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Get away from time, concentrate more on performance!

Who do you think is fitter out of the following and in the best physical condition?

The 100m runner who runs it in under 10 seconds or the one who does it in 12 seconds?

The runner who can run up a 2 mile gradient in 14 minutes or the one who takes 25minutes?

The swimmer who takes 10 lengths in 15 minutes or the one who does it in 25 minutes?

The cyclist who can cycle around pembrey country park in 30 minutes or the one who does it in 60 minutes?

The person who does his/her 3 circuits of inside workouts without a break, or the one who has to take a break after each exercise?

The person who power walks with her dog or the one who ambles along stopping to talk to everyone over the same distance and takes twice as long?

The one who recovers very quickly from a tough exercise session or the one who takes all day to recover from a tough session?

The one who can do 10 sprints up steep hills without much of a break apart from walking back down the hill, or the one who needs 3 minutes break in between each sprint?

The person who focuses on constant improvement every month or the ones who goes through the motions every day, every week, every month, every year, not focusing on improvement, just “getting through it”.

There are exceptions to a couple of these but in the main, if you are faster and stronger at something, it is a great sign that usually your body fat is lower, your strength is better and your health is in great shape. Since we don’t really want to be getting involved in races against our friends, we need to start competing with ourselves a bit more!!!

You should be able to tell if you’re improving right away. Are you better than last week, last month or especially last year? Are you going through the motions in your training or do you really try to do your best in most sessions? Did you have health worries in the past and have you tried living your lifestyle in a much healthier way to alleviate those concerns? These are the questions you should be asking yourself, especially as we come to the end of the year. Its always a time for reflection and its not too late to finish the year off at a high if you really want to.

Those distance high’s may seem a long way off, but if you train regularly, eat well and sleep well, and have patience, those once proud moments in your life will be your again!

Lets give it a go and get going!! Nine weeks to christmas so lets get a move on!!!

Twitt
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Your way of life

Okay, we discussed over the last couple of days how easy it is to get into your workouts, how they don’t have to take you all day, and how important it is to work with purpose in your workouts, rather than against the clock.

We talked about half an hour in your day is possible to bring about excellent progress in your training, as long as you knew what you were doing and you gave a real effort each day you trained, i have to make it clear right now that you shouldnt kill yourself and work TOO hard, that is not necessary, we need progress and we dont need anyone collapsing so thats a big warning on safety reasons!! PROGRESS AND SAFETY, yes it can be done and i get people doing it every day.

I think this is an excellent way of making sure you train for a lifetime and not just for one month, one week, or one year. If you set yourself unrealistic expectations, you will be setting yourself up for failure full stop. One of those unreasonable expectations would be to train for 2 hours at a time. I have met so many people who do so and you know they are not  going to keep that kind of schedule up for a lifetime.

People who will do that longer period of training (90-120 minutes per day) are usually around 18 years of age and perhaps thats their main focus on life, as responsibilities are pretty much non-existant in their life. Once life changes for them, they often quit exercising and make that famous excuse “i havent got time” again.

I think 90-120 minutes training is not only nearly impossible to stick to and keep up, its not productive. I know some of you have/do train for long periods, but was it/is it really sustainable long term without breaks? Wouldnt you like more time in your day to have fun and do other things?

I have had a couple of people train with me in the last couple of weeks (sons of parents i train) who said they usually workout for these long periods and i swear to god, we did a workout which was pretty non-stop and they lasted 29-30 minutes, and both of them very fit to start with. They couldnt believe how much they really did in half and hour and wanted to train this way forever, because there were BETTER things to do than hang out in the gym all day training!! They told me that they had never worked so hard, but it was of high-quality and they felt sure great results would come.

Thats the bottom line, if you can get some great, results-orientated training in your life and it only takes 30 minutes, WHAT are you waiting for. This lets you get awesome results, allows more time to do other things and keeps the chances of you staying fresh and actually KEEPING to the programme very high.

What more do you want?

The science is there now to support all of this, lets make this a way of life you can keep up AND get fantastic results from!!!

Twitt
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You got 30 minutes?

So now we’ve established that it takes only 30 minutes per workout to get into great shape, how many of you are using everyone’s favourite excuse “I haven’t got the time to get fit”?

If anyone is telling you that they workout in the gym for an hour and a half to two hours, then you’d better tell them they are wasting their time and its time for them to put A LOT more intensity in their training. WHILE they are still in shock, as them to try a whole body session when you do 6-8 exercises for 3 circuits with no rest. THEN ask then do they realise they have been wasting their time all these years.

Life is faster these days, we want things now and we don’t want to spend all year getting them!!! 30 minutes Monday, Wednesday and Friday if done with real intensity will take you a long, long way.

Two sessions of 20-30 minutes doing intense walking, running, cycling, swimming will take you a long, long way in helping get oxygen into your blood and making everything in your body work fantastically well, and help you lose a lot of body fat.

As I keep telling you, every exercise and every movement you do has an ENERGY COST. Sitting down doesn’t have much of an energy cost, running up hills has a HUGE energy cost and with some practice and conditioning for a couple of months, you would be working up to these things that benefit your body immensely.

