Healthy Habits

Hey Underrated Competitor!

We’re heading into the second week of September, so we can finally introduce the second segment of our monthly An Underrated Newsletter: Healthy Habits.

Each month, we’ll bring you three categories of content designed to inspire you on how to continue taking care of both your body and mind:

FUELING FAVS — Recipes from the chefs of our underrated community featuring the meals they love to make.

WORKOUT WISDOM — Exercise routines and training tips from athletes in the Collective to help you stay active and keep improving.

READING RECS — Books, articles, and other recommendations from your editors, Lucas & David, to keep you learning beyond the gym.

Keep reading below for this month’s Healthy Habits, and as always, we’d love to hear from you. If you have a recipe, workout, book, or healthy habit that keeps you going, reach out – we’d love to feature it in a future edition!

FUELING FAVS — A FUN TWIST ON SWEET POTATOES AND CHICKEN w/ Rebecca Cain

Ingredients

1 Chicken Breast

1 Sweet Potato

Hot Honey (optional)

Yogurt Sauce

• 1/3 cup Fage 0% Greek yogurt

• Cinnamon

• Sugar free maple syrup

Recipe

1. Bake the sweet potato at 400 degrees for 45-60 mins (depending on size)

2. Season your chicken to your preference (I prefer salt, pepper, garlic, and onion powder)

3. Air fry the chicken on 400 degrees for 15-20 mins or pan cook until done

4. Mix together the yogurt, cinnamon, and maple syrup and spread across the cooked sweet potato

5. Top with chicken and enjoy

Nutrition (1 Serving)

Calories: 400-450 cals

Protein: 45g

Carbohydrates: 35g

Fat: 4g

WORKOUT WISDOM — TABATA w/ Lucas

This simple workout is a challenge but easy to follow. 4 minutes. 8 rounds.

20 seconds HARD
10 seconds REST
Repeat for 8 total rounds

Choose any form of conditioning you please/have available:

Run - Bike - Row - Ski Erg - Stairs - Jump Rope

During the 20-second intervals, push at a hard but controlled effort. Think of this as an 8/10 effort that way you still have gas in the tank by the last round. Use the 10 seconds to recover and prepare to go again.

The goal: Stay consistent. Don’t crush the first round and fall apart by the eighth.

Can you keep the same effort from Round 1 to Round 8?

Four minutes doesn’t sound like much. Give it a try and tag @XcelsiorCollective to tell us how you did!

READING RECS w/ Lucas & David

Lucas’ Suggestion:

The Inner Game of Tennis — W. Timothy Gallwey

One of the most famous sayings is “you can be your own worst enemy.” Despite the title, The Inner Game of Tennis is about learning how to perform without getting in your own way.

Gallwey analyzes the battle between the part of your mind that overthinks, judges, and worries about results and the part that already knows how to perform when you trust your preparation.

The takeaway is simple: Focus on what is happening right now, not what just happened or what might happen next.

Why I Recommend It

Whether you’re an athlete, student, or young professional, this book is a reminder that improving your mentality can be just as important as improving your physical attributes.

This week’s habit: When you catch yourself overthinking your performance, bring your attention back to the next action in front of you by focusing on one touch sensation you can currently feel.

David’s Suggestion:

Dolores Claiborne — Stephen King

I’ve recently been delving into horror as a genre – through books, movies, and even games. I wasn’t drawn to horror until recently, when I became intrigued by the stories that my own fears prevented me from experiencing. I decided to start with Stephen King, one of the most renowned horror authors of our time. With no real reason beyond the cover catching my eye, I grabbed Dolores Claiborne from a bookstore in Cape Cod. After years of rarely reading full novels, I ended up finishing this book in three sittings, and it remains one of my favorite reading experiences to this day.

Dolores Claiborne did not turn out to be the standard supernatural horror I expected when I sat down to read it. While the book does have its nightmarish scenes, the true horror comes from the evil that exists within people and how they choose to enact their maliciousness. Overall, it is a tense and somewhat heartbreaking story about the lengths a mother will go to protect her family. Beyond the story itself, the way the narrative is told was something that I had never experienced before, and I have never felt closer to a character’s inner thoughts than I did while reading this book.

If you enjoy literature that challenges the way you think about morality while telling a story rooted in the darker sides of humanity, I think you will enjoy this book just as much as I did. But even if horror isn’t for you, I hope you can take something else from my experience with it. Sometimes the things we are most uncomfortable with are the things worth trying. I spent years avoiding horror because I was afraid of it, only to discover how much I enjoyed the genre once I finally gave it a chance. Find something in your own life that makes you uncomfortable, and give it a shot. You might find something you love in a place you never expected.

Here’s to another month of Fueling our bodies, moving with purpose, and feeding our minds.

Stay Underrated,

Lucas & David
Xcelsior Collective

Thank you for checking out our newsletter!

This has been an exciting new avenue for us, creating a way to inform and engage our community with segments we find interesting and beneficial to our lives. We hope you enjoyed what we had to offer, and we will be back next month with more. Let us know what segments you liked, if there are others you would want us to include, or even contribute to a post in the future!

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