Challenge Workouts

You may not be training for a professional team. You may not ever earn your living from athletics.

Sure, this message should be applied to your training.

But the message here goes beyond athletics.

It crosses over to all aspects of life.

How bad do YOU want to meet your goals?

I’d be remiss not to put a plug in for my challenge workout program. If you want to up your fitness game, having a plan is imperative. Setting a goal is paramount. How will you know where you’ll end up if you don’t chart your course?

Do you have  a plan? Have you set a goal? Is it written down?

Studies show that those that set small achievable goals and then celebrate small victories along the way are more successful at meeting their challenges. Don’t forget that it’s often the small victories you achieve that are just as sweet as the BIG ones.  Your goals can be related to fitness and fat loss, but of course they also apply to other areas of your life like career, family, finances, what ever is important to you.

Break your goals into small manageable steps.

If your weight loss goal is to lose 50 lbs, it’s much more manageable to consider losing a few pounds a week. Celebrate each week to help you stay on track and motivated to your final goal.

Each person has different fitness and fat loss goals. Don’t let others determine what YOUR goals are. If it means that for starters you cut out the fries with your fast food meal, that’s an important step. You can move ahead from there, taking that small step towards change is what’s important.

The changes that are easiest to implement are those that you painlessly integrate into your lifestyle slowly over time. This goes for your training and your nutrition (as well it can be applied to other aspects of your life).

For example, for me, clean eating didn’t happen over night. Slowly I incorporated healthy choices as I eliminated the not-so-healthy choices. The good news is that when you stick to a healthy routine, it’s actually self correcting. I feel so good eating clean and training regularly, that when I deviate too much from healthy choices, I feel crumby.

Take small steps towards your ultimate goal and eventually if you keep moving forward, you’ll get to your desired destination.

Slowly over time you’ll move from A to B.

My friend Alwyn Cosgrove talks about ‘process goals’. By using process goals, you create momentum that helps carry you to your bigger goals.

If 10 pull ups is your goal, you can set process goals to help you reach this. Process goals may include something like:

1. Get a plan
2. Implement the plan religiously, don’t skip workouts
3. Increase the number and quality of assisted pull ups
4. Train other body parts to achieve a balanced physique and avoid over use injuries (it’s in the plan)
5. Implement healthy eating to lose excess flub so pull ups will be easier

You’ll be pleasantly surprised that as you stick to your process goals week after week, the larger goal of achieving 10 pull ups will happen.

Hitting your process goals = success.

Try this approach, and watch your goals become a reality.

Seriously, try using the process goals approach rather than the “end goal” in mind, and it might just be the perfect  avenue for you.

Celebrate the victories (big or small).

Get a plan to help you.

Last time I was in Vegas, I rubbed elbows with the best in the fitness and fat loss biz. I filmed this interview with ‘Workout Finisher’ Mike Whitfield (who’s lost 100+ lbs) and fat loss expert John Romaniello.

I found it an interesting interview that I thought I’d share with you partly because it sort of goes against all that I do nutritionally.

I’ve come to understand that there are many ways to succeed with long-term fat loss. The best nutrition plan is a healthy one that you can follow, so while intermittent fasting may not be one that I regularly use; I feel that many can benefit from it.

I’m not one to go hog wild with eating, although I understand that occasional large meals followed by periods of fasting can have positive effects on leptin and other hormonal levels.
Stay tuned for more from Roman on intermittent fasting. Be sure to post your comments or questions. I know that Roman would be happy to share more of his knowledge.
Here’s the interview of these two fitness and fat loss experts:

M: You know how I love to do workout finishers at the end of my workout to raise my metabolism and burn extra calories. Do you use finishers in your programs? And when do you like to insert them?

R: I don’t write workout finishers into my programs with my clients. I encourage them as a fun thing to do when they feel like they have a little more in them at the end of their workout or if they’re trying to strengthen a type of move like pull ups.

M: You’ve been talking a lot about Intermittent fasting or IF. What eating schedule do you like and practice?

R: I think all methods of intermittent fasting are effective. What works for me is a 7-day schedule, which is a combination of many methods I’ve researched. This IF schedule takes the best of all methods and allows me a cheat day, a 24h fast day, fewer meals and it revs up my fat loss. It definitely beats the 6 meals per day for me.

M: Fat storage is a funny thing. Let’s talk about trouble spots like love handles or man boobs. Why is this?

