Double AA club Podcast
Double AA club Podcast
EP: 85 Omar Silva's Secrets to Balanced Living: Exercise, Nutrition, and Mental Health
Unlock the secrets of balancing fitness, nutrition, and mental health with insights from veteran personal trainer Omar Silva. Join NYC Boom and Big Daz as they sit down with Omar, who brings a wealth of experience from New Rochelle, New York. Discover how Omar's certifications from the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) and his role as an exercise specialist at a physical therapy office have shaped his approach to functional training and rehabilitation. Listen as he shares a compelling story of helping a golfer recover post-hip surgery and offers a glimpse into his ongoing pursuit of a golf performance specialist certification. Omar’s passion for blending rehabilitation with personal training is sure to inspire anyone on their fitness journey.
Explore the intricate connections between what we eat, how we move, and our mental well-being. This episode tackles common misconceptions about healthy eating and cardio, diving into the essentials of serving sizes, calories, and balancing macronutrients and micronutrients. NYC Boom opens up about past struggles with food control and the emotional impact of eating habits. Learn how energy levels can influence behaviors like smoking cigars and how emotions can drive our food choices. This conversation offers valuable perspectives for anyone looking to enhance their fitness, nutrition, and mental health. Tune in for a wealth of knowledge and motivating stories that could transform your approach to wellness.
You are listening to the Double A Club and this is your host, ny Boom, and my co-host, big Daz. We'll be talking about trending topics and healthcare and basically just as a disclaimer just to let the listeners know that this is just basically on our opinions and speculations and I hope you guys enjoy the show. Let's start off and kick off with our first topic.
Speaker 2:Hello everybody, this is NYC Boom here at Double A Club Podcast, and joining us is Omar Silva. Please tell everybody about yourself, hey, how you doing. Of course, I am Omar. I am based in New York, new Rochelle, and I'm a personal trainer here. I've been working with it for about 24 years. That's a long time, yes, sir. So can you tell us a little bit about some of the certifications that you have for personal training? Well, I've been certified for about 24 years.
Speaker 2:I do have NASM National Accreditation of Sports Medicine right, exactly, okay, what else? What else Besides NASM? I think I've gotten some fitness nutrition specialists and I do have I'm actually working on, I'm working on the golf performance specialist certification as well. Nice, do you have golfers over there in New York? Absolutely, I work with some. Okay, because I know here in Florida, golfing is big and we have a lot of golf athletes here. Yes, plenty, as I hear. I actually have some clients that go to Florida. They travel actually to North Carolina, I believe Virginia as well. Waxie, to North Carolina, I believe Virginia as well. Okay, and also, on your belt, your tool belt you were an exercise specialist at a physical therapy office, correct? That's right, buddy, that is right.
Speaker 1:Let's not forget that Exercise specialist?
Speaker 2:Nah, I can't forget that. Man, how many years did you work at? Let's see? Started in 2007. I probably finished around 2007. I probably was there for five years. Okay, so you got five years experience in therapy, yeah, rehab, whatever Sports rehab Okay, great.
Speaker 2:So you have an extensive knowledge in fitness and health. I would you know those 24 years come a long way. Yes, I may say that I do have enough knowledge in kinesiology and movement and I'm just you know, one of those things for you is just to consider where you are as far as a personal trainer, and I think well, I don't know, I just it came to, I came to a conclusion, I think around 2006, 2006, 2007, that I really enjoyed the whole aspect of sort of rehab, kind of personal training combination and ever since then I've been pretty much doing that sort of training, specifically more like functional stuff, right directed towards the functionality of the body, biomechanics. Yes, I think that's basically where I'm at still today, along with all the certifications I just mentioned. Okay, so a quick question so any well-known athletes, models or maybe a regular person that you help rehab that you can talk about from your experience of working? I don't have any models or sports, except for golf pros, I would say for golfers, I would say I worked, I actually have been working on a golfer who just recently had a hip surgery who has been doing great.
Speaker 2:Actually, I am now in the midst of getting him probably to get into a different phase of his training, probably to get into a different phase of his training, definitely not where I was before, where I think about maybe eight weeks ago, maybe more than eight weeks, probably going on three months now, since he's been out of surgery and he's come a long way. I mean now he's no longer having the issue with his hip pain that he had after surgery, obviously, but, um, his strength is finally back. We worked a lot with a lot of rehab stuff first and then sort of brought it up into a progressiveness of a different phase of his training where now the methods are more about, I mean, gaining more muscle mass and still getting some, I would say, a length and Flexibility of his, his upper body, because that's what he was lacking, a lot more than his hip. Okay, and yeah, I'm doing great, sorry, yeah, that's good, keep going.
