FitnessQuests

How to Build Confidence

Over and over again when hearing from readers or talking to people
I’ve found that one of the biggest problems in keeping up with a diet
or getting the most from an exercise routine is, quite simply, that
they lack the confidence to do so.

Maybe they’ve failed before, maybe they don’t see themselves as having
a great body, maybe they just don’t realize what they’re capable
of--whatever the cause, the result is they fail to push themselves.
And more often than not, that failure can be traced back to lack of
confidence.

If you’ve ever spent any time researching how to build
confidence and be more successful, you’ve no doubt seen statements
such as the following several times:

I will kill this workout!

I always succeed!

I’m the type of person that loses weight!

I’m athletic!

I’m great at overcoming adversity!

I love a good workout!

Sounds pretty familiar, right? I’ve spent a few minutes myself
spouting off mantras like this in some futile attempt to change my
perception of myself, trying to make my brain magically flip on that
success switch. Unfortunately, it never worked.

So why is the concept so popular if it doesn’t really work? Because it
actually does tap into something--the problem is that it’s about as
effective as filling a swimming pool using your favorite coffee cup.
It can work, but you’re going to be there for quite a while. The
reason is simply because saying words and making statements doesn’t
override your core belief. More importantly is that it doesn’t do much
to affect your thought process itself, which means you do everything
in virtually the same way as you would have anyway and get the same
results.

So the question is, how then can you use words to do these two things
and to find the success you’ve been looking for?

In the same manner you might use if you wanted to convince a friend to
think in a certain way about something. You wouldn’t tell them what to
think and expect it to work. You’d ask them questions that you felt
would lead them to the answers you wanted them to find. Once the
questions were asked, their brain would take them the rest of the way
on its own. You can’t TELL them what to think any more than you can
tell yourself what to think. But QUESTIONS are made of magic.
Questions set the brain on the path of frantically looking for answers
and meaning. So when you want to convince yourself of something,
simply ask the right questions to lead you there:


Why am I about to get a great workout?

Why am I becoming more successful at sales?

How am I going to beat my last record?

How am I going to stick to my diet today?

Note that I didn't suggest a yes-or-no question such as Will I stick
to my diet today?  That kind of question doesn't require your brain to
search for concrete answers, and if you're just starting out it's easy
for your brain to simply provide the answer that requires the least
amount of energy and just stop there.  But if you ask these or other
open-ended questions with confidence, your brain will automatically
set out on a path to find the answers. This in itself will change the
thought process. Not only will your brain be working for answers, the
question itself affects the core belief because it implies truth.   If
someone asks why the sky is blue, you don’t first question whether or
not the sky is actually blue. You simply try to find the answer.

I hope you’ll give this a shot. I know the more you use it, the more
you’ll begin to get out of it. Oh, and just in case this needs to be
said, stop the negative self talk…especially in the form of a
question! All the 'What if they don’t like me? What if this doesn’t
work? Why doesn’t anyone ever listen to me? Why can’t I get a
promotion? Why is life so unfair?' types of questions have to end now.

These statements are extra dangerous because when you are saying this
stuff to yourself, it’s almost guaranteed that the words actually
represent your core beliefs. Feed them and it doesn’t matter what you
do on the other side of the coin. Those beliefs become a slippery
slope until they can devour you and control every aspect of your life.

Turning your goals into positive questions, however, can make all the
difference.  Your brain will search and try to find the answer, and
when it does find the answers, I bet it will also help you find
confidence you didn't even know you had.

Until next time,

Kris

 

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To be or not to be?

To be, or not to be?

That is the question…isn’t it?

As many times as we’ve heard this question, you’d figure it would represent something quite profound—and you’d be right.

As humans, we have the unique ability to choose whether or not to be alive. We have the ability to take our own lives, but we also have the ability to choose instead to really live. Since you’re alive right now, the question is:  have you made the choice to live actively or passively? I would like to suggest that people who actively make the decision to live are often happier, healthier, and more successful people than those who do not.

 The conscious decision of wanting to be alive and embracing all that comes with it allows us to put a new, greater context around our lives. The ultimate context is no longer simply the idea that we are alive, but is expanded into the idea that you’re making the incredible choice to be alive. All your decisions can then be made in this new paradigm of making a choice to be here and to get everything you can out of it.

It’s my belief that people who actively choose to live are then more active in all their choices. They rarely switch their lives or beliefs to ‘autopilot,’ they never pass their fates on to chance, and they know that the small decisions matter.  For someone who chooses to live every day, the little joys in life that more passive people might miss are always standing out in vibrant display, there to be admired and fully experienced by the one that actively decides to experience them.

If you are not so active in your choices each day, I hope this can be a reminder that you chose today to be alive.  Spend some time today reminding yourself of the magic of that choice, and all the joys out there waiting to be experienced.

 

Until next time,

Kris

PS: I was going to tie this into health and fitness but then I decided I’d let you decide what it ties in to and how.

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The 28 Day Baby Step Challenge

So last week I talked about taking developmental detours on the secret road to success and how important it is to take them often.

A developmental detour is a detour we take to develop a new skill or understanding that will lend itself to a consistently better life. This could be anything from taking a class to moving to the top of a mountain for a few years to figure out who you are.

While I encourage you to take these detours as much as possible, I do realize that they aren't always feasible. So today I want to give you a way to make a few changes that won't require a full blown life detour.

  

The 28 Day Baby Step Challenge

The rules are very simple.

1.   Pick something very small that would add to your life or health in some way.

Whatever it is that you pick should be very small. It should take no more than 15 minutes per day and it can take less. You should also be able to explain it in less than 10 seconds. We’re talking baby step here.

2.   It should be a S.M.A.R.T goal.

For those unfamiliar with this it’s a business management mnemonic that stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. So, your goal should be all of those things. For instance, maybe you want to drink more water. You wouldn’t say that you want to drink more water because that’s not specific, measurable, or time bound. Instead your goal might be to drink 10 8 ounce glasses of water each day.

3.   Determine how best to accomplish it for yourself.

For instance, you may set up a schedule each day for your water drinking. You may just drink water whenever you can and carry a checklist for your ten glasses. You may decide to drink one glass every 90 minutes. You may decide to carry a jug that holds as much water as you plan on drinking knowing that if it’s not empty by the end of the day you’ll have to chug it. Just find a simple way that works for you and stick with it.

4.   Track it for the 28 days

Find a way to track it. One that I’ve found that has a good motivating factor is one I call the calendar chain. Quite simply, every day you accomplish your goal, you may a large red X over the day on the calendar. If you take the X from corner to corner, after a few days you’ll notice it’s forming a chain on the calendar. That chain is your success visualized and I’ve found that it’s very hard for us to break that chain.

Here are some sample goals

First let me say that this could be anything for you. It could be eating three servings of vegetables per day, it could be doing 15 minutes of cleaning at the end of each day, it could be not throwing your clothes on the floor when taking them off, it could be not smoking your after dinner cigarette, it could be going to bed by a certain time, it could be eating breakfast every day, it could be 15 minutes of yoga each morning, it could be meditation at night, it could be reading a chapter in a book each day, it could be riding your bike to work, it could be spending 15 minutes playing guitar every day.

It could be anything you want it to be. Just pick something and go for it. Then don’t turn your back for the next 28 days. Then at the end of 28 days, reflect on it. See how it worked for you. If it’s a good thing, keep it going.

Why 28 days?

There are two reasons for 28 days. First, 28 days is enough to begin to dig in that habit path a bit. It certainly won’t be an unbreakable habit but it will definitely feel weird on day 29 if you wake up and decide not to continue.

Second, 28 days is not forever. You’ve probably heard the popular mantra amongst addicts to just take it one day at a time. The reason for that is that forever is a long time. Furthermore, forever is not measurable. No matter how successful you are at something, the thought that you’re no closer to the finish is one that saps motivation. When you put a limit on something and say that for the next 28 days you are going to do something, it allows you to wrap your mind better around what that means. It makes it real to you. It’s not as daunting. It’s just easier for your mind to take it seriously. Before you try to change something forever, see if you can do it for just today. Work on forever tomorrow.

My personal challenge for myself

My first 28 day challenge is an important one for me. Personally I feel that I don’t stretch enough. Stretching is something that is incredibly important for many reasons but I know that I don’t do enough of it myself. So, my personal challenge for the next 28 days is to do 10-15 minutes of stretching each morning before I do anything else at all. My bet is that this will help my form, my recovery time, my blood flow, my flexibility, injury avoidance, and it will help me to better structure my day.

The reason I like this concept is simply because we all have a million tiny things in our lives that hold us back. While it would be great to fix them all at once, we all know that this is not very realistic.

I’m a huge believer in making consistent, small improvements in life. Small changes may not seem like much but trust me, it doesn’t take much time for the magic of compounding to start working. When it does, both your success and happiness will begin to go up at a rate you’ve never dreamed possible. I encourage you therefore to make this more than just fixing that one little thing. After you successfully complete a challenge, be ready with a new one.

If you plan on joining me in this, please post a comment below or if you want to keep it private you can write me on Facebook. As always, I love to hear from each of you. Also if you have a way of making this more effective, I’d also really love to hear that so please share it with everyone.

Until next time,

Kris

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Potent technique for improving anything fast.

A few days ago I promised to tell you today just how I improved lowered my 12 minute workout down to 8 min 23 seconds in less than a week. Today I plan on fulfilling that promise.