R: The hormonal reason people store fat locally is insulin management. If you see a person who stores the majority of fat in their love handles then it stands to reason that they have problem managing their insulin. With training and diet we want to start to take the right steps to correct the insulin problem. Some things that can have an impact on insulin sensitivity are an increase in growth hormone, reduced carb intake, density training, increased fish oil, herbs and spices like cinnamon. There are a lot of things you can do with diet, training and supplementation that can help. Often, we also see that the last five-ten pounds are almost always stored in those areas that are dictated by hormones. For women, hormonal fat storage is typically in her hips and thighs.

M: How can you use intermittent fasting to address hormonal fat storage?

R: One of the reasons intermittent fasting is so effective is that it helps you manage insulin. It’s simple: eating less frequently will result in less insulin spikes. It’s difficult to use fat as an energy source in the presence of insulin.

Intermittent fasting is also beneficial because the production and secretion of growth hormone is greatest during fasting periods. Growth hormone affects other hormones like cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that is in part responsible for belly fat storage. If you can find a way to extend and increase the period of growth hormone secretion, you can maximize and optimize the postive effects it has on the body and fat storage.

Stay tuned for more info on IF, or intermittent fasting.

Knees are the most commonly injured joints in the body. Considering that when you simply walk up stairs, the pressure across your knee joints is four times your body weight, it isn’t surprising. Simple, everyday wear and tear can end up hurting your mobility and then add to that your intense training.

It’s a vicious cycle…. your workouts seem to cause knee pain so you sit down; inactivity causes pain so you stay down.  Your knees stay sore, you get weaker and you lose strength and balance. You get sized up for a walker and a wheel chair…

Well, that may be a little dramatic, but I’ve talked to so many people that become sedentary due to an ache or a pain.

Tell me, if your knee aches, what’s wrong with Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s my fellow Canuck and all round good guy, Rick Kaselj. We often meet at ‘mastermind’ meetings where top fitness trainers gather to share their knowledge. We were in San Diego and my elbows were screaming at me so I decided to corner ‘exercise for injury’ guy, Rick for some answers.

Here’s what Rick had to say about how to ‘save your elbows’: (I hope it’s not too late for me!)

Before I help you with your elbow pain, let me just say, “great work”.

Excellent job on taking on the Shawna’s challenge workouts, you’re are awesome.

Now let’s get to your injury.

The top three areas that people injury are the lower back, shoulder and knee.

But for today, lets focus on an injured area that is not in the top three, the elbow.

Many times when it comes to the elbow, the injury can be due to trauma or repetitive use.

When it comes to people that do challenge workouts, it is often times repetitive use that leads to the injury.

3 Things You Can Do RIGHT NOW About Your Elbow Pain

Let me go through three actions you can take right now to help improve your elbow pain.

#1 – Look at Your Grip

The grip that often leads to elbow pain is a power grip.

A power grip is the way your do a human flag or grab a dumbbell.

When the elbow is in pain or injured, we worry that we might lose our grip or let go of what we are holding so we increase the intensity of our grip.

In your workout and what you do day to day, try to decrease how much power grip you perform or try to use a different kind of grip.

#2 – Massage the Muscles

The best thing is to get someone skilled to help with your muscle recovery.

Between massage sessions, what you can do is self massage.

You should do this to the muscles around the elbow.

In the elbow area this helps with recovery, moves metabolites out and helps with circulation.

#3 – Deep Stretching

A lot of times what people will do is a forearm stretch.  This is good but you need to do a deeper stretch to really help things.

In the video here I go through a deep arm stretch which will help your elbow out.

(You can see how difficult of a time that Shawna had with stretching in the video.)

The Last Word

We all get injured from time to time. One of those areas that aches but is never bad enough that we stop training is often the elbow.

There is a lot you can do to help overcome that elbow pain that won’t slow your workouts down, won’t force to you take workouts off or lead to expensive medical appointments.

I go through three that you can do right now.

So remember, decrease how much power grip you do during the day, massage the muscles around your elbow and do some deep arm stretching.

That is it.  Thanks so much for reading and have a great pain free day.

Rick Kaselj, MS

Who is this Rick Kaselj Guy?

Rick Kaselj is a personal trainer that focuses on helping clients overcome their injuries.  Rick’s specialization is the shoulder and did his Masters’ degree project on designing effective exercises for the rotator cuff.  He shares with shoulder pain suffers and fitness professionals what he has learned in school and from his client’s and has put it all into the Shoulder Pain Solved program.

If you’d like to check out his Shoulder Pain Solved program, check it out here.

Check out Rick’s blog here: http://ExercisesForInjuries.com