10 Habits of Highly Effective Exercisers

I have long been a fan of Steven Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and I have always wanted to put them into fitness terms.  I'm not really sure why I've waited until now to actually execute the plan, but hey, better late than never, right?

I have a convention, though ... about the time I was first introduced to the book, I was working as a pizza delivery driver.  At that chain, we were expected to memorize the company's core values.  I have since taken these values and morphed them into fitness concepts, giving me a total of 10. 

You can read them all here.

Holiday Survival Guide 2.0

Holiday Survival Guide 2.0

They’re baaaaaack. 

The holidays make some squeal with delight while evoking in others the need to curl up in the fetal position.  If you’re struggling with your weight, the holidays can seem like all-out war (and they don’t even follow the Geneva Convention)!

Now’s the time to prepare for battle, and if you follow my advice you can get through the holidays unscathed (and maybe even enjoy yourself a little).

20 Habits That Are Keeping You Fat

Decades ago, around the time of Steven Tyler's last haircut, a completely wrong-headed idea started being passed around America's dinner tables: Eating fat makes you fat.
Wrong. Eating fat won’t make you fat, any more than eating money will make you rich.

One of my favorite quotes ...

Ever since I first came across this quote in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, it has been one of my favorites.  

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. " - Viktor Frankl

In a nutshell, it means that no matter what happens to us, we have the power to choose our response.  Pavlov proved with the aid of his pooches that responses can be conditioned. 

Read all the details here...

Fear and Desire

It has been suggested that pain and pleasure are the two main motivators in life -- that whatever we do, it is a function of obtaining pleasure or avoiding, reducing, or eliminating pain.  Everything else, then, would boil down to one of these two factors.  What blows my mind even more is that it isn't actual pain or actual pleasure that drives us, but rather the perception we have that taking a certain action would LEAD to pain or pleasure. 

So essentially what REALLY drives us is fear and desire.

Plan B

If there's one thing I've learned in life it's that you NEED a back up plan.  We can try to "will away" the bad stuff, but do you honestly believe that nothing bad will ever happen in your life?  Besides that, it's not what happens to us that determines our success; it's how we deal with what happens to us. 

Read any book or watch any movie (especially the biographical ones) and you'll discover that the main character in the story comes off heroic, not because of how lucky they were, but how they triumphed over some negative thing in their life.  Iron is shaped through fire, and our destinies are shaped through adversity.  That being said, we need to have an alternate workout plan for those times when life gets in the way. 

Strategic Approach to Fitness

As a trainer, it is almost second nature to tell you all about the success stories I’ve helped to create. In fact, this article will kind of go against the grain as I discuss with you the “not-so-successful” stories.

The message I’m conveying to you today isn’t going to be about successful folks who have lost 50 or 60 pounds on a program (any program) and then continued to lose on their own. Instead, I’m writing about individuals who may have done well on a program, but then lost their momentum after its completion.