First a quick story…

In 2003 a very unhealthy version of me walked into a gym in Clearwater FL with the intent of becoming hot. I was 23 years old. After signing up, I was paired up with an awesome personal trainer that had more certifications and degrees than I could count. He didn’t just study this stuff, helived and breathed it. Honestly, it was this guy who inspired me to do what I do today.

As good as he was however, my first workout was an absolute disaster. We all want to think we’re in better shape than we are-especially at that age. The truth was though that I was a mess. I was in terrible shape. I hadn’t worked out in years. I drank like a fish, I smoked, and my diet was horrific. I was battling depression and had massive anxiety. I was just an all around a mess.

The first workout he started me out with some pretty simple stuff designed to strengthen my stabilizing muscles. I couldn’t do 90% of what he wanted me to do though. I’d try. I’d get out a few horrible looking reps and then I’d fall over wanting to die. At the end of the session I felt like a truck just hit me. I asked him how long until I’d be able to do this stuff and start getting some benefit and he just told me “soon”.

The next time I went in there I was figuring he’d lower the difficulty so I could actually do some of it and start building up. Oh how wrong I was. Everything he had me do was a harder variation of what I couldn’t do the time before. Guess what? I couldn’t do this stuff either! I was a bit frustrated and upon leaving, once again felt like I’d just been run over by a truck.

The third time, I figured he’d get the point but he obviously hadn’t because he’d increased the difficulty again! And surprise, surprise, surprise, I didn’t have a prayer at doing any of it!

As you’ve probably guessed, this trend didn’t stop. Each workout felt more and more like I was actually going to die. To me, progress was walking in and having it be a little easier to do something he was asking me to do. To at least make it feel like I could do something he was asking me to do.

I know this is a strange analogy but just imagine you went to juggling school. You’ve never juggled before so they hand you three rubber balls and tell you to take the next hour and go at it. You spend the entire hour dropping all three balls. You walk in next time hoping for a better performance but this time they tell you that you’re going to be using four balls. Since you can’t juggle 3, you can guess what 4 will be like. The next time they hand you bowling pins instead of balls. You see where this is going. This is how I felt.

Finally after about 10 workouts I really couldn’t take it anymore. I was seeing no progress. Nothing was getting easier and in fact it was just getting harder. I wasn’t getting better at anything and I still hadn’t successfully juggled three balls. My session package was up and the talk of renewal came up and I let him have it. I went on and on for about 10 minutes talking about how terrible these workouts are for me and how I’d never be able to do anything he asked of me because before I can even actually do something, he makes it harder. I told him I felt like I was wasting my money. He just stared at me without emotion.

When I had pretty well tired myself out, he was still just staring at me. I was livid. He stared for another minute and then (I will never forget this) he started to laugh at me! He stopped pretty quickly and apologized but said he couldn’t help it. I just sounded so ridiculously whiney there. Honestly he was probably right but it didn’t make me any less pissed off by the whole thing.

He told me he’d been waiting for me to say something but he didn’t expect this. He then said he starts everyone off like this and most people complain about it immediately but he was impressed by how long it took me. He said he’d enjoyed working with me because I never complained and always worked myself as hard as I could. He told me that was rare and because of that, I was getting great results.

He must have seen the impending eruption building in me with those words because he then told me to follow him back to the floor. I won’t describe the exercise he had me do because it would take two pages of text but it’s something he’d had me try a week earlier that I couldn’t get one rep of. Let’s just say this move seemed like the equivalent of juggling 14 flaming knives in my comparison against three rubber balls (since then we’d moved on to 25 flaming knives and a VW Bug).

Determined to show him what an idiot he was, I got down there ready to fail. To my surprise though, not only did I not fail. I did 8 full reps! I was shocked! Then he had me go back to some week one stuff that I was never able to do. It was so easy it didn’t even feel like exercise!

It was that day that locked me in with him for the next few years and that was also the very beginning of me becoming very interested in health.

Fast forward to last week…

After getting the 12 minute workout down to 11 minutes and stalling on my progress, I decided to use the concept I learned that day as I was determined to drop my time under 9 minutes but didn’t want to spend months on it. What I did was design a new, similar workout but make it a lot harder. Basically, I added 50% more demand in between rest periods. It was very difficult so the first time I took it easy. The second time I pushed more. The third time I did this I pushed as hard as I could. By the third workout, I got more used to the harder workout and felt like it was a good difficulty level for me.

The next day I went back to my original 12 minute workout. At this point my body was used to doing a lot more work in between rest periods so when I got to my scheduled rest times, I was able to skip them and keep going. I was also able to work a little faster in exchange for the work I wasn’t doing. The result? A record smashing 8 minutes and 23 seconds.

Remember, a week earlier I was killing myself trying to get below 11 minutes and couldn’t do it!

No matter what you want in life I want you to remember this story as the lesson is profound. Most people will tell you that practice makes perfect. Honestly, they are right. You’ll never master something unless you spend a lot of time doing that thing. However, if you have a long way to go in your improvement process before you start to think about mastery and you want to make a quick jump, don’t waste your time doing that thing. Instead, find something harder and put your all into it. Even if you can’t do it, try with everything you have. When you come back to the original thing you wanted to do, you’ll find the difficulty level will have decreased for you to such an extent that you probably won’t even want to work on such a low level anymore.

One caveat though… If you decide to use this in fitness, be careful! It is very easy to injure yourself if you don’t know what you’re doing. Bad technique and maximum effort will always be a recipe for disaster if not under tight controls.

Tomorrow, I'll post the variation of the workout I did to improve my time. Try it for yourself!

Seek improvement,

Kris

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The Secret Road To Success

The longest and most grueling road we can take in life is the one that leads to “just being yourself.” It’s the road that ensures that at the end of the day, you are just you. It starts the day you’re born and most people stay on it until the day they die. It goes without as much as a rest stop for as far as the eye can see and this road can seem as if were laid long before you ever got here. It has no remorse but it’s often littered with your regrets. Yes, you will be on this road until the end of your time so you’d better make the most of it.

Pretty grim, huh? What if I told you that this long, grueling road is a magic road? One in which you can leave almost any time you want? One that offers amazing detours which will teach you lessons of love and fortune that you can use to reshape the rest of the road in front of you? One that you can redirect toward anything you want in life or stay steadfast on when it's heading in the direction you want to go? You can reset its course anytime you want. There’s a catch though, these detours are scary places that are wrought with vulnerability, failure, and hardship.

Gabriel Lueders "Gravel Road Headed West"

Now the choice is yours, do you take the scary developmental detours of life so you can redirect that desolate road you will spend the rest of your life going down? Or will you stay on your safe path and hope it magically gets better on its own and you somehow just become the best version of yourself?

Imagine for a second a cat. Cats are amazingly agile creatures: a cat can jump six feet in the air and land on a small window sill and walk across it with perfect balance before turning its body all the way around and jumping back down, only to land on its feet in a way that appears to take little thought at all. But what has to happen before the cat can do this?

If you’ve ever seen a cat entering a new room for the first time, you’ll notice that the first thing they do is freeze and look around. All the cat’s senses seem overwhelmed and all its amazing agility seems to simply turn off. It’s as if they’re moving in slow motion as they absorb everything in the room. The next time they go into the room, they are moving a little faster, and then a little faster still. Eventually the cat will treat the room like any other.

What you saw there was the cat going through a phase called transitional vulnerability. While agility does come naturally to a cat, a cat needs comfort in its surroundings to really access that agility. This comfort only comes through purposely inducing a phase of discomfort. Watch how skittish a cat is when it enters a new room and you’ll see that discomfort for yourself.

It’s important to a cat to know its environment so that it can take full advantage of its hunting and retreating skills. Knowing the terrain of the new room adds to its ability to live a quality life. It keeps the animal safer and even though the stages of getting there are very uncomfortable, if you’ve ever tried to keep a cat out of a room it’s never been in, you know that as soon as it can get in to explore, it will.

Most people live with great discomfort because they don’t live more like the cat. They know that room is there but it remains a thorn in their side because as opposed to going through the momentary pain of pulling it out, they’d rather just have the discomfort of living with it. They aren’t willing to go through the temporary stages of transitional vulnerability that come with leaving their boring road and taking that developmental detour.

What thorns are in your life that should be pulled? What rooms in your house do you need to explore? What do you see coming up on your road that a quick detour would prepare you for?Take a good hard look at your life and answer these questions. Then decide to do something about them. You only have to do it once to reap the benefits forever.

I have a friend that is a very successful fitness model. She’s won top awards in almost every contest she’s entered and can be prominently found in magazines and ads everywhere. I personally know that before she was a fitness model, she was overweight and had a sweet tooth that put most others to shame.

 Today she eats one of the healthiest diets I’ve ever seen and her cravings (while still there) have been lowered substantially because it’s just not what her body expects anymore. I was talking to her in my gym one day and after I finished an overweight woman in her mid-thirties approached me and said, “Wow, must be nice to have her body.” Feeling like this would be a good chance to help her move forward with her goals, I mentioned a few things my fitness model friend has done to accomplish her body.

The response I got was disappointing: “Well, it must be nice to be OK with eating health food all day, but I have a sweet tooth and I gotta have my mint chocolate chip.” The words “must be nice” generally translate perfectly into, “I’m not willing to go through the work they went through to get what I want so instead I’ll just pacify myself by resenting them for their luck.”

The first girl decided years ago to get off the long road of her life and take a developmental detour to a better diet and fitness routine. When she got back on her road, she had a new skill that carried with her. She was a better version of herself. It wasn’t an easy detour to take, but she still took it. When she felt she had it down, she integrated it. She got back on her path but this time, her path was just a little better and would lead to a better version of herself.

