Joel Younkins One thing that diets, training programs, and meditation all have in common is they lay out a set of rules for you to follow. And this is usually what helps these things build compliance so people actually follow them. In general, we as people like rules, we like things to just tell us what to do. Sometimes it takes too much energy to think about every single little thing. This is where autopilot can help. This is why people say, "Just tell me what to do!" Ha Ha Think of it like this. All diets lay out a set of rules. Eat only during this time frame. Eat only these foods. Training programs tell you when and what to train. Mediation tells you to meditate for X amount of minutes. And to meditate a certain way. These are rules to follow in order to execute these protocols. We can do this on our own too. If you don't like a certain rule or you need a specific one for yourself, just make up your own rules. If you're not sure if this rule will be smart, then look, it's 2018, it's not very hard to ask someone who can help you :) YOU can actually set the rules that you like and want to follow for yourself. So when you're forced to make a decision, you have rules that have been set for yourself to make the decisions easier. Some examples of some rules could go a little something like this...
Your options are pretty much endless. And the best part is, you can't be mad at the rules because you created them! But having rules is a great way to help keep us pointed in the right direction. If you're not jiving with someone else's rules, make your own that work for you. Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value!
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Joel Younkins One of the most important, if not the most important, training variables is training volume. You may be asking yourself, what exactly is training volume? Before we dive into some thoughts about it, lets explain this variable. It's simply the total amount of work that you are performing, either daily, weekly, monthly, or annually. This is how you take into consideration of how many workouts you do in a week, the sets and rep schemes, how many miles, how many steps, etc...This is the total workload, not the weight or the pace, that's intensity. And it's also not which exercises you do, that's exercise selection. Doing Too Little Volume Most people that workout, are probably not performing enough volume to make real big improvements to their fitness levels like they'd really hope to. Assuming that they're not exercising/training enough frequently throughout the week, not getting the most out of their gym workouts, or not performing enough exercises that they may need can really hinder someones progress. Part of training smart, is knowing how to train hard. And training hard, requires a decent amount of volume! Doing Too Much Volume On the flip side, some people do too much volume. Sometimes, people who are very motivated, will get ambitious and do too much too soon. This is a problem because you will get quick results, but you will hit your ceiling of progress too soon and you will be left scratching your head. These people will often get injured way more easily than someone with a smarter (long term minded) approach. This also happens a lot in athletic teams. Coaches will throw everything and the kitchen sink at their athletes to get them ready for the season. They'll do so much work that they are probably not rprepared for, that they'll actually head into the season beat up with too much fatigue. It may take them 3 to 4 weeks to allow their bodies to catch up. What's the Correct Amount? Well to be honest, out of all of the variables that a coach needs to figure in order to train their athletes/clients, volume is almost always the one leaving the most questions. Because the reality is, we truly can't give you a straight up answer, or know an exact answer but we know how important training volume is. But I can give you some recommendations how to plan your training volume so that you can train hard, but also not over do it. In training, you want to achieve this certain balance of training hard enough to stress your body, but recovering enough to grow and adapt from it. You want to think in the mindset of stimulating, not annihilating. This will allow room for progress in the future if you need to add in more volume. Also, when you annihilate yourself, you may actually take so long to recover that it actually hurts your adaption phases and your fitness levels could end up going backwards... Below I'm going to lay out a few key generalized principles that you can focus on to adjust the volume for yourself accordingly.