Speaker 2:So I think we were like eight or nine years old, so I don't know. If you said I think we were like eight or nine years old, I would say I was eight, going on nine. So yeah, we met around that time too, but I don't know how soon and how. How did we meet?
Speaker 2:Because, honestly, I can only remember playing downstairs in front of the studio, I believe I believe me, and Eddie knocked on your door and said, hello, you did. Yes, because the building before when I first got there, the building the kids in the building were very good at that If they saw like a new person move in, which was me, yeah For me, when I first moved in, they would knock on your door and say, hey, how you doing, my name is Dad. Hello, how you doing, do you want to come out and play when else? And I think I did that to you too. Oh man, I hardly recall. I was actually trying to think of that, like how did I meet him there? Yeah, and you know, we used to work together as personal trainers, we used to travel together because we worked at the same gym. Absolutely, that came later, but yeah, I mean good times of those days, man, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know, throughout that time when I was training, I trained a couple athletes, someers and football players. I trained a playboy model who was trying to get into the LFL lingerie football league and Ball. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she never, she didn't know anything about football, nothing like completely nothing. And we trained her to play football and she made it to the very final cut of the team, so that's pretty good. Wow, I think they had 90 women and she made it to the last 60. Okay, which I think this is a 54 or something like that, which I think was 54 or something like that. Was this a kind of? What do you call this? Was this a TV show per se, or was this just trying to join the team itself? No, she was trying to join the team. She wanted to really be in sports and everything, and the league was on TV during the time too. They, they still. They're still active, the league, they're just not on television. They were on MTV, yeah, yeah, and you know, and from all those years, you know it was always interesting, a lot of the different people that we would meet and everything.
Speaker 2:Any person that you ran into or trained that always, kind of like, struck you. You know, just, you know, that person just stuck with you. Oh yeah, man, there was there's still a gentleman that I still keep thinking about, and this man was one man that told me something that really stuck with me, and I don't know how it may sound to you, but I remember him saying to me one day, as we were talking and training, he goes you know you lack character. And then I just looked over, right, this is I'm probably I would probably about five years in my training like I, just I was still green, I believe, as a trainer, personal trainer, and that's never left my mind and I think and I thank him, him for this day that he said that to me. Because of it I am who I am today and I built that character as I stand today. I would say that if I ever see him, I could just probably just give him a big hug, man, because I changed the way I look at life ever since he told me that.
Speaker 2:You know, I was a well-driven young 20-something-year-old. It was not in the right places in the right way. I was always driven by external purposes, not internal purposes. Driven by external purposes, not internal purposes, and my ambition was not to. In those days, I would say in the early 2000s, I was not driven by trying to really service people and help people in that way. I was still helping people, but I wasn't really that driven to give all of my services to them. I was more busy about the external purposes of life in general. You know, being a 20-something-year-old where you just felt like, well, as long as I look good and I train hard and people train with me, then all I care about is just money. And making that much money and that drive made me who I was.
Speaker 2:Then I think you probably remember I was training, probably who knows how many sessions a day and working about maybe 12 hours, maybe 13 hours a day, about six days a week, because you know, I worked hard. Yeah, I worked way too much, yeah, I work too much and that's how I drown myself and the way I train because of that right. Getting back to the man who said that to me, it always stood with me. So, little by little, I kept chipping away at the ego that I had built throughout those years and somehow I found myself, maybe around the 2000,. I would say that 2000, no 2010. It's when my perspective started to change. I think around that time I was already working at the rehab clinic. So, yeah, things started looking up differently and I obviously had gone through a lot of other things then and, yeah, so it brings me to where I am today, and I think I am.