The thing to keep in mind when you see someone who is very successful is that no one just ended up that way. Some may have had more advantage than you out of the gate while some had less, but they all made decisions to be who they are. They all had to do things that weren’t comfortable. They all took those detours and went through that transitional vulnerability. They pushed forward and they got there. It wasn’t accidental and it certainly wasn’t all about luck. Even a lottery winner had to buy the ticket.

Anytime you decide to make a change, everything will be new. There will be a certain vulnerability. I want you to see that coming and be OK with it. You need to know what it is, explore the feeling, and remind yourself that transitional vulnerability is a good thing that should be associated with a better life. Don’t let it freak you out. When it comes up, acknowledge it. “Oh, that’s transitional vulnerability again, and it must mean I’m on the right path.” Then after you acknowledge it, just keep moving forward.

If you stay aware of it, it can’t catch you off guard—and even more so, it won’t be that nagging thing inside you that you just want to stop because you don’t understand it. Instead, it will be something you expect to happen. Once you know what to expect, it doesn’t really bother you that much. Associate it with something good, and while most people are running and hiding from it, you’ll welcome it and benefit from it.

One more point on this: transitional vulnerability isn’t just a mental thing. In health and fitness it’s very physical as well. For instance, if you take a person that eats a terrible diet and put them on a very healthy diet, you will see some crazy things happen as their system adjusts—and most of them are not good. Gas pains, bloating, mood swings, headaches, I’ve seen it all!

Similarly, if you start a new fitness routine, your body will feel awkward and vulnerable while performing the new movements. You will likely end up very sore for long amounts of time. Respect these physical vulnerabilities. Feel them out, go through them all. But don’t push them too much. It won’t be long before they will have passed, and you’ll be ready to get back on your road of life…as a new and improved version of yourself.

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

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Silencing the Voice of Instant Gratification

There’s a battle going on inside you that you may not have fully
realized.  Two voices fighting for supremacy that have absolute
control over everything you do. Individually, these voices determine
whether you spend your entire life burdened by mediocrity or being
lifted by greatness.

It’s up to you which one will win…kind of.

Have you ever had something really important you needed to do, but
instead of actually doing it you find yourself sitting in front of the
TV? That’s one of your voices winning. We’re going to call that voice
“instant gratification."  Have you ever had a day in which you got so
much done, your normally weighted down shoulders felt as if they were
filled with helium? We’ll call that voice “delayed gratification."

Human beings, just like other animals, are hardwired with a very
dominant instant gratification voice. Successful human beings learn
how to overpower that with delayed gratification. There was a time
when if you didn’t value instant gratification, you would likely
starve to death. It was all about picking the low-hanging fruit or
making the easy kill. At nightfall you latched onto the closest
available shelter so that you weren’t eaten, and according to folklore
you either wasted little time in clubbing the right woman to carry
your genes or you risk losing her to someone else. Ah, such a simpler
time.

Today, we no longer have these problems. In fact, through the many
advancements that brought us modern life, most of us have infinitely
more time and resources than ever before. While instant gratification
has become a hindrance to us that leaves us blowing through our money,
taking out loans we don’t need, choosing the pleasure of our favorite
show over a good workout, eating fast food instead of a home cooked
meal, and even failing to ever really set our core values in life, the
voice of instant gratification is just as strong as he ever was.

As I mentioned though, there is another side. Another voice. This is
the one that tells you that you should be working out more. It’s the
one that tells you not to allow the little things in your life to
build into something bigger. It’s the one that aches for some type of
greatness that’s bigger than winning the lottery. It’s that voice that
tells you that you don’t believe in what you’re doing and is begging
you to lay the framework to do something that will make you happy.
It’s the voice that tells you what it is that you believe in the first
place. Delayed gratification could also be called your conscience.

For most people, quite sadly, we’ve been conditioned to listen more to
our instant gratification side rather than our conscience. Think about
it: when you’re first born, your only real reality is what you want
right now. You may feel a bond to people that take care of you but in
all reality, those people are barely real. You like them because they
make you feel comfortable and safe. It’s all about you. Where does the
conscience or delayed gratification come in? Not until your parents
start teaching you to be a good person. It’s in there somewhere, but
to really come out it must be learned. As you can see, it starts out
weaker than the IG voice and in most people it never changes.

The difference between most highly successful people and everyone else
is usually that the successful person has created a bigger vision and
has learned to silence his instant gratification voice in favor of
delayed gratification. This is a big reason that when someone with a
smaller vision wins the lottery, they quickly end up broke. People
with a bigger vision usually end up taking it from them.

Not only does our IG voice start out strong, it’s actually exercised
far more often throughout most of our lives. There are hundreds of
little choices we make each day that we don’t even realize we’re
making, and most of those lead to whatever makes us more comfortable
right in that moment. We reinforce the IG voice over and over again
without even realizing it, and then when we get home and think, “I
really should cook a healthy meal,” you’re left wondering how you just
managed to spend your intended healthy night chowing on pizza while
watching Jersey Shore.

It’s simple:  your IG voice has been winning all day, and you’re used
to listening to it. It wasn’t a stretch to do it one more time.

Wouldn’t it just be amazing if you could silence that voice? Imagine
what you could get done in your life. Perfect abs, larger bank
account, less clutter in your house, better relationships, never
giving in to temptation again when you know you shouldn’t. It’s huge,
right? Well, too bad--stop dreaming because you can’t silence that
voice. What you CAN do though is develop the other. Every decision you
make goes to one of these two voices, and most of the time your IG
voice tramples your much weaker delayed voice...but if you could
change that, you could have all of those things I mentioned above and
more.

 
Bam! Action Jeans! There's probably no reason for this picture.  

So the question is, how can you change such a thing? As I said, you
are always making tiny decisions. Each of these decisions either
strengthens or weakens you and as you’ve seen, it’s usually the IG
voice fighting for the weakening decision. Because most of these
decisions are made unconsciously it’s hard to stop them, but make no
mistake, the groove of habit is wearing deeper whether you’re aware of
it or not. So how could you combat something you don’t even know
you’re doing? First of all, you pay attention. Try to notice when you
are making each small choice throughout your day. If you’re sitting
there watching television, you are in that very moment making a
choice. If you decide to get off the couch and go wash your car,
another choice. You can almost always stop what you’re doing and do
something better for you, and you should always be aware of this.

Next, a trick I like to use is exercise; specifically, short bursts of
body weight workouts at home. I can do them any time I want and they
require no equipment.  The power in this is that by making the work
intense, I can create a situation in which my IG voice is not just
whispering hypnotically in my ear to take the easy route, he’s instead
screaming his power-drunk head off. He’s pushing buttons that are
playing with my rationale and trying everything he can to get me to
quit and just go back and sit on Facebook where I'll be "happy".

This is by far the most powerful time to shut that voice down. It’s
the best time to find that little voice left inside of you that is
pushing you forward. That little bit of delayed gratification that
knows why you’re doing this. That little bit of conscience that knows
that this will make you a better and stronger person for finishing it.
Find that voice and do everything you can to amplify it. Let him work
the ground beneath him and push you forward. Know that every time he
wins, that groove gets deeper while the dust settles in on the old
trail.

Remember, it’s not just exercise, it’s training.

Tips for a good workout:

1.    Make the workout short (20 minutes or less) so that when
you’re really wanting to quit, you know you just have to stick it out
for a couple more minutes. It helps.

2.    Make sure you have everything you need to do the workout
without much setting up or leaving your house.

3.    If you have the knees and health for it, running is great for
this.  At that point where you just can’t run anymore, keep running.

4.    Fight for that last rep, and if it’s safe, fight for 3 more.

5.    Make sure the workout is just on your edge of what is safe
and possible. It should be daunting but possible.

6.    Lower body and full body exercises are most effective here.

7.    Be safe. Check with your doctor. Do whatever you have to do
but be safe.

8.    Do these workouts often (even daily?).  It does no good if
you aren't consistent.

9.    Push for a record each time you do the workout, and
continually make it harder to maintain the level of difficulty.

10.   Always keep great technique.

11.   Finally, don’t quit. This is huge. If you quit under any
circumstances other than threat of injury or pain that you shouldn’t
be having, you will set yourself back substantially, and it’s very
easy to quit again next time.

That’s it for today. I know I’ve been absent for a little while, but
you will be seeing a much more ambitious posting schedule from me from
now on.

Until next time,

Kris

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Here's a free thank you gift to my readers.

Hey guys and gals!

I just wanted to take a second to thank all of you that have been reading my blog and spreading the word to others. Although the reading base is still low, it seems to grow a little everyday as you guys continue to pass the important information on to your friends and loved ones. For that and for being pretty much the coolest people ever, I thank you.

So, instead of a post today, I wanted to give you something a little better. I just picked up an ebook written by Mike Geary who is a fitness and nutrition author that I greatly respect. Mike, like me, is a big advocate of using better health to have a better body. He's used that formula to write what is now the best selling six-pack abs book on the internet called "Truth About Abs". You can pick up a copy here Fatlossessentials.com if you're interested. It really is everything it says it is.

A few minutes ago though I got my hands on another book of his called Training & Nutrition Insider Secrets for a Lean-Body. It's normally about $18 but Mike has decided to let a few of us give it away to our readers and I was lucky enough to get on board for you guys. It's pretty substantial too. Its about 65 pages and touches on a bunch of helpful topics. To grab a free copy just click the link below and it will open in your browser in PDF form. I recommend you save it to your hard drive cause you'll want to have a copy to look over later.