Conclusion Training Volume is considered King of Training Variables. It ranks the highest of importance but it can easily be under utilized and not achieve the results you wanted or it can be over utilized and you will experience negative training results. The best way to find what your best training volumes is, is to start of low and slowly add in more when you feel progress is slowing down, or when you feel like your workouts are not properly challenging to you anymore. It's only one variable in the whole picture, but YOU MUST pay close attention to your Training Volume! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins “The comfort zone is a psychological state in which one feels familiar, safe, at ease, and secure. You never change your life until you step out of your comfort zone; change begins at the end of your comfort zone.” -Roy T. Bennett I'm only 29 years old, and I realize I do not have all of the answers. As I get older, I realize how many answers I'm truly missing. But, I have learned a couple things along the way in my journey so far. I feel it's my duty to share my perspective on these things with others. So I'm going to give you my current thoughts on this topic right now to maybe help spark you to some future success for yourself! During my journey of training, coaching, and growing a business, I have found some consistent parallels that exist between all three of these. In this post, I want to discuss the idea of comfort zones. What I have learned to be true, is that growth happens almost 100% of the time, outside of your comfort zone. Now, I know that sounds like a cliche, right? But, this couldn't be more true. And I'm not talking about small growth, like "oh hey look, I can do 21 push ups now instead of 20." I'm talking about making real, big, and dramatic changes to your life. I've witnessed my clients, who come in consistently 3 times a week, and watch them push through the struggle, and make huge progress in just a few months! They literally tell me, "I never would've thought I could ever do that in my life" kind of things. It's an amazing thing to watch this happen to them! For myself personally, not long ago, I would've never thought I'd ever be able to Squat over 600lbs. I started the sport of powerlifting, I kept trying to push my boundaries, and I eventually squatted 650lbs, leaving me with the feeling of wanting to Squat 700! Ask me that in college as an elite D1 collegiate athlete, and I would've probably said, "yeah I wish." In times of business growth has been same. I remember back to year 1. Things were tight, my goal was simply pay my bills on time. That was not comfortable position to be in, but it forced me to be creative and work harder and smarter to make this business survive, and then eventually thrive! Whenever, I catch myself feeling content, I find myself to be less creative, less motivated to accomplish more. It's simply human nature in us to do that. What do I do when I want to consume more business growth? Simple, I just find a way to make myself more uncomfortable. One of the best pieces of advice I ever took a couple years, was to raise my standards for myself every 6 months. So I use January and July to reflect on what areas I want to grow on what I expect of myself. I've also heard advice from millionaires, that they say if you want to become a millionaire, always spend your money on things that are just out of reach of what you can afford. Why? To simply never become comfortable in what you're making. This puts the pressure on to keep making more money. I'm no financial coach or adviser, so do with that information as you will, I'm just giving you another example of comfort zones. My point to this blog post wasn't to preach some new method or theory to achieve success. I'd have to believe that you have heard something along the lines of this before. I assume that if you're reading my blog posts, you're the type of person who looks for growth and to evolve themselves. So I'm sure this is nothing new to you. But, I wanted to remind you of this simple reality that leads to growth. It's one of the simplest things you can do for yourself to achieve really any goal. I'm reminding you, if you want to do something, force yourself somehow someway to get a little uncomfortable in the process and that will make it easier to achieve that goal. I'm not saying miserable, but a little discomfort in your life does some good time to time. And those times that I'm referring to, are times of growth! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins I once fell victim to the idea that when someone needs to start making life changes, like nutrition, training, people they associate with, etc, that they must start subtracting things as step one in this process. This concept originally made sense, because in order to make changes, you have to eliminate the problems one way or another. What I found was, instead of living with the idea that we have to give up things, lets just focus on abundance by only focusing on adding what we want into our own world. When the good comes in to your life, it leaves less room for the bad. For the sake of this blog, we are going to discuss this concept by relating it to Nutrition. You'll actually see how well this idea could work for other areas of your fitness goals and life goals after reading it. When starting a diet, what do you think of first? Maybe it's "I got to cut out pop" (or soda if you're from the rest of the country), or "I have to eliminate fast food," or "I have to cut out