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Day 57

Day 57

What you are capable of in your overall progress is entirely up to you, and varies on the level of commitment you intend to put in, and what is manageable in your everyday life.

If you want to train 3 times per week, eat well 80% of the time, and generally look for periodical increases in your fitness, I think this is a very successful strategy and long term you should be in good physical condition. I see many people working out this way and they have been happy with the way things have panned out.

People who want the shorter terms gains in physical condition, may want to up that to 4-5 times per week, be very keen on their eating, and look for constant improvements in their eating, and put a high priority on sleep. Once you have this approach, then the results can be staggering as some of you are showing in this 12 weeks.

For each and every effort you put into your physical improvements, you will get it back in the form of lower body fat, healthy blood pressure and a strong heart rate, good strong bones and joints, the ability to fit into the clothes you want, to feel as if you have an abundance of energy, your self-esteem and self-confidence going up dramatically, and the satisfaction of knowing you have overcome many challenges on the way!

Don’t expect every week to be the same either, most weeks I would bet you remain enthusiastic, and happy at the changes you have made to your body. It’s the stressful weeks we worry about the most though don’t we?

Stressful situations always tend to throw doubt on all the good things we are trying to do. If we have had 4 great weeks, then one bad week is not going wipe away 4 weeks of progress. In fact, one bad week can often spur us on to make fresh progress the next week, making us realise that all that progress is really not worth throwing away at any cost!

The 80% rule of still enjoying yourself when you train and eat is always going to be a winner for you. Nobody can have perfect weeks leave alone a prefect 12 weeks, that simply is not possible.

Mental freshness is as important as physical freshness and trying new foods out. You won’t always feel like eating the right things, and if one day a week, you have a couple of your old favourites, then where’s the harm in that?

Your capacity can actually be enhanced when you’re fresh for workouts, fresh for getting your eating back on track as you get that feeling that you’re “up for it” again and that the “bad weekend” you may have just had, may not have been that bad at all, especially compared to the way you USED  to eat.

What eating 80% good food and allowing yourself the occasional treat means is that there is room for fun, and still allows you to perform at your peak. Without any fun, your programme will crash and burn, and keeping yourself happy goes a long, long way when it comes to keeping your programme going for the long term, like the rest of your life!

Whatever your strategy, as long as you keep doing something over the week, then you will always be moving in the right direction!

Twitt
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Day 56 End of week 8!

End of week 8 would you believe! 8 weeks at the start probably didn’t sound that long, but now you know it can be quite a long time to get your eating right, your training going well, and the most important part probably, get your mind right in order to give the effort required.

Had my first sunday morning run for a while today, as the demands of two small children over the last few weeks have taken over. Back to normal now that the first 6 weeks of a new baby are over, and this was the best sunday morning in some time, and the temperature was good enough to run in a t-shirt and shorts, the first time since last summer! The run felt great, and once you get a run in for the first time in a while, you realise how much you missed it!

The temperatures in january and february just gone will have actually done us good, however icy and snowy they may have been! If we can find a way to get our workouts in during the coldest time of the year, and the coldest temperatures in the last 30 odd years, then the current weather will only allow more activities, and it should be a breeze from now on to get more workouts in exactly when you want to.

This challenge started during the most demanding time of year, and working in the toughest times gives us more skills and discipline that we ever thought. Most businesses i know have had the toughest times since the Great Depression, but most of them are coming out of this recession leaner and meaner, and better equipped to handle a change world and economic environment.

The same should happen with you, we have a lot of ups and downs from most of you in the past 8 weeks, and from that you will have developed your very own strategies on how to overcome the challenges that life always throws at you. Once you develop these skills, you won’t miss so many workouts, you won’t use the same old excuses to eat sugary/fatty food, and you won’t write whole week’s off anymore, you will tend to recognise bad habits beginning sooner than you did before, and you rectify your habits before they become destructive.

Sunday is always a great time to get out and about, and a means of making sure you start off your new week with a bang. We talked about hangovers yesterday, and now’s a great time to get rid of it, eat some decent food, drink plenty of water today and get back to feeling your old self. I never see sunday as a “let’s break some records day”, i see it more as a relaxing, and gather your thoughts kind of day, and a morning run is a key element in that process for me.

I’m looking forward to the start of week 9 tomorrow, and a big last month from all of you!

Twitt
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Day 55 Ireland V Wales day!

Evolution has happened for most of you on this site, and all of this is illustrated very well on a day like this, a Wales versus Ireland rugby international traditionally used to mean lots of alcohol, some fast food half time, and then a nightmare headache the following morning! It may also have been a fried breakfast before the game too, and the morning after so it would have been “calorie city” for most of us on these grand occasions.

These grand occasions that many Welsh people will have gone through will have meant calorie excesses of between 2000 and 4000 calories in one day!

This means that you are likely to put on one pound of body fat in one day (3500 calories) and are likely to give your artieries a severe thrashing, along with your liver of course! Most people then will not try to minimise the damage caused with a workout the following morning,  as their “headache” will be too bad, and bed will be the most likely option!

Many of you who used to follow such a ritual will testify that you wouldn’t have properly recovered from all of this until the wednesday or thursday, or did you simply get used to that lifestyle?!

Living in such a world leaves only room for functioning in the most basic of ways. You go to work and simply “go through the motions”. Your exercise plan starts on a wednesday, and peaks on thursday! Then the whole process starts all over again. Which brings us back to today.