Download free ebook here!

If you know someone else that might be interested you can send them here or you can simply email them the book. I hope you enjoy it and get something great out of it! I'll be back with some new stuff in a couple days.

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS: Don't stop spreading the news now!Hit the like button below and give others a chance for some free stuff. Also, if you haven't subscribed yet the Facebook like button toward the top right-hand side of the page will get that done. You can also retweet, Digg, Stumble, bebo, myspace, email, or send the link by carrier pigeon if you want to. Whatever gets the word out :)

Challenge update

I almost forgot to post this. Many of you know that last week I posted my new personal challenge to gain 20lbs of muscle by September 4th. I have good news and bad news on that front.

First the bad news. It was supposed to be a challenge against a friend of mine that wanted to lose 20lbs by that date. It looks like this won't happen as she has sustained an injury that may keep her from exercising for the time being.

The good news though is that I'm not using it as an excuse for my own goals. Even if the bet is off, I'm still trudging forward and still accountable for my promises. That being said, after 1 week, I'm weighing in 3 pounds heavier at a weight of 156lbs. This is I believe what I called for myself last week so I'm happy to have hit it.

THis month my routine is a heavy strength routine (low reps, high weight). My cardio consists of 20 minutes of steep incline walking which amazingly enough has been kicking my a**

Another change I've had to make in order to get some strength back and get some more water and glycogen in my muscles is putting a lot of grains back in my diet. Upon doing this, I actually gained 5 lbs of mainly water weight in the first day. I cut it back though and dropped the weight back down a little.

Look for another update next Wednesday. I'm looking for 159lbs!

Train hard!

Kris

The importance of home for your diet

Out of all the insights that I’ve had over the years that have helped me to grow and to keep myself healthy, this has been one of the biggest. It has been a pillar of my strength and will power and has served as a constant reminder of what I should be doing at all times. Quite simply…

Respect your home.

The place in which you hang your hat is your territory.  It’s your environment you create for yourself. It’s your home. Home is a place to recharge and seek nourishment. This means nourishment of your body, your mind, and your soul. It’s where all can be exposed with no worry of being hurt or ridiculed; you can let your guard down. It’s where you can surround yourself of constant reminders of who you are as an individual. It’s the one place that you personally control and nothing should be allowed inside it that’s negative or can sabotage you in any way.

Your home is the only place in the world that you have this kind of control and that should absolutely be respected.

This means not allowing others to bring anything into your home that you don’t want there (including drama). Not allowing them to bring anything in that could hurt you in anyway. It even means being selective of what you allow from radio and television to come into your home. All that is in vain however, if you are not mindful of what you bring into your home.  Anything you bring in should be nourishing to you and nothing should be damaging. You have complete control of what’s there. No one else does. So if you allow yourself to be sabotaged in your own home, how do you plan on having success outside the home?

 

There is an obvious correlation here with food. If it’s important to you to be healthy, fit, and well nourished, you should be actively bringing in an abundance of nourishing foods into your home, while blocking access to damaging and harmful foods.

The one true place that you can have complete control of what goes into your body is in your home. Once again, if you sabotage yourself here, you have no chance of controlling it anywhere else in your life. This should be a constant thought when you are in the grocery store figuring out what you are going to be bringing back with you to your home. If it goes in your cart, it will end up not just in your home but in your body, so don’t put it in the cart in the first place.

A tip to make this easier while grocery shopping is to stay in the perimeter of the store as much as possible. The more you stay out of the aisles the better. It’s the aisles that are filled with the chips and cookies and frozen foods while the perimeter is loaded with fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy products. Granted not all of these are good for you but they are a lot better than most of the processed garbage found in the aisles.

On occasion, your cravings will get the best of you. There will be special occasions and get-togethers when some junk food will be part of the occasion. The purchase of this type of food, as a practice, should never be included in your regular grocery shopping though. If one night I get a craving for something that just won’t go away, my life is designed so that I have to go out of my way to fill that craving. I have to get up and physically leave my house to go get it. It’s not in my house already because my rules of grocery shopping prohibited me from buying it. This helps me to avoid the pitfalls of sabotaging my diet in my own home. I have to justify it to myself much more if I can’t just go to the freezer and grab the ice cream. 

 

If you practice looking at your home as a place of nourishment, it will have a great effect on your life and your health.

As a side note, I understand that some of you might be saying that this doesn’t work if you have a roommate or a significant other that has their own ideas of what they want to bring into the house. Clearly you can’t stop them from making their home their own as well?

Of course there will always be some truth to this. But if you’re in a situation where you have say a roommate or BF/GF living with you that stops you from having your own space and allowing yourself to have a spot to recharge and just be yourself, you should probably take that as a sign that its time to move on. It’s that important to have your own environment.

If you’re married and things just aren't that simple, I suggest you try to reconnect on the grounds you originally came together on and talk about it. Most people marry because they have commonalities and respect for one another. While people change over time, these things shouldn’t really change. Connect on this level and then explain yourself and what it is you need from your home that you’re not getting. Then find out what they need and make it a joint project to find ways to help each other obtain them. There’s always a way. You just may have to get creative.

Until next time,

Kris

  

  

PS: If you got something useful out of this article, you can help others find it by hitting the Facebook "Like" button below and/or by Stumbling this post on Stumbleupon. If you would like to be notified of future articles, please hit the Facebook "Like" button at the top right side of the page or you can follow me on Twitter @Easywhey. Thanks for reading!

My New Personal Three Month Challenge…

My New Personal Three Month Challenge…

The Post…

This post is all about a bet I made with a friend that keeps accountability for both of us in reaching our fitness and weight goals. I’m including it for those that want to get some ideas on some ways to keep motivation. Plus, I’m going to be giving weekly updates on my results here so I figure you should all know what I’m talking about! Plus, weekly updates here keep me even more accountable as I know that hundreds of people are watching me either succeed or fail. This should be interesting…

In the beginning…

I was talking to a close friend of mine today who came to me for some advice about fat loss. Like many people, she’s struggled with her weight for a little while and has decided that her best option is to set a goal and a date to achieve it by (great idea btw!). Her goal is to lose 20lbs of fat by September 4^th which gives about 3 months. Since this is a lofty goal (but very doable) she came to me for some advice and I’m doing what I can to help her set up a fitness routine and nutrition goals. She’s great with the food she eats already so it should just be some portion sizing and nutrient timing which should be pretty easy.

Anyway, it got me thinking about my own goals and it gave me an idea…

The wheels start spinning…

As of right today I’m 153lbs and standing 5’11”. According to the BMI (body mass index) scale, I’m pretty much right in the center of my healthy weight range which is between 133 to 178lbs. While I’m quite proud of my body, I must say that I’m a little sick of having to shop in the kids section for a belt that doesn’t wrap around me twice.

It’s actually always been on my mind to try to gain some size and as long as I can remember I’ve had a goal of 175lbs while still maintaining my 6-pack. With the way I train and eat though, my metabolism is always in hyper-drive which makes it difficult to gain weight in a healthy manner. Not impossible but very difficult. Since I’m quite healthy, I’ve never prioritized it high enough to go through it although it is something that’s been in my head for years. I’ve tried a few times but never made it past 162lbs before giving up. Six big meals per day is a lot to keep up with…

The Proposal…

So, I made a proposal. Since I have about 20lbs to gain for my major goal and she has 20lbs to lose for hers, we entered into a little contest pitting us pound for pound against each other. It’s going to work like this:

How it works…

Each of us have weighed ourselves and put down a starting weight. As I said, mine is 153. I won’t mention hers though as she is a lady (which means she has claws and might use them). On September 4^th we weigh in with each other again and compare ourselves to where we started.

Up to our goal weight, each pound lost for her or gained for me is worth $10. So if I gain one pound, she would owe me $10 and vice versa. At the end we tally up the weight and determine the victor. Then of course the loser pays up! The amount owed will be based on the difference in weight so for instance, I she loses 16lbs and I only gain 10lbs, I would owe her for $60 for six pounds. Of course if we both hit our goals no one owes anyone and its huge celebration time!

 

This picture has nothing to do with this post. Enjoy! 

 

My personal conflict…

The interesting thing in this for me is going to be playing coach for the opposing team. I have to say that I love using the knowledge and experience I have to help others reach their goals and even more so when they are friends, but this is going to be weird! Every pound I help her lose means that much more work for me and every time I gain some muscle weight, as her coach I’m going to have to jump in there and kick some behind to make sure she doesn’t lose! To make things weirder yet, I don’t like to lose. I’m highly competitive. One second I’m going to be talking trash and the next I’m gonna be pushing her to beat me.

As strange as it’s going to be though, I think these dynamics are going to be a huge advantage to both of our success and motivation in accomplishing our goals. While I definitely want to win, the desired outcome would of course be a huge celebration for both of us at the end for meeting the goals we’ve set for ourselves.

The more the merrier…

I encourage any of you as well to join in. Of course I’m not trying to start a gambling ring here so no money but if you want to set a goal for yourself (doesn’t have to be 20lbs, could be less but I wouldn’t make it much more than that either way) and post it below, I’d love to follow your progress too. Plus if you do and you have questions for me, I’ll do my best to answer them and keep you on track. Remember though, you will be held accountable to weekly updates in the comments section.

