o v e r c o m i n g

You need to find the best environment for overcoming self limitations.

Here is something most of you don’t know, my good friend Miha here used to be really over weight. He started his journey towards this uniquely fit body as someone who was not happy by being fat and decided to change for good. I didn’t know him back then yet, I met him later, when he had developed an eating disorder to a degree that his bodyweight got dangerously low. Little did I know back then that he will become one of my most loyal training partners and best of friends.

Long story short. Miha achieved something next to impossible. He managed to overcome being obese, then overcome anorexia, to finally become a role model for anyone who can recognise genuine fitness. He remains as such well over a decade later, fit and ready at any time you meet him.

*****

Miha you have been my friend for a very long time, over the years you have inspired so many with your fitness to a degree that nowdays hardly anyone knows or remembers what incredible odds you had to overcome.

*****

If there is no-one to set the standards for you, the solution is “simple”. Either you start setting the standards for self and others, or seek the environment where the standards are set for you.

— Marck Goran Lorencin

o f f e n d e r • b r o t h e r s

As a follow up to the recent blog post, where I coloured myself a Fitness Offender, here are some good "offender brothers" of mine.

It is the company you keep, the environment you visit, who you look up to and who you choose to follow, or who you choose to live up to. If your environment doesn’t challenge you, that is a problem. If your friends don’t challenge you, that an even bigger problem. There is nothing to learn, nothing to improve, nothing worth the struggle …without a proper challenge.

I like my offender brothers, they challenge me and I challenge them. There is no better way to get better.

PS. No offense to any “gym sisters” but as play of words is strong here, adding “offending sisters” into the mix might somehow send a very different message. For the record, “sisters” can be of course just as tough as my “brothers”.

— Marck Goran Lorencin

l a s t • d i e t

An interesting milestone silently passed for me this summer. It has now been over two decades since I was last time on any type of diet. Yes, you read that right, 20 years ago, I decided to take all the knowledge and experience which I acquired in some previous 10 years of studying nutrition both in theoretical as practical application. This would mean that when I was about 17 years old, I started to approach this area more systematically.

The higher you climb on the ladder of knowledge, the more complicated everything gets. How to plan for optimal nutrition, being armed with precision weight scale and searching for perfect numbers and ratios in for a given goal/scenario. All of this is time-consuming, stressful, complicated …yet if you master it, it can give you the best possible results. The problem is what I already mentioned, there is a price to pay for it and to maintain such a bleeding edge lifestyle. It occurred to me that it makes little to no sense to go through such trouble unless you are genuinely trying to be the best in the world.

Now, while I admit to being guilty of seeking perfection in much of what I do, I decided to chase my goals differently. Suddenly, my goal became how to achieve above-average fitness results with as simple approach to nutrition as possible. Learn to make optimal nutrition choices by trusting my instincts, past experience and basic common sense. Enjoying good food, practicing healthy measure of all, eating what my body needs first, what it craves second and ultimately programming my mind to crave that which my body actually needs most of the time.

I stand here, looking more or less the same as for the last 30 years, stating that for the past 20 years, I absolutely do not diet yet somehow manage to maintain a low body-fat all year long. There is not a lot of difference between my winter or summer form, maybe 1.5-2 kg at most. I am not trying to teach you nothing here, merely provoke you to question the way you do things day after day, while not being satisfied with the outcome.

Not to stride from the main reason why I made this post today. Plainly speaking, I just wanted to say that I am not a proponent of diets, do not follow any nutrition trend, never weight my food, calculate, analyse or track my meals via some app or otherwise.

I am setting a stage here for a wider debate of this type. There are many lessons to talk about, views to express and truths to be said. For the time being, I will leave things at that, but you are free to ask questions or comment otherwise.

— Marck Goran Lorencin

s t o i c

Stoic values, Old-school training and Walking the walk.

This ancient stone has been in my yard for as long as I remember. When I was just a kid, there was a pile of smaller stones and rocks next to it which served me as weights. A thick tree branch was my pull-up bar. Later, when I was in high school, my next door neighbour, Marino, took iron disks from an old car and welded them to a steel pipe to make a barbell for lifting. He also made a heavier one using discarded brakes from an old truck and let me borrow it. I remember there was also a heavy squarish looking stone and a smaller rounder one, for which I created some unique exercises. There was no internet, no smartphones and no distractions. This was in the late 80's.

Fast-forward to today, very little has changed in my approach. Anytime we spend time here, be it summer or winter, I train outside on that same yard with minimal tools like, one 40 kg kettlebell, a pair of 22.5 kg dumbbells and gymnastic rings.

Make the best of what you have. Having less should never be an excuse.

— Marck Goran Lorencin