We inspire you to be the most active version of yourself. Talking about strength, why it's important and what you need to do to get it and yes it's something everyone can have. Strength training can change your life in a positive way you've never imagined.
The Power of Habit is a really solid book and covers habits on a personal level, as well as how they form in workplaces and the communities at large. I personally thought this was an excellent book for the first three quarters or so, but then it got a little bit long, repetitive and not as interesting.
To the dismay of English teachers everywhere I answered her question with a question ‘Do you do Yoga or would you do yoga?’ and she said ‘No’ and I responded ‘Then I guess Pilates is better than yoga.’
The best exercise to do, is always exercise you will do.
I first met Maggie 7 years ago, when we started working together. She was very overweight, had lots of back pain and was just ‘reelling’ from a visit with her doctor. She had just been told she was pre-diabetic and if she didn't make some serious changes to her lifestyle and improve her health she would have to go on medication.
To start mental toughness is your ability to push through the pain of something that seems insurmountable, this can be physical pain, psychological pain or emotional pain. It’s important to understand that pain is relative to the person experiencing it. Someone that is suffering from depression may find it too painful to get out of bed in the morning whereas an elite cyclist may be able to ignore the 10 out of 10 painful burning sensation in their legs on the final stretch of the Tour de France and to add another layer of complexity to this, they could be the same person.
Let's take two steps back for a moment and consider all the goals that you're trying to achieve, whether you're trying to lose weight, trying to get stronger or trying to get bigger let's just throw that out the window for a moment, forget about it and let's assume that at the end of the day what you're really looking for is to be healthier person and all of your other goals are just your method or your way of becoming a healthier person.
The first step to designing a strength training program that works for you, is to decide why you want to strength train. Are you interested in function, size, strength, power or muscular endurance? If you’re first starting out I always recommend you start with function.
We built a page to show you exactly how to do all the strength training exercises we talk about in this episode. Just click here.
If you're comparing yourself to someone that is more fit than you, in an absolute sense then that’s fine, it’s how weightlifting competitions are done, the person that finished first is absolutely stronger than the person that finished second.
No one is perfect, especially when it comes to exercise and eating healthfully, this means we all have failures sometimes, but it’s often how we deal with these failures that make the difference in the long run.
How do I ensure that I'm not overcompensating for weaker muscle groups and achieve a consistent level of development of muscles? Gord this is a great question and I think everyone wants to be balanced so let’s sort this out!
So the root of the question is this, how do I make sure I’m strength training in a way that keeps me balanced so I don’t over or under develop certain parts of my body? Gord’s specific issue is this, He does his regular workout’s but he finds he can bicep curl much more with his right arm than his left arm, so he feels like he’s compensating somewhere during the workouts that is not allowing his left arm to develop the same way.
In Episode 31 we talked about why the fat burning zone is your worst zone to burn fat in from a purely physiological perspective and in today’s episode we’re going to get into the 3 lesser known reasons it’s not the best zone to exercise in and only one of them has anything to do with physiology.
This is our first ever video podcast. We’ve talked about the different types of contractions and today we’re going to show you how to put them all together. This is important if you’re trying to break through a plateau or looking for something a bit different to add variety into your workouts.
If you cannot see the video on the site you are listening on, please visit our site at: https://fitnessforfreedom.com/use-tempo-to-get-more-out-of-your-workouts-in-our-first-video-podcast/
When most people think about lifting weight, this is the part they usually focus on, the actual lifting part. Doing a concentric contraction means you have to produce more force than the resistance offers to overcome the weight and lift it, doing repetitions of it is what makes you stronger.
If you’ve ever felt alone or like no one cares whether or not you do something you need to listen to this episode.
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Intrinsic goals are goals that we set for internal purposes or intrinsic motivation, like building relationships, developing a personal skill or giving back to a community, for no other reason than to get the warm and fuzzies inside or the sense of accomplishment and pride of doing something challenging that you set out to do.
Extrinsic goals are goals that we set for external purposes or external motivation. Like money, high praise or trophies. They are are often driven by fear of loss or for the external accolades we receive from other people. A perfect example of this in the fitness industry is the before and after picture as a marketing tool.
One of my client’s has a brother and for the sake of this story we’ll call him Mike. Mike is a DJ and he spends most of his time working in clubs, restaurants and doing special events which usually go late into the night. He’s been doing this for over 20 years and has very much adapted to this lifestyle. For the last few years Mike has been getting increasingly more tired, he no longer has as much energy for his gigs and then for some reason he can’t sleep as well even though he’s tired at the end of the night. He attribute’s this to the fact that he’s getting older, he’s in his early 50’s after all and maybe all these late nights are starting to catch up with him.
I’m not 100% sure where this came from or what research study was cited as the original to say this, but the theory goes like this, eating carbohydrates aka. sugar causes your insulin to go up and if your glycogen stores are full, which they are all the time in most people, excluding very athletic individuals, then this gets stored as fat on your body. The theory is this, if you go to bed after consuming these sugars, then you go to bed with high blood sugar which means your body is much more likely to store it as fat because you’re not moving.
To talk about each of these strategies we need to start with a story about Beth. Beth is of course a fictional character but if you’re like most people you at least recognize some aspects of her life in your own. So here are some strategies that you can use in this situation that you might find helpful.
Once you've decided that there is a personal trainer or strength coach that you would like to work with based on education, experience, personality and all the other things we talked about in yesterday’s episode, then you should look for this type of process to decide whether or not they're a good trainer for you.
To download the free personal trainer checklist, click here.
We work really hard to try and guide you and get you exercising in a way that works for you, but sometimes you just need the guidance of a professional to show you how to exercise, so today we’re going to cover what you should be looking for when trying to find the right personal trainer or coach for you.
If you like our free checklist of what to look for when hiring a personal trainer, please click here and then scroll to the bottom of the post. We'll deliver the checklist right to your inbox just moments later.
There are two type’s of people that say they exercise every day. The first is someone that wakes up every morning and does 100 push-ups or a 100 sit-ups or something like that, I have never met anyone like this in real life I have only seen them in movies, I’m not saying they don’t exist, I’m just saying I’ve never met them in real life. However they would be able to strength train like this for one of two reasons, one they either rotate between exercises everyday like do push-ups one day, pull-ups another day and sit-ups the next day.
The first thing I want to pick apart is this notion of good fat and bad fat, there’s really no such thing as good fat and bad fat, our body needs fat to survive, which means there are fats we should eat more of, fats we should eat less of and there is one type of fat we should never eat, so I guess this would be the bad one and it’s called trans fat. But we’ll get to that one last.
Alright I get it, sometimes vegetables can be boring, I mean how many carrot sticks and pieces of celery can we eat, we’re not rabbits. Sometimes you just might crave something that’s a bit salty or sweet and vegetables don’t cut it and that’s fine, you don’t need to eat all vegetables all the time, you just need to eat more. So here are some strategies I’ve used with clients or I myself use, to get the job done.
The Lean Start-Up by Eric Ries is a business book that I read 2 years ago, but the principles he teaches in this book can be extracted into health, wellness and fitness. Before I get into it I want to give you some background, Ries had several failed tech start-ups and this was his mind set for each company.