You keep me accountable…

So once again, today is June 2 and I weigh in at 153lbs. My promise to you is that I will do everything in my power to reach my goal of 173lbs while maintaining a reasonable 6-pack and will give weekly updates on my progress and any insights this process gives me. My next update will be next Wednesday, June 9^th and to be on track I should be at least 156lbs. Wish me luck!

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS: If you like this post, tell your Facebook friends by clicking the 'Like' button below! This will not subscribe you however so if you're interested in keeping up with future posts, you can do so by clicking the Facebook ‘Like’ button in the top right hand side of the screen or you can follow me on Twitter @easywhey. Either way, thanks for reading :-)

 

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Are you giving it your absolute all in the moment?

I really hope that all my US readers had an amazing three day weekend celebrating the service men and women and all they’ve done for us through the generations. It’s Fleet Week here in NYC, so there are uniformed servicemen everywhere. Unfortunately, this means the rest of us non ‘uniformed hero’ types are completely invisible to the ladies for the next week but… sigh… such is life…

This article was going to be on shredding those excess holiday calories many of us have taken in over the weekend, but I’m sure it will be done a million times over the next two days. Plus I’m going to guess that you don’t need yet another article telling you ridiculous life complicating things like, “Walking backwards burns more calories than regular walking so why not switch!?”

This picture has nothing to do with this post. Enjoy! 

No, we don’t need ridiculous, but what we do need sometimes is just a little motivation...and what better time to absorb a little motivation than just before you get back to life after a nice holiday?

Lately I’ve been pondering a question--a simple question, but one that seems to have profound effects on how I spend my time and what I get out of it. Now I’d like to share it with you in the hopes that you can also benefit.

The question is simply, “Right now, at this very moment, am I putting EVERYTHING I have into the task at hand, or am I scattered and wasting my time?”

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that the time is always now. The time to be the absolute best that you can be is always right this very second--no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much you don’t want to do it, no matter how much you feel it can be put off until tomorrow. The time for being your best and setting the bar higher in your life is ALWAYS right now. With that said, if you’re going to use right now to set that bar higher and improve your life, you can’t afford to not be giving it your absolute all.

When I’m at the gym, I am asking myself this constantly. When it’s just me and a stack of weights that I don’t want to lift, when I’m on my last three reps and I feel myself giving excuses to not do them, when I’m on a good run but talking myself out of going as far as I said I would, when my whole body burns and I can barely stand up but my break is over and the squat bar is staring me down… you can be guaranteed that this question is circling my brain.

This question reminds me that I’m here, I’m in the moment, and if I’m not going to push to be the best I can be, I may as well not have gone to the gym at all. The time is now and there is no way I’m going to let three reps beat me. I came in knowing full well that training is hard and that getting results is even harder, but if I decided to put in the time I may as well get the max results for the amount of time I’m putting in.

This isn’t just a fitness perspective though; this is all of life. This could be something as simple as hanging out with a friend or loved one. Are you giving them your total attention? Are you making the most of the time you have together right this very minute? I don’t care if you’re cleaning your house, setting up a website, practicing your golf swing, doing a project at work, mowing your lawn, learning a language, spending time at a museum, running a business, grocery shopping, or laying in a hammock listening to the wind blow in the trees. If you’re going to do something, do it with excellence and focus. Don’t get in a relaxing bath and think about work. If you’re with your loved ones, make sure they are all that count in the moment. If you’re at the gym, be at the gym, remember you’re there, and remember you have a purpose. Then follow it. No matter what you’re doing, make sure you are giving it your absolute all.

You’ll find that when you start asking yourself this question often and it really gets burned in, the things you spend your time doing will actually become more enjoyable and rewarding. Everything you do will have the potential to lead to something better. You’ll start to find joy in things you’ve never taken the time to even notice. You’ll spend less time on everything you do but get better results. In short, your life will begin to become a series of victories!

What I want you to do is take this next week (it’s a four day week for many of you), and just keep asking yourself this question and see how it affects you. Did you do a better job? Are the people around you responding differently? Did you have an insight I didn’t mention, or even one I did that struck you harder than you thought? Did it change something for the better or worse that you didn't see coming? Go through a week asking yourself this question about once an hour (really contemplating it), and then come back and leave a comment telling me what you got out of it. Until then…

 

Train hard and expect success,

 Kris

PS: If you like this post, tell your Facebook friends by clicking the 'Like' button below! This will not subscribe you however so if you're interested in keeping up with future posts, you can do so by clicking the Facebook ‘Like’ button in the top right hand side of the screen or you can follow me on Twitter @easywhey. Either way, thanks for reading :-)

The illusion of health and how its holding you back

I’m often asked why I think it is that with all the information and diets out there, people are more obese and out of shape than ever. My answer is always the same. It’s our mindset. Now stay with me, this isn’t some woo-woo article where I tell you to think about your fat melting away to make it happen. This is more than that. It’s about what people want vs what they need.

To illustrate this I’d like to talk about something I call the “illusion of health”. The illusion of health is what most diets and exercise gadgets promise us that we just can’t help but to chase. When you watch some late night commercial about an ab machine that promises to melt the fat away from your midsection and have you displaying a gorgeous set of chiseled abs in just minutes a day, what they are promising you is the illusion of health. There is no way doing some crazy crunches using the Ab Blaster 7000 is going to bring you to good health. It’s not going to reverse the damage of the processed foods you eat, it’s not going to help your body get the nutrition it’s been deprived of, it’s not going to clear your arteries of the garbage that’s caked in them, it’s not going to balance your hormones, it’s not going to heal your damaged organs or lower your risk of cancer, it’s not even going to burn fat! It’s really not going to do anything for you and that’s why you don’t see any of these things promised.

Instead they show you a bunch of fitness models that lead lifestyles that do all of these things and have the body to prove it and tries to convince you that some glorified crunches will give you a body like theirs. These things then sell like hotcakes because people want that body. They care more about the illusion of health (that body) than actual health. The problem is that if a body is not healthy in all regards, it will never look like that.

 

uh huh, yeah, I guess this belt works your biceps too huh? 

 

Diets are exactly the same way. Millions of people have decided that fat and carbs are enemy #1 to a lean body. Some people even avoid life giving fruits and vegetables because they contain carbs. This despite the libraries of studies that say that carbs and fat are essential to the body functioning as it should. Take them away and you cannot be at optimal health. That’s not cared about though because people are more interested in the illusion of health than health.

The illusion of health can be summed up as the characteristics that a healthy body displays: slim, muscular, athletic, shapely, clear skin with healthy glow and elasticity, healthy teeth and gums, etc. All the things the magazines accomplish so well with Photoshop for their covers.

The reason people are failing is simply because they are chasing the illusion instead of the real thing. You can’t eat crap or avoid major nutrients and expect to have a healthy body. It just doesn’t work that way. However, if people would concentrate on health instead of chasing some illusion, I think they would find that the illusion would no longer be an illusion at all. It would instead be the person staring back at them in the mirror day after day.

You may want to ask yourself which one you’re chasing right now. Chances are, if you’re following restrictive diets or doing an 8 minute abs DVD in the morning, you’re probably chasing the illusion. If instead of saying you want to be healthy you’re always concerned with weight loss, you’re probably chasing the illusion.

The illusion is the quick fix and if you chase it, you will end up with nothing. If you decide that becoming healthy is what you really want to do, your body will often take care of the rest.

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS: If you like this post, tell your Facebook friends by clicking the 'Like' button below! This will not subscriber you however so if you're interested in keeping up with future posts, you can do so by clicking the Facebook "Like" button in the top right hand side of the screen or by following me on Twitter @easywhey. EIther way, thank you for reading :-)

When am I an athlete?

Hey all, it's Laura.

You may recall that like many of you, I'm pretty new at the whole consistent-fitness-routine thing.  To actually follow a plan, follow through on it, and accomplish something is still a very new concept, and something I'm still sort of surprised I actually did.

It's back to the basics now, as it's about 13 weeks till my NEXT half-marathon in June.  So I'll be returning to a 5 day per week plan, and will likely be trying my hand at overdistance training--more details on that once I have it all worked out.  I'll keep everyone posted on ideas and tips as I train for this race, which is in Lake Placid and reportedly has a couple monster hills.  I took a week off after the Disney race, part of which I was laid flat with a bad cold, but now I'm looking forward to lacing up those running shoes again.

But I was thinking about a conversation I had with a friend the other day... "It's so awesome you've become an athlete, Laura," she said.

"Nah, I'm a new runner.  Athletes are pros."

"Come on, you've completed a half-marathon, and have more in the future.  That makes you an athlete!"

So I've been trying to figure out exactly what makes someone an athlete, and when it is safe to call yourself one.  I'm still not sure.  To call myself an athlete sounds like trying to be something I'm not; but then again, I do train consistently and work towards pretty admirable fitness goals.  (I've entered the lottery for this year's NYC Marathon, by the way--I have about a 1 in 20 chance of getting in, so we'll see!)  I guess the big difference between me and what I consider athletes is plain old body type:  I'm still curvy and not very muscular, when I consider athletes to be compact, toned, and trim.  I suppose, then, that I would land somewhere in between, with aims to work my way over to my own definition of athlete.

The first step to get there is to get back on the roads--which starts with four miles today!

Is it time to pack away a few goals?

When you talk to any of the fitness gurus out there, they will tell you that if you ever plan to have success, you must have goals. Hey, who am I to disagree with this logic. If you don’t know exactly what you want, it’s going to be pretty hard to end up there. For one thing, each goal can take a while to accomplish and without one, we tend to jump around from thing to thing and never really accomplish anything.