Speaker 2:I have built myself a character, a well-known person, and the personal training career. I would say that people do know as having the character that I have, but the real goal now is just to service people in a different way. I give it all my love and compassion to them. I'm no longer greedy about the money that I would obtain. It's more about just giving away the amount of knowledge I've obtained in the past 24 years to those who really need it. Along with that, as I'll get into it later, it will be about mental health and how I've sort of gotten myself to this point.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to run you through a scenario and I want you to tell me what you think about it. Okay, sure, so you're training this new client, right, they're going through their complimentary session, the pre-session that every gym offers every new member, and you take her into the office once you're done with the workout and you're explaining to her everything that you're going to be able to do to her to help her achieve her goals. Right, and she comes out. She tells you well, you know, I want to get toned, so I'm going to start off doing cardio and everything, and you know, and then I'm going to tone up that way, lose all the weight, and then I'll come check you later for weight training. Okay, what do you think about that? Because I know, whenever I got that, I felt like shooting myself. Because I'm like Chick. First of all, you can't get toned there's no such word, really and second, that look that you wanted to get. You're not going to achieve it through cardio. No, not at all, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I always want to tell them. I always want to tell them that fat under your arm doesn't go away by cardio. I mean, it's the only thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it doesn't. What would I say to a person like that? Well, no, what you would say is what do you think when you approach somebody like that? Oh, at least what the person said to me yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because a lot of people, when they go into the gym and they want to lose weight and they want to get toned and they want to get fit, or they, you know, they don't want to get jacked, but they want to, they want some musculature to appear you know what I'm saying and they obviously think that the cardio is going to fucking do that. And even, and even the more educated ones, they, they believe that it's going to happen in weight training and it can kind of happen in weight training. It'll happen more in weight, but in personality. All this shit comes really in your diet. Exactly, that's where I was going to go. So, so, please, I would say 80%. Yeah, 80% is diet, 20% is, or at least that's what I would say. 80% is diet, 20% is exercise. As you probably may read on you know any, any webpage or any anywhere you need on the new time. Yeah, nowadays, no more magazines that brother you on the internet and you'll find it right.
Speaker 2:I would say it's a hundred and a hundred to me I would say you give me a hundred percent of proper way of eating. And most importantly is having a better relationship with food. Most people, they know what they need to do, right, I think most of my clients, when I ever asked them hey, how are you eating, what are you eating? And they always say I'm eating healthy. Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, they are Right. And so when they, when I tell them to write down, let's say, I'll take two, three days worth of just doing a diary of what you eat throughout your day for three days, and then they show me what they have, half the time it's very little, it's never a lot, it's very little, it's never a lot, it's very little. Right, it's usually at least two meals or one. And obviously they also don't know what to do, or at least what to cook, how to shop, what to eat, what not to eat. Or I mean, obviously some now they know how to shop what to eat, what not to eat. Or I mean, obviously some now they know how to read labels, but still they don't realize that these labels sometimes tell you how many servings there are. So there are times when they'll eat a whole bag of something. It could be anything and they believe that it's because it's healthy, that it's okay for them, right fact it isn't right. They're eating more than enough of the serving size. That's one way of them not knowing how much they are eating. The other would be, as you said, you know, like some people go and start doing cardio because they believe they're going to lose the weight, people will go and start doing cardio because they believe they're going to lose the weight. They may lose weight or they'll lose water weight, that's for sure. They won't definitely get toned, as you're calling it. They'll lose a lot of muscle mass is the reason why they lose the weight. Because that's usually what's working. Correct the way, because that usually what's working, um, correct, but it is important that that, in order for us to contain homeostasis right, and that means the balance of your body you need to eat significant amounts of calories. And now we're going to get into more of the macro nutrients and the micro nutrients.
Speaker 2:Oh, my god, you. I remember you had an unhealthy relationship with macros and micros. Like you literally had a scale with you in your back pocket and weighed everything and fucking like, calculated everything. You sucked at math. But you knew how to do math on my phone, like yo, like you was fucking. You was unhealthy on that. I guess you could call it the unhealthy more of the.
Speaker 2:I was a little bit overambitious of how I wanted to. You know what it was actually. I'll tell you. It was control. That's what it was. Because the ability to have you know what it was actually, I'll tell you it was control, that's what it was. It was the ability to have control of what I did, and I think that's the reason why I always wanted to continue to do that. But then I also knew the logic of it. I also knew the outcome, which is the important part. What is the outcome of us doing something like that? Right, that we need to look at calories.
Speaker 2:Now, I'm not saying we all should look at calories, right?
Speaker 2:We don't have to.
Speaker 2:Nowadays I don't weigh my stuff as much as I used to.
