved issues. They will only sit, fester, and rear its ugly head in the future. Deal with it now and be done with it.
* Lowering Our Physical Toxins: Smoking cigarettes, keep intake of alcohol low (2-3 small drinks per week may be acceptable), cell phone radiation, pesticides, smog, recreation and prescription drugs. Do not abuse anything (even exercise). Anything in moderation is the key.
Being thankful and grateful for what we do have now opens up our energy to the world and gets us ready to receive. Always try to find the positive in any given situation.
Nelson Lopes
* Exercise: Building muscle mass with resistance and body weight training exercises and increasing the size and power of the heart and lunges by doing cardiovascular exercise (preferably interval style). Long distance running is not ideal for fat burning or for building a bigger heart and lunges. Look at the physique of a sprinter compared to that of a marathon runner.
* Nutrition: Eating less processed foods while combining quality carbs and protein together for every meal, eating small meals often throughout the day to stabilize already normal blood sugar and insulin levels. If it is made in a plant, stay away from it. If comes from a plant, eat it.
* Optimistic & Grateful Mindset: Being thankful and grateful for what we do have now opens up our energy to the world and gets us ready to receive. Always try to find the positive in any given situation. If you look hard enough, I promise you will find the silver lining in every cloud. This takes some training. But one easy way to do it is to hang around people who are good at it. And do not hang around people who are not.
* Creating Goals: We need to know what we want (health, money, relationships), write it down (on a 3 by 5 card and stick it in your pocket), read it out loud every day and night, get emotional, and visualize that we have already attained it. Visualizing it is important, but not nearly as important as feeling the sweet emotion of victory and success. It is important when visualizing to go into the “theater of your mind” and think in pictures. I dare you to try this simple exercise for 2-3 minutes first thing in the morning and last thing before you go to sleep.
* Time: With all the technology and modern devices, the plan was to make life easier. But what has happened is that we don’t make good use of the extra time the technology has given us. Most of us actually have much less quality time to do the things that are important to us, like talk and develop deeper relationships with our loved ones. We just fill the extra time up with other things that are supposed to save us time. We all have the same amount of time in one day, 1440 minutes. Why is it that some seem to get so much more done than others? I think that it comes down to priorities. We all have the ability to get the two or three things done that are most important to us. So if you put a priority on your health and fitness, then you are going to exercise and eat small healthy meals often through out the day.
Making A Change
The simple strategies to reap the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, more than likely, come down to are you unhappy and uncomfortable enough with your present position in life? Are you ready to make changes?
What I am saying is that with everything that we have coming at us in the modern world of technology, most of us are not aware how our choices are limiting our ability to be healthy, energetic, and vibrant.
Are You Ready To Make Changes?
We are dull to our senses and we are not doing what it takes to change our lives. We need to stand up, look in the mirror and answer some hard questions.
You are exactly where you want to be right now. You’ve already taken the steps necessary to achieve your station in life, and not one bit more. And you’re completely satisfied with that station in life. Even if you know you could be much leaner, stronger, more energetic, happier, and more successful. Now you might say “Well, that’s not true – I know someone who is 100 pounds overweight and he’s miserable!”
To which I say, no, he’s satisfied. Clearly, the benefit he’s deriving from his behaviors still outweighs the drawbacks, or else he’d change those behaviors! This article is primarily meant to inspire some self-analysis – not to provide hard and fast answers. However, if you’d like some avenues to pursue some serious reflection, here are a few:
* Develop self-reliant behavior – create the mindset that all of your limitations are self-imposed, because they are.
* Get out of your comfort zone (get into the boiling water) and find a way to enjoy it. In fact, you might even want to consider burning the boats (no recourse or way to retreat) and put your rear end on the line. It will light a fire underneath you. It will get you out of bed early and stay up late.
* Find out what works, and then do more of it. Find out what’s derailing your efforts, and do less of that.
* Cultivate dissatisfaction. After all, that’s why you’re where you are now- you’re satisfied with it. Visualize and focus what you want (and feel the emotion of already having it) 90% of the time, and visualize what you don’t want 10% of the time.
* Seek out and cultivate empowering personal relationships. The people you spend the most time with have a profound effect on your life. Make sure it’s a profoundly positive effect. You will turn into who you hang around.
Conclusion
Bottom line is that I know that we can all live an incredible life full of health, energy, and happiness. The more balanced and happy I become, the more I realize that there are people all over the world that are focusing on their health and energy first and then allowing the other pieces of the puzzle of their life to more effortlessly slip into place.
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