Is it possible though that having too many goals can be an even greater evil?

 Just as I said above, if you don’t have a goal, you tend to jump from one thing to another without really accomplishing anything. If you have too many goals it can be easy to do this as well. With too many goals however, there is the added stress of not accomplishing them and feeling like you’re constantly beating your head against the wall.

A real goal should become one of, if not the most important thing in your life. If you have a real goal, you should be devoting your entire self to that goal. Sure, you may have different goals in different parts of your life and that’s fine but when we develop a love for something, a lot of us start developing many goals around it.

In my case, I love fitness, so the idea of doing everything from being a body builder, to running a marathon, to being able to do crazy gymnastics type body work is appealing. I even have a dream of jumping on a bike and going from New York to California. Crazy thing is I’ve barely ridden a bike since I was 14!

A couple years ago I worked with someone who ran the NYC Marathon every year. Since him and I were both into fitness, we talked a lot. I became a little jealous of him for being able to run it and I started thinking that I was going to do it. That year went by and I didn’t really do anything to prepare for it but I decided that since I only live a few blocks from the finish line in Central Park that I would go watch people cross (Completely inspiring and amazing thing to do btw).

Being out there was really a surge of energy and it really put the oomph back in my goal of running it. Problem was that even though running clashed hard with my other fitness goals, I was determined to figure out a way to do it. So after taking my new Nike’s out for a couple of spins and finding that it was killing my primary training, I stopped running as much. Before I knew it, it was marathon time again and my work buddy was all excited about running it but I wasn’t excited. I was downright miserable and I felt like a failure. Not only had it been a year of losing prior results due to my new training but I didn’t come close to making the new goal either.  

Then something weird happened though. I actually sat and thought about my options and made a real decision for myself. I decided that running a marathon, no matter how much I might have wanted to do it, was the wrong move for me right then. It may seem like a copout but it was really one of the best and strongest moves I could have made and it’s taught me quite a bit. The first thing it did was take that nagging pressure off me. Now I can enjoy the idea of the marathon without thinking I’m a failure.

Next, it cleaned up my routine. Now that I wasn’t going for two different goals I could concentrate on one thing and actually get results.

The third and most important thing it did was that it taught me that I don’t have to do everything right this minute.

Now when I say, “Hey, one day I’d love to run the NYC Marathon”, I can say it without the shame of having to ask myself why I haven’t done it yet. I know why I haven’t and it’s OK with me. I have other goals that are more important to me and as long as I am actually working on those, the rest can sit neatly packed away with no shame. It can now simply be a box of dreams that keeps me going and growing into old age.

Maybe in the same spirit some of you might want to take a look at your own over burdened lives and do a little goal sorting. Figure out which goals are most important to increasing your happiness and overall quality of life, and put the rest down for a little while. It’s OK. You can come back to them when its more advantageous to you. Plus between the stress relief you feel and the ability to focus yourself more in less places, you may be surprised at the progress you’re able to make.

Until next time,

Kris

 

The wonder of achieving a goal

Hey all, after being MIA for entirely too long, it’s Laura here—and I have good news!

 

 I completed my first half-marathon!!

 

Some of you may have been wondering why I fell off the earth, and I’ll be honest—I hit a bit of a rough patch with my running.  I pulled a muscle near that same injured knee, and then had some other issues that were completely unrelated to running but nevertheless prevented me from continuing my training.  With the date of my half-marathon looming ever nearer, it became more and more important to simply build a base for the distance required, whether it was walking OR running.  Due to the complications to which I could do nothing but accept and adapt, I had to tweak my goal to just finish the damn thing.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to run as much as I wanted to, but the very thought of crossing a major finish line was still very exciting to me.

These were the thoughts and hopes going through my mind at the ungodly hour of 4AM, where I was waiting in the (surprisingly cold!) parking lot of Epcot to go to the race starting line for the Disney Princess Half-Marathon in Orlando.  The starting gun went off for my group at 6:21AM, and my 13.1 mile journey began.  It was exactly the kind of race atmosphere I had wanted:  supportive and encouraging, with many other women running their debut half-marathon as well.  We were all in the same boat, women who had faced various challenges and wanted the pride and sense of accomplishment in knowing we had each reached a major goal. 

Throughout the race course, there were bits of entertainment to keep everyone going:  a pirate ship manned by Capt. Jack Sparrow, a few of the Disney princes cheering us on, and various characters posing with you to take pictures.  The highlight, hands down, was at the halfway point where you would run through Cinderella’s Castle at the Magic Kingdom, cheered on by a prince and princess, footmen, and live music playing.  The race finally ended back in the Epcot parking lot, where I crossed the finish line with my arms raised overhead, cheering.  My parents had joined me at Disney World to support me, and they cheered as I received my very first medal…it was a perfect culmination of all the hard work I’d put in to be able to cross that finish line.

There were drawbacks, as I’d known there would be:  I didn’t finish in the time I wanted due to having to walk as well as run the race, and due to the huge crowd there were times I WANTED to run but could not because we were all bottlenecked into a small area.  There was a point at mile three where I thought of the 10 miles still looming ahead and for a few minutes was already exhausted, just thinking of the long way I had to go.  I simply had to turn off that part of my brain and take everything one step at a time, which made the entire race much easier.

And now I can always be counted among the groups who have completed a half-marathon.  The most exciting part to me is that I hope this has opened a door into many more half-marathons; I can continue to improve and build up my running, and enjoy completing half-marathons for a very long time.  I even have another half already lined up, the Lake Placid Half Marathon in June.  I think a lot of people, once they achieve their big goal, might feel a sense of being let down, a feeling of “Well, now what?”  Thankfully I don’t feel that at all because I have the next race already planned, but instead have that continued sense of excitement and even a bit of drive to try and improve my time. 

The big goal, the next big dream, is the New York City Marathon next year, 26.2 miles that currently scare the hell out of me.  Truth be told, I’m sure they’ll scare the hell out of me until the day after I complete it.  That race—and who knows, maybe other marathons to follow—would be the ultimate achievement.  The smaller races I run here in NYC will count towards a guaranteed entry for next year, so I have lots of time to prepare. 

Allow me to tell you, while I’m still enjoying my elation from completing the race, that anyone can achieve a similar goal if they put their minds to it.  In a matter of months I’ve gone from little physical activity (comparatively, anyway, as in NYC you have to walk a lot) to completing a half-marathon, with plans to keep on going.  I may be young, but I saw many older women on that race course this weekend, some easily in their sixties and seventies.  I’m sure they would join me in saying it’s never too late to set a goal, and to set your mind to achieving it.

Building character in the gym

For most of us, we have a real love/hate relationship with working out. Many of us love the feeling we get during and after a great workout. When everything is firing on all cylinders, you feel stronger than usual, your endurance is through the roof, and you could open bottle on your arm veins. There isn’t a much better feeling than beating personal bests and the physical rush that comes with it is almost superhuman.  Also, who can argue with results?

Of course we all know that most workouts we don’t feel like super powerhouses that can do anything and new personal bests equate to climbing Mt. Everest. You just don’t have the strength, everything feels heavier, and each rep makes a quart of ice cream and a couch sound more appealing. When every muscle in your body is crying for mercy and you just want to go home and lick your wounds; it’s during these times that your brain can make a pretty convincing argument that you have no business being in the gym right then and you’d be better off just coming back later.

It is during these times though, when you don’t feel like being there is doing you any good at all that staying and pushing through will do you the most good. Sure, you may not be able to hit your personal bests in terms of weights and maybe your pumps won’t be as great but tough workouts have a lot more benefit to us than just building muscle and physical endurance. In fact I would venture to say that those are more side effects to its real benefit of building character. There’s a saying that if you can build a world class body, you can do anything.

Many people look at bodybuilding as a worthless and narcissistic thing to do. There’s a reason though that people like Arnold have gone on to be successful authors, movie stars, politicians, organizers, business owners, etc. It’s because they understand what it takes to be successful. In Arnold’s case, he would lift until he passed out. He’d go into the woods and do 50 to 60 sets of squats with logs until he and his friends couldn’t walk anymore and then just camp out there cause they couldn’t make it home. Now we have armchair armies of fat 14 year old kids sitting around telling people they don’t know how to build muscle because their workouts are longer than 45 minutes.

It always bugs me when I see people saying stuff about athletes like Michael Phelps for instance. “Oh so he can swim fast, so what?” These people don’t seem to realize the absolute determination, will power, dedication, and heart it took to be one of the best in the world at something. Someone like Michael Phelps could take those same principles and do almost anything with them. If he starts a business, do you think he’ll quit when it gets a little tough? No, because he not only knows what it takes to succeed but its driven so far into his mind from his swimming that it would probably never even cross his mind to quit. It wouldn’t even be an option to him. He’d find a way to make it a success!