Speaker 2:There are times when I do. I mean, the only time I probably will do it is if I know that I may add too much. Or in my case, let's say, a piece of chicken, right? I don't know the way it like I used to, because I'm so used to looking at food when I'm cooking it, that I already know how much that weighs Eventually. You kind of see how much is that? Oh, that looks like three ounces or four ounces. Okay, I'm going to have that instead of me having to weigh everything and then going down to the macro or the micro, and I think people should kind of be a little bit less intimidated about the whole idea of that and and maybe learn more about what types of foods are healthier than others, right, and what should we consume certain foods, because that's also tied into mental health and you're gonna hear me talk about this, but that's tied into that and it's absolutely true. I mean, what we eat is how we behave, how we definitely feel and as far as how much muscle we maintain.
Speaker 2:Let me stop you for a second, right there. Sure, sure, let me say this and you can continue. It's very true what you're saying with mental health, because, like, for example, I'm an avid cigar smoker. You know that right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, I have to explain to my wife that sometimes you know, we were watching something on TV and this guy was having an interview and explaining how the cigars absorb energy. And If you have that which is true If you have bad energy, the cigars thing that is gonna absorb that bad energy.
Speaker 2:If you have good energy, the cigars don't show that energy. And my lady, my wife, is like that's bullshit, that can't be real. I'm saying I told you that's very real. Like, seriously, like if I'm in a bad mood, I'm pissed off and I smoke this cigar which I've been enjoying for the whole month. That's just gonna fight me that day when I smoke it anything, because i'm'm upset. So the cigar is going to feed into what I'm giving it, it's going to make me more upset.
Speaker 2:So is that what made you stop? Is the fact that the whole idea of energy, or was it something else that really sort of made you change? What do you mean Stop? What Did I smoke. Yeah, exactly, no, no, no, I still smoke. I actually wrote my own book. Oh, you still smoke. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, so you still smoke, I still smoke. I still smoke Because I wasn't sure. Yeah, yeah, it's all right.
Speaker 2:So, you know, I have to explain that to her and how? You're explaining how food feeds into mental health. It's also absorbing the energy of the person. You know what I'm saying. So the food you know what I'm saying can lead to so many things. Like, you know, a lot of people have anxiety disorders and they feed that anxiety disorder with food. Yeah, they feed their depression with food. You know what I'm saying? Like, food is connected to our emotions and that's why they have that thing that feel good food you know what I'm saying which is like side food and shit like that. You know what I'm saying. Because it feels good. Yeah, it does. Actually, it's how I'm healing myself and this is emotionally and mentally. This is how I'm.
Speaker 2:I finally realized how to work through that process right, to find food, imagine, right. So I hear I am teaching for 24 years how to exercise, how to eat, how to do all of these things and I, I, after these 24 years, I realized that, wow, I, I still needed, I still needed myself, like everyone else out there I'm sure sure is to find ways of healing, and one way is definitely exercise, the other is definitely food. And then I would say, I am now going by these four sources of energy, right, the physical energy, the mental energy, the emotional energy and the spiritual energy, and think of a meter for each one. And every day, as we go through our processes they kind of fluctuate. You know, you might be physically exhausted by the end of the day, or you might be mentally exhausted or emotionally or spiritually exhausted. And how do you regain that balance? And definitely you hit it right on the money, man.
Speaker 2:I think that food is one of the best ways to get some of that energy and that would probably be the intent of emotionally getting more energy, mentally getting more energy, and definitely physical, not so much with the spiritual. I don't know if that's kind of into that, I will leave that for a little long. Yeah, I would say that they all kind of sort of play a role in our lives and that's where I'm kind of finding more of that. I'm getting more knowledge as far as like, wow, as long as we look inside and we tend to not look externally. Things start to look better, not in once, not at that moment, but rather in time. Things start to sort of work much easier, things come to you much easier and, as I said, food would be something that I've been passionate about for so many years, as you know. Right, I want to.
Speaker 2:If you remember, I went to culinary school yeah, I do remember you was very good cook. Yes, yes, I still have fun with a lot of food. I hated close food and then I worked in the business for a few years myself before I even decided to become a personal trainer. So this is before. I was a trainer myself and it's never left me. Right, that's something that's always been my passion too, my love of food, and now I use it for the better of me and for also the better of my clients and whoever else wants more information about, because food just brings a lot more than just a sedation of hunger. Right, it brings intimacy when you're sort of having food and dinner with a loved one. Uh, you know, it brings you together with friends and stuff like that. So it does create this harmony of things and balance of again going back to the mental, emotional state.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the AA Club. Listen to us next episode to continue this topic. If you want to reach us on the email, it is doubleaclubpodcast at gmailcom. Catch you on the next one.
