January 14th 2011

Negativity is all around us especially in a tough economy and there’s not much money around. The trick is to either let it bury you so you become as negative as everyone else, or you use it as a tool to burst out of the quicksand you may be in right now.

The question is will you listen to the doom and gloom merchants about your progress, or you will shut them off from your life and concentrate on all your goals and ambitions.

Try and work out the issues that distract you from getting to where you want to be, and then you need to work out ways on how to eliminate them. Of course you can’t eliminate your husband, wife, family and work colleagues rom your life. Start by making a list of the people who distract or even stop you from reaching your goals, and list those who help you reach where you want to be.

Then you need to go back over old ground and start keeping records on your food again over 7 days. There have been a lot of studies showing that those individuals who record in detail everything they eat and drink periodically, say once a month or 6 weeks, the more successful they were in their fat loss goals for example.

You can do the same thing with your exercise, i go on about all the time the importance of trying to make progress in your training, are your numbers going up, sideways or down? Is your strength going up or down, is your endurance better and how’s your enthusiasm for training? All valid indicators that will determine how well you’re really doing, keep a close eye on all of these, you don’t need to do it every week but once a month will be very valuable if progress is important to you!

Another powerful way to make sure you’re successul is to make your private goals and ambitions public, this makes the whole thing more real and you will find that a lot of people are going to be supportive. They will know you’re on a stricter eating plan and not offer or make you high calorie meals/snacks, maybe someone will ofer to come and exercise with you and push you harder when they are out with you on a run or example.

When you make your goals public, you put your reputation on your line and you are showing the world that you can really make this thing happen. You may get some negativity but as we said, we need to ignore all that “noise” and concentrate on those who are going to help you get where you want to be. Its not tunnel vision, its called doing everything in your power to feel and look your best!!!!

As long as you use the number one secret-consistency, then you should advance very quickly!!!

Thursday 13th January

As there continues be a lot of press for brief workouts and in particular the 4 minute workouts this week, I have had a lot of questions on how to start them off in terms of ideas of workouts.

 I posted the original 4 minute solution blog some time ago as most of you know so lets go through the basics again.

For example, if you did this, it will give you a good start to exercise, but you CAN SUBSTANTIALLY improve from there, the 4 minute solution is not the end, its more the beginning of how you can progress and reach your potential.

If you started off with around 4-6 exercises, then you should be able to get through this workout very quickly, especially If you’re new to fitness and a complete beginner.

If you did an amount which was comfortable of the following

Press ups

Arm dips

Squat thrusts

Sitting on a chair and then standing up

Sit ups

Then this shouldn’t take you more than 4 minutes, and to progress from there in a fast way whilst still maintaining very quick workouts in terms of time, you need to think in the following way.

For example if you started off with 5 press ups in this workout, and did the workout on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday, then week 2 you need to aim for say 8 press ups Monday, Wednesday and Friday, then  week 3 aim for say 12 press ups for the Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Anyone who has ever trained with me will know that its entirely possible to get from 5 press ups in week one to at least 20-25 press ups in week 6.

If you applied this to every exercise, then you may start off on 10 squat thrusts and maybe graduate to 50 squat thrusts in 6 weeks, which is quite impressive in everyone’s language.

If you stick at your programme and progress in this way, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t, then after 6 weeks you should easily attain progress that you have never had before.

The results will mean less body fat, usually a couple of inches off your hips and waist, much better energy levels, better sleep, a leaner harder body and this would be just the start!!

As I said earlier, please treat the 4 minute workout as just the start of your journey to achieving anything with your health. I have seen individuals truly go from these type of workouts to climbing some of the most famous peak’s in the world, to running marathon to dropping at least 10 dress sizes, the opportunities that will present themselves are limitless, all you need is a plan and consistency with your workouts and food.

Please try and have a look at my original 4 minute solution from last year, as well as the workouts section which explains all sorts of workouts. The site may not be the best organised as I have limited time,  but these pages are all about tried and tested quality information, its here for you so its your choice how well you use it.

Any questions either subscribe for free or email me on fitness@kerimckibbin.co.uk