Nothing wrong with a couple of drinks today, but everything doesn’t have top be “fried” all day! You don’t have to drink as if it’s your last day on earth? The big key for me has always been going for a run early the morning after. Your head says no as you have this huge headache, but once you are 10 minutes into it, you actually feel amazingly better.

Have a decent breakfast on the sunday morning, and you’re set for the day! You don’t want to stay in bed all day and you may actually want to “do things” on a sunday! What a concept!

Your monday then starts off with a bang and by the wednesday, you are absolutely flying, which means a great week!

This is always a great strategy and whatever you decide, take it easy and enjoy your big saturday!

Twitt
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Day 54

Day 54

If there’s one thing that made you do this challenge, or made you duck out of this challenge, or even join this challenge half way through, it has to be the need for certainty in your life.

If you started this challenge and wanted to be in the best shape of your life, you wanted certainty it would happen, so hopefully you will have known what i‘m all about by now, and that I was able to help you get there.

If you didn’t join the challenge, you didn’t have certainty within yourself that you could stick with it, so was it worth all the effort you were asking yourself if you didn’t succeed?

If you have just joined us, you have seen and heard people do well on here and you are pretty certain now good things in your life will happen because what we are doing is tried and tested, it’s kind of like jumping on a horse when he’s 6 lengths clear with just 50 yards to go, you WILL be successful if you start adopting some simple principles.

Certainty dominates all out actions in life, making us do things or makes us avoid different challenges that we would “prefer” to avoid.

I remember going to see certain people in authority when I was 18-21 years of age, and asking for things for potential business expansion. I spoke quietly, was lacking conviction and these people saw it!

The reality was that these people in authority giving out grants etc had never taken a risk in their lives, never poked their heads out of their comfy taxpayer paid offices, and were often in the job by default. I had no reason to be afraid of them, and they actually had no “wisdom” whatsoever! The reality was had i had complete “uncertainty” that I was good enough to deliver the project, and had fallen at the first hurdle.

I was fortunate when I started my business, that I relied on no such public body, and the previous rejection fuelled my desire to be successful, and all the “you’ll never make it’s” pushed me to become even more focused and driven to reach new standards.

If you focus on a goal, you have to get the certainty in your mind that not only is it possible, but that you will get there as long as you are prepared to put the work in, and you have to focus on the fact that when you reach your goal, your life WILL be significantly improved when you get there.

You have to have the certainty too in this challenge that the road to your best ever shape is never a straight line upwards either. We always talk about “bumps in the road”, and I think we have mentioned them so much by now, that we expect them!

The bottom line is that I found out myself, that if you do your training on time, you eat well most of the time, you sleep well, if you keep your attitude in positive territory even if it all hits the fan at times, THEN YOU CAN BE CERTAIN that this programme will work EVERY SINGLE TIME for you!

I am trying to pass all this certainty on to you, that if you are consistent with anything you try to do, you have enough belief, and that you’re strong enough not to let any negative people put you off, that YOU WILL and can right now achieve anything you want, as many of you are proving.

From all of this, you will have certainty with your health and abilities, and that means much more than all the money in the world!

Twitt
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Day 53 Take pressure off yourself!

Many people started this challenge with a bang, and achieved great things in the first month, and some have started well, then fallen off a bit, and now are bang on course to achieve big things of course. Whatever your situation, I don’t think it is realistic at all to expect you to be perfect all the time, that simply isn’t possible!

It’s always good to take the pressure off at times, and you will realise by now that 12 weeks is quite a long period of time to give your very best effort.

This is why I give everyone a 80% target on eating good natural food. I gave you a target of 8 out of 10 in each workout you do, because 10 out of 10 is highly unlikely each time.

If you manage to get these kinds of averages in, you’re going to be classed as working amongst the top percentage, and pretty much guaranteed to reach your goals in your programme in a relatively quick period of time.

Putting undue pressure on individuals to do well has never been a tactic I’ve considered successful. I remember in my teens, we had a captain in our cricket team who would berate you if you bowled slightly off the mark, or it wasn’t your day when you batted you would have a verbal outburst directed at you.

 Hammering someone because they weren’t performing at their best proved to be a potentially damaging tactic to myself and destroyed my confidence.

I remember another captain years later who would always give me a reassuring pat on the back if I was having a bad day, and told me that he was sticking with me no matter what. The result? My game and confidence came back sooner than I thought, and that meant my performance was up to its normal standard very quickly and that reassuring pat on the back helped me an enormous amount, and put a spring back in my step.

All of us need someone to show confidence in us from time to time, and you have seen it on this site with some members seemingly be at all time low’s recovering to be at all time high’s in just over a week sometimes!

 I tend to use the tried and tested method of showing great encouragement when someone is a bit down, and having a harder time than usual. I’m in the business of getting the very best out of people, and less is more sometimes!

So when you are looking to assess your progress so far, try and look at the big picture.

If you are getting it right most of the time, then there’s no problem and your condition will be improving naturally.

If your food and training is all over the place, and you’ve gone back to your old ways, then you need to reassess your priorities, and ask yourself if you really want to be in the best shape of your life, or not?

Answering this question honestly will help motivate you to take immediate action, and make you realise if you have put too much pressure on yourself, or too little even?

The focus should not only be on this 12 weeks, but creating the trends and patterns that will serve you well for the rest of your life.

Nobody’s perfect all the time, so if your lifestyle is healthier now than when you started, you are still making steady progress, then that’s perfectly acceptable to me and keep having confidence in your abilities, that is the vital element you always need!

Twitt