You DO have to workout for longer when you first start off as its difficult to get the right intensity, and its advisable you take your time when building up your fitness.

However, you need to keep building up all the time, and look for constant advancements. I don’t mean killing yourself of course, I mean working out with purpose and YOU CAN DO THIS ANYWHERE. It doesn’t have to be a fancy gym (these venue’s often don’t encourage real intensity anyway and more of home to poser’s), you can do this yourself and theres a big list of workouts in the training/workouts section.

Its time to get real today with Christmas 10 weeks Saturday and get this thing done. Don’t believe the rubbish you read and lets hit it hard!! Its only 20-30 minutes out of your day!

Twitt
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Showing up is always the hardest thing to do!

A good response this week from many of you on your training efforts and many of you are  now developing fresh confidence levels to reach your goals.

The secret i developed a long time ago was that if i show up here enough times, if i show up training enough times, i show up and shop for good nutritious food enough times, if i keep on believing in what i do every day and i use that mantra for all areas of my life, i will be successful.

People ask all the time how they can be more successful, how they can be healthier, how they can become fitter etc etc, and the answer doesn’t change a whole lot!

There is a book you can read for free online called Think and grow rich published in 1936 by napolean hill that i recommend as essential reading. Google “think and grow rich” and follow the links, no catches and i repeat, its all free!

Its not what you think though, its not about money as you may guess, its about fulfillment and getting what you want out of life, rather than life making you a prisoner in your own body and mind, afraid to take risks and not being able to try anything.

This book encourages you do read just one chapter every day and more or less guarantees success should you follow the advice from real life case studies. You dont need any magic power to read it or do what the book says, it promises anyone that they can achieve anything they put their minds to, and everyone i know has read it has found the promise to be true.

The main message from the book is for you to find the strategies to become successful in your chosen areas, then perform those strategies each day until you become a master and do these things automatically. When this happens, you become successful without making much effort because your life and daily actions will have changed so much over a short period of time.

The very most important thing i took out of it was the consistency bit, meaning as long as i showed up every day and approached all my tasks with real effort and dedication, good things would naturally happen.

We go over it all the time on here and try and work out in your head how much more successful you would have been if you were more consistent with your food, your training, your sleeping and your positive attitude. How much would that have made a difference to your results and the way you feel?

Go on and be honest, how much more would you get out of yourself if day in day out, your performance in every thing you did was higher? Interesting thought and this is the message you ought to get to really improve big time once again!

Twitt
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Scan the internet or just do it!!!

If you want to get fit these days, there is so much information out there, its not true! I wouldn’t call most of it “information”, i would call it MIS-INFORMATION!

If all of this worked that’s presented on the internet, then how come the obesity epidemic is still rising at an alarming rate, over 60% of the general population is considered overweight, adults and children are getting bigger and bigger, the NHS is crumbling under the pressure of adults in this country being overweight and all the negatives that brings, etc etc?!!!

The truth is that most of us have become lost under the weight of all this mis-information and we have forgotten “how to do it”!!

From dvd’s of so-called celebrities cashing in, to so called fitness “experts” demonstrating exercises in the media so complicated just to show how much “knowledge” they really have when in fact the opposite may well be true. Some could be considered helpful, many could be considered in the group of “a little knowledge is dangerous”!!

We can literally scan the internet all day long and come up with about 1000 different solutions on how to get fit. You used to exercise to get fit and healthy, but have you noticed now its mainly about “losing weight” rather than the health aspect anymore.

It is mostly about peddling dubious products that are usually about as helpful as a handbrake on a canoe, or in some cases downright dangerous.

In the dangerous column, you have two massive companies gone bankrupt over the last two years on their claims about losing weight through “fat-burners”. These tablets usually include ephedra which can put severe strain on your heart, and in some cases have killed people in the USA.  They promise the world, often they deliver misery through ill health.

The bottom line is that if you see adverts in the paper, tv or internet promising you things seemingly too good to be true, then they usually are that, TOO good to be true and downright fraudulent in nearly every case.

Same with exercise equipement, they will claim madonna uses it, or so and so uses it, but in reality this is rarely the case. Quite interesting to see someone else claiming to train madonna, that is around the 7th trainer i have heard of in the last 5-6 years. Either she’s not happy with her trainer or people just claiming to train her to peddle some product or to get some “acclaim”.

The bottom line for me and in any business is to retain clients and all the individuals or businesses i train right now have been training for many years, so i have no need to make fraudulent claims like these bogus companies! These fraudulent companies need too start producing real long lasting results, rather than latching on to some celebrity that they think will take them to the promised land.

We talk on here all the time about doing the fundamentals/basics all the time and you won’t need any of the fancy stuff. You WILL get amazing results from doing the tried and tested in terms of workouts and eating, thats a fact and deep down, you really know that even if you have spent hours on the internet “trying to get into shape”!

Its time to put down the computer and get off your backside and get out there and train, simple as that and JUST DO IT!!! There’s heck of a lot of difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it!!! Lets go!

Twitt