Most people just don’t have that kind of drive. They don’t have that heart, that soul,that character, or discipline to do something truly great. All of us have some drive though, and we can all take action to improve our character. There is no better way to do this than through physical stimulus. When you’re under a heavy squat bar and your legs are shaking and the last thing in the world you want to do is one more rep, that is your body, mind, and soul that you are pushing to its limits. Your legs might be burning and shaking and tired, but it’s your brain that really wants you to quit. The reason for most human failure in life is that people just aren’t willing to do the things that make them uncomfortable. In fitness, if you’re REALLY pushing yourself, it’s not about what’s mentally uncomfortable, it’s about what is physically and mentally PAINFUL. While this makes it more powerful in breaking habits of avoiding discomfort, the real advantage is that in fitness, you can safely bring yourself to this level anytime you want to and then practice pushing past it. Every opportunity you have to push past the pain, the more your subconscious forms that trench. Succumbing to the pain becomes the path less travelled in your brain and you carry it with you in everything else you do

Building character is about building great habits. Do it first in the gym where you have direct control and you’ll find it easier to do it everywhere else in your life. So how do you do it? How do you fight yourself in the gym when every fiber of your being is begging you to stop? Even more importantly, how do you do this consistently? You set yourself up through training methods and pay attention to it. First I’ll give you some training methods and then some tips and insights to help you further.

 

HIT or high intensity training

 The idea of high intensity training is training under the principle that it’s not about how much work you do, but how much more you did than last time. Keeping all variables relatively the same, there are three basic and measurable ways to increase the amount of work you do in a given period of time. The amount of weight you lift, how many times you lift it, and the amount of rest you had to take to do it.

 Let’s say that for the bench press, you’re hitting 3 sets of 10 @185lbs with 60 second rest periods. If this is what you did in your last workout, this time you want to increase it so you have the option of increasing either the weight, increasing the reps, or you could cut your rest time down a little. Any of these would be sufficient examples of adding more intensity.

Not only is this a very effective way of making regular gains in the gym but it forces you to push yourself further no matter how much you may not want to.

Resetting your goals

 Let’s say you’re six reps through your 10 reps set and its feeling smooth. You know that you have more in you than 10 because you’re really not that tired yet. Right there is where you adjust your goals for THAT set. It’s natural for us to feel fatigue at the end of a predetermined rep range. If you tell yourself you’re going to do 50 pushups, once you hit 40 it becomes hard and by rep 50 you are just done. Even if you could do more, you rarely would. However, if you set that goal to sixty, you may not be very happy at 40 but your body isn’t giving out on you at 50. It’s all psychological. So at about that sixth rep, before you’re too tired and before you start those last tiring reps to completion, if you realize you have more, reset your goal right then. If you feel like you could get past ten and still have some left, commit to at least 13 Commit yourself just higher than you think you can go. The point is to commit yourself past what your brain is afraid of. Then once you’re committed, doing it often becomes a solely mental battle. Eventually, you won’t be able to put down the bar if you feel you have more.

Set lofty goals and going for it

This is also a great way to break through plateaus. If you curl 35 pound dumbbells for set of ten and its hard but not impossible to finish, for your first set, pick up the 40’s or 45’s and go for 12. If your body just completely fails at 9 then at least you know that you took yourself as far as you could go. Sometimes just going for it makes all the difference in pushing our boundaries.

Always, no matter what, try for at least one extra rep

I don’t care if you are doing super low rep work with 90% of your max weight. Always try go for that last rep. In one of my last routines, I had a beginning exercise for each body part that I would do four sets of four. I set that weight to the max I thought I could do for four reps and sometimes a little more just so I didn’t think I cheated myself. If I could get to 4, even if the rep kind of sucked, I would ALWAYS try for a 5^th. Then, if I could get a full 5^th rep, no matter how much I had to struggle or how much it hurt, I would go for a 6^th and so on. Let’s say this was my 3^rd set and I got in 5 ¾ reps. What do you think I would go for the next time? Before I started the set, I would pick up my training journal and boldly write in the number 7. I didn’t care that this was a ridiculous goal. It didn’t matter to me. What matters is that if I got to almost 6 when going for 4, I can definitely get to 7 if I’m going for it. Kicker is I always would reach the goal. I might be screaming in pain but I got it, and now I knew I was capable of it.

Get up and go.

This should go without saying at this point but if you’re not in the gym, or you don’t strap on those running shoes, you can’t push yourself. Everytime you don’t get up and do the thing you said you would do, you weaken yourself substantially. You take an opportunity you had to train your brain to make the strengthening decision and instead replace it with a little more wear in the path of weakness. If you want to be successful, the path of discipline should be so trounced upon that grass will never again be able to grow.

There is nothing truly difficult about the normal actions of a successful person. They are usually so impressive in fact that it often leads us to look at them and say things like “Big deal, I can do that.” It can actually lead us to resent successful people and think of them as lucky.

What makes them successful though is not their ability to do simple actions, it’s the fact that they’ve found a way to do them over and over again, day in and day out relentlessly. I read an article by Jay Cutler talking about his preparation for Mr. Olympia. He said during his bulking phases, he would go out and cook a pound of fish and some vegetables on his grill, come in and eat them, spend 20 minutes checking email and making his phone calls, and then so he didn’t miss his eat every two hour deadline, he’d be right back outside grilling for his next meal. He would set his alarm three times per night to get up, make a meal, and go back to bed. He did this for 17 weeks straight. Anyone can cook some fish on the grill, anyone could eat that fish, anyone could wake up at night and eat but how many people could do that every single day and night for 17 weeks straight?

When we fail at something, we all want to think its because we’re unlucky or because we just don’t know the magic formula. While there are more and less effective methods for doing something, 9 times out of 10 times our failure isn’t based on our methods but our conviction. You could have the best program in the world but if you don’t follow it, it ain’t gonna work but its always easier to find a new program than to put in the effort to follow it.

I read an article Arnold once wrote that said, great calves take 500 hours of intense work. 500 hours works out to about 660 45 minute workouts. At 6 days per week, that’s about 3 years of 45 minute intense, calf only workouts. He says that anything less than that, you may as well not be doing anything. There are tons of guys out there that are so frustrated with their calves that they claim they will do anything to build them. Well, we’ve known Arnolds workout for over 30 years now. How many of those people have the discipline to put that kind of work in for even one week?

Stop worrying about the how, if you don’t have the discipline to follow through. Once you get the discipline down that the how will make the difference. Once you build the character, you can do anything. So next time you’re thinking to yourself, “I know I’m supposed to but I just don’t want to” and you start hearing your brain come up with a million excuses not to, that’s your cue that you have a chance to turn it around. Remember, it’s about more than your physic; this is about your life. Start using the gym to build your character and I promise you, you won’t regret it.

A few tips and observations

Mind set

The gym is your battleground. It’s your character Mecca. It’s the place you go for only one reason and that is to better yourself so you make damn sure you get every ounce of betterment you can out of it. When you walk in the door of your gym next time, take a deep breath and look around. I want you to tell yourself that when you are here, nothing stands in your way and you will do everything to your absolute max potential. Tell yourself this every time you walk in the door until you know it instinctively. Even if you can’t control the outside world, in here, you control everything and your results rely on you. You’re here and that presents you an opportunity. You will not let that opportunity slip by for anything.

No distractions

Do not allow any distraction. Grab your ipod if you have to and turn it up loud enough that you can’t hear people talking to you. This is about you, not your social life. I’m not saying be rude, but if it takes a little disregard of some other slackers’ feelings for you to excel, it shouldn’t stop you. This also means, stop talking to the cute girl or guy at the counter. You’re here to work. NO DISTRACTIONS!

Get a trainer, a coach, or a friend to keep you accountable.

Accountability and extra drive go a long way. Don’t ever forget though that you are doing this for yourself, and not just for your friend or trainer. It’s easy to slack on the days that they aren’t there if you forget that simple premise. Plus it does little for your character if you aren’t doing it for you.

Go til you blow

One way of doing this is to take an exercise that you can do but you really don’t like. Most guys hate working their legs so squats are usually good for this. Load up the bar with a light weight. 95lbs is sufficient for most. Now just squat until you can’t anymore!

You’ll find that when you don’t have a set number in mind, you’ll want to quit sooner than you should. Especially with light weight because you’ll get tired but it feels like your muscles could just keep going all day. This makes it seem like the workload in front of you is monumental and makes you really want to quit. Of course this usually happens by about the 15^th to 18^th rep. This is the challenge. You’re goal is to go until you can barely get that bar back up if you’re alone, and if you have a spotter its to go until you can’t get it back up by yourself.

By the end, you should be gasping for air and taking several second rests between reps because you have to just to keep going. Once you get to that point, you know you’re almost there. At this point, look at yourself in the mirror through the tears and commit yourself to five more reps. Even if it takes you ten seconds a rep, you get those five reps. When you rack that barand your legs turn to spaghetti, you know you’ve just built some character. If you really want a challenge now, rest for 2 minutes and head over to the leg extension machine for a quick burnout set.

Testing yourself

Wanna test yourself right now and see just how strong your will is? Get down and start doing some pushups. If you can normally do 30 in good form, set a goal for 45-50. If you can normally do 100, set the goal for 120. Then do it, no matter what it takes, do it. Don’t quit until they are done or you pass out from trying. Come up to your knees and shake out your arms for 5 to 10 seconds if you need to but get it done.

If pushups aren’t your thing, try body weight squats. If you don’t normally do these, set a goal of doing 100. Then no matter what it takes, do it. Just get them done no matter what. It doesn’t matter how much it hurts, how much you want to quit. If you’re at all in good health and you have good knees, you can do this if you try hard enough.

The point is to take an exercise that you can do at home with no weights, take the normal amount you can do, and then set a goal that far surpasses it and just get it done. If you find that you stop midway through, you need to ask yourself why you stopped. You need to really think about what that says about you and your ability to push through the hard stuff in life. This is just a set of squats or pushups, what about that business you want to start or that book you want to write or whatever it is in your life that you want to do? If you can’t do this, you need to evaluate why and then start on a path of trying to figure it out. The great thing about this though is that if you can learn to do it, you won’t have to learn to push through the pain in the rest of your life, you’ll just start to do it automatically. If you learn to push through this physical pain go until it is physically impossible to go anymore, it will go a long way in training yourself for all other aspects of your life. And when you do hit a wall in some other place and you just want to quit, remember what that pain is and treat it just like you treat your training. That is what this is after all, its not exercise your doing…You’re training.

I promise you, if you do this, it won’t just be your physic that moves to the next level, it will be your life.

 

 

The Price of Success is always cheaper than the cost of failure

This saying has become my new mantra. To me, it encompasses everything in life. What it means is quite simply this. For any success in life there is a price to pay. Maybe it’s hard work, maybe it’s putting your ego aside for someone else, maybe its delaying gratification, or maybe its spending a few extra minutes in preparation phase. Some successes are so important that people are willing to give up their own lives for. I generally don’t recommend this though.

Nothing worth having comes easy. Want proof, some of you may be looking at people like Paris Hilton and saying, “but Kris, it was easy for her”. Sure, some things came very easy to her. You know what’s important to her though? Its important to her to feel like she’s done all of this on her own. That she could be a success without the starting money and Hilton name. Let me tell you, it’s gonna take an awful lot of work for that to happen.

However, for every success, there is the chance to fail. Sometimes failure is due to not having the right knowledge, sometimes it’s bad luck, but most of the time, failure is due to not being willing and able to pay the price of success. Just like each success has a price, each failure has a cost as well. The difference is, the cost of failure in anything that’s truly important to you, is always greater than the price you would have paid for success.

Let me give an example. When I was 13, I began playing guitar. I loved playing and I would play 100 hours a week if you’d let me. It wasn’t work to me, it was all play. Some would say that I put in the time so I was paying the price of success. Well, kind of but not really. I had quite a few friends at the time that were also into playing guitar and they were somehow always better than me even though they played less. Most of them had more money than I did and they were getting lessons so I would just attribute it to that. Then, when I was 16 I met a kid that had been playing one year less than me, never took a lesson, but blew me away in skill. What was the excuse then? He must be a natural.

I was quite jealous of all these people that were better than me, especially when guitar was my life at the time. I remember I would go over to my friend’s house and ask him to teach me things. I would always think I was going to learn something great but instead of showing me a cool technique or some new song he’d learned, he’d give me some stupid scale to practice. I HATED scales! They were so boring and I’d much rather throw on a CD and play along or just turn the amp up and rock out for hours. So, of course I would let the lesson go in one ear and out the other and I wouldn’t even learn the scale, let alone go home and practice it. I’d just keep doing what I was doing and I’d get it.

Years later I worked at a music store selling guitars. For some reason, the people that worked in the store were always thought to be these amazing players. Some of the people that really were too. We had the almost local celebrity status because everyone wanted our jobs. The truth was, I actually was a decent player and to the novice ear, I was an astounding player. Sometimes though, the real musicians in the area would try to get you to test something out or play something for them and there was always this thought that I must be an amazing player. The truth was though that I knew I couldn’t hold my own against these people. By this time, I’d rationalized that I just wasn’t ever meant to be as good as these people and even more ironic was my thoughts that I just wasn’t smart enough to understand scale structures the way they did. I had myself totally convinced that I’d paid the price of success but just wasn’t good enough. Looking at it now, I know I didn’t. I sold myself short.  

The price for my not putting the work in is a heavy one. To this day music means a lot to me, but I don’t feel like I have to skill to create what’s in my mind. That pain is great and it’s pain that I’ve endured for a very long time.

What was the price of success? Had I taken the information that my friends had paid for and were willing to give to me for free and spent one tenth of my playing time practicing just that in a structured way, not only would all this pain and humiliation been avoided, but instead of writing this blog I might be shacked up with some super model right now counting my rockstar money living a life that now I could only dream of.

In this case, like all others, the price I could have just paid for success (even non rockstar success) is much less than the pain of failure. One hour a day meant the difference in confident virtuoso with a ton of opportunity, and hiding my shame from people I thought were just better than me and not ever being able to express myself in an art I love.

Now, after 17 years of failure and finally a realization, I’ve decided to start back as a beginner. I never stopped playing and I’m not anywhere close to a beginner, but it doesn’t matter. Now that I’ve recognized the difference in price, I’ve decided that even though I’ve paid so much for failure already, its still worth putting in the work and paying the entire price of success. Even though success today won’t come as easily without ten hour a day to play, and even knowing that at 30, the rewards such as being a rockstar are probably out of the question, its still worth it to me to pay the price of success to stop paying the price of failure.

Of course this is only one example. All examples are really the same though. When I was younger, I decided that I wanted to have instant success. In fact, I was sure that I would have instant success. I’d never been around too many successful people growing up and I never really learned what it took to have any real success. Nobody around me ever put any proactive energy into anything. So for me, to put any proactive effort into something at all was a formula for success. Other people weren’t successful because they didn’t try to be in my eyes. I was gonna be daring and make it happen. No dount in my mind that all I needed to do was take a leap and I’d be a millionaire overnight. Besides, I had tons of great ideas!

So in my infinite wisdom, I went out and swung for the fences! When I missed I just wound up and swung again. Never mind the fact that I had no ball hitting skills, I just had to keep swinging. My failures were spectacular. There were a lot of them too. After a little while of this, I started going out to find help from those that had been there before. Their advice? Practice your scales. I had no damn time for boring scales. I was in my early 20s now. I was supposed to be rich by 19. I’m way behind schedule and you want me to practice boring scales?  I still hadn’t learned. I spent 70+ hours a week swinging for taller and taller fences against faster and faster pitchers. Eventually, I started to tell myself that although it didn’t make any sense, I must just be cursed to a life of failure since nothing ever worked. Interesting thing was, although I still didn’t get it. I did realize that had I spend those years that’d passed learning some boring technique, I would be much better equipped now to hit this next ball over that fence, but that didn’t matter now. The only reason that was important was because I obviously saw now those years as wasted. It didn’t deter me from thinking I was going to hit the next one over though and I still didn’t have time for all that stuff. I was gonna be a real success damn it and real successes are spectacular. Plus, now I’m old and really don’t have time for that crap.

Now I’m 30. Oh the horror J. At 28 I finally decided to stop swinging for fences and the last two years have been my most successful and happiest ever. Funny thing, even though I haven’t seen most of the fruits of the success prices I’m paying, I actually find joy in that act of paying the price. I’ve learned that you can’t be simultaneously failing and paying the price for success. When you’re truly paying for success, you’re always inching forward. Success is always a little closer than it was before.

That’s something I really want you to take out of this. If you are truly paying the price for success, you cannot be failing at the same time. The reason this is so important is that its very easy to feel like a failure. Its easy to feel defeated. Even those people that actually hit that homerun are never really happy and most will go broke trying to prove to themselves it wasn’t a fluke. If you really want to be free of that horrible feeling of failure, make sure you are paying the price of success in everything you do. You won’t always get what you think you’re paying for, but you’ll always get something much more valuable than you paid.

 

Until next time,

Kris

Motivation

Hey Guys,

Kris here. I decided today that I wanted to do something a little different than what I usually do. When Laura and I made this blog originally we decided it was a good idea because fitness and living a healthy lifestyle is something we love and therefore love to talk about. There was another factor that we also discussed though.

We wanted to use our experiences; our journeys, to help other people to become motivated to make changes in their own lives. To give people the courage to stand up and decide to do something better with their lives.

Well, I’ve decided that by talking about fitness alone, we can only reach those goals on a minor level. Sure, fitness is extremely important but in just talking about fitness, you get the impression that it’s all about lifting heavy weights or running marathons and it’s so much more than that. I think people have a preconceived notion that being overly fit is vain in some way and I guess to some people it is, but it’s the added benefits that are more important than looking good.

In today’s day and age of convenience and sickness, one of the most difficult and impressive things you can do is to live a truly healthy lifestyle. If you can live a strong, healthy, and active lifestyle; one with goals and passion, you see that you can truly accomplish anything. This is just a tool to help you get to that area in your life. If you can live big in the gym, you can live big in life. If you can go through the steps of building a truly healthy body, you can go through the steps to build a strong healthy spirit, to make a strong and healthy living, to have strong and healthy relationships. If you can live a strong healthy lifestyle, you can be a leader and you can pass this great will for life on to others.

We are all products of our environments in some way. Fitness is about looking through your environment of unhealthy foods, people, and conveniences and proving that you can become more. In doing so, you do a service to everyone around you. See, if you can be the strong one that progresses through the hardships of your own environment, you actually add something positive to the environments of those around you. Even if you don’t have strong bonds with these people, you add something to their environment that they may, unlike you, be a total slave to. They may not even realize it. They may resent you, they may talk you down, they may be jealous, they may discredit you, but that doesn’t matter because you are in some part of their mind, social proof that they can be a better person themselves.

There are many, many topics I want to discuss here and I will get to them, but my point today is just to say, remember, anything you can do that is positive will not only help you to get stronger, but it will help everyone around you. I believe people are meant to be servants to one another. In later installments we will talk more about what that means.

In the spirit of this, I am adding a new category to the Fitnessquests.com blog which is “Motivation”. Please leave me you feedback on this and give me some ideas about what is important to you. If I feel that I can do it justice, I will be more happy to make it part of the discussion here. If I can’t and you can, I’d love to have you guest author a post or two.

Until next time,

Kris