carbs, I love carbs though," or "I need to stop drinking so much." Do any of these sound familiar? If so, keep reading... What does good nutrition look like to you? I'm not talking about a certain diet trend. Because diet trends tend to take things out of your diet, the opposite of what we're trying to do. I'm just talking about, eating healthy foods that will make you feel great and perform and recover from your workouts! Lets call this Good Nutrition; meaning lean protein sources, unprocessed non-sugary carbs, fruits, vegetables, and healthy fat sources. This is the Good Nutrition we are talking about! So, say you're diet doesn't have much of these things in it. If they don't, don't get depressed, a lot of people struggle to eat like this. Most people skip breakfast, eat whatever for lunch with a pop, and who knows what dinners even look like. But, instead of focusing so hard on having to eliminate all of the problems with your diet, focus on simply adding in the Good Nutrition. Yes, we're so accustom to having people tell us to give things up, but rather are barely ever told to simply add Good Nutrition. What happens when you just add in Good Nutrition? Well you'll automatically will be forcing out bad foods that you'd normally eat. We only have 24 hours in a day and you can only want to eat so much. Drink water all day long, add in breakfast, add lean protein to your lunch and dinner, eat some fruit as a snack between meals, throw in a protein shake after your workout. Did you see that? All we said was, ADD IN. By the time the day is done, you won't even be hungry, in fact you may not feel hungry at all during the day and will probably have more energy than you know what to do with. You now have all this Good Nutrition in our life, what should you expect? Well, as long as you're working within your daily calorie balance (eating towards your goals with healthy amounts), you'll likely be increasing your metabolism and combined with good training you'll be feeling better than ever. Keep in mind, YOU WILL BE ABLE to have cheat meals during the week without sabotaging your progress too much if you're eating Good Nutrition frequently throughout the day and training hard. General rule of thumb, the more extreme the goals, the stricter you have to be! I hope you now can see, by adding in Good it basically automatically pushes out the Bad for you without having to really thinking about giving something up. When you're more focused on the positive things that will help you, it leaves less time worrying about the negative. I also now hope that you can see how this idea can help you in other areas of your life too! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins I've made corny jokes before to my clients saying things like, "I learn more from you guys than you learn from me." But in all actuality, I feel like it's very true. When I got into coaching in my younger 20's, I'd always assume that 99% of my clientele would be exactly like myself. That we'd be more alike than different, that we both saw training the same, that the gym meant exactly the same. I was in for a real wake up call. As a private facility owner, you have to be able to wear many hats. You have to know how to write training programs, how to manage your facility, how to market your brand, how to actually run a business, and most importantly, know how to coach your clients! I felt very comfortable coaching my clients early on. I was confident in coaching someone how to perform the exercises and execute a training program, this came easy to me. But the big lessons were still to come... I had to learn the in depth principles and application of psychology and coaching. I realized that as much as the gym life brings people together to focus on similar goals, it really amplified how people were so much different. The gym creates stress, and everyone responds to it differently. So the more I realized this, the more I started studying a lot of psychological and social behaviors of people. By studying some news concepts, and putting them into play with my daily experience, I've learned some valuable and simple lessons as I close out this chapter of coaching in my 20's this year. I'm going to share with you 3 Lessons I've learned from working with people. These 3 Lessons do not carry any certain weight to them. I've for sure learned more than 3 Lessons, but these three have been on my mind lately and I wanted to share them with you. Maybe you can relate and they may help you right now or in the near future! Lets get to it! 1.) Be Genuine, Not Nice People love and respect real. They love and respect it so much that some are even afraid of it because the idea that people keeping it real, is sometimes intimidating to them. But the ones who have the love for you, they will ride or die for you when they see you as genuine. Why nice doesn't work...Nice is just trying to be kind when you may not always mean what you say. When in doubt, yeah just be nice, but people can usually sniff it out real quick if you're trying to be nice. For example, if someone buys a green Ford Mustang, and you hate green cars, being nice you'd just respond with "great car" (or something like that). If you're being genuine, you're response could be, "great car, but it may take me a minute to get used to that color. But I'm happy for you!" Assuming this is really how you felt. People respect real. In fact, if you want to attract genuine people too, genuine people crave real because a lot of what around them is fake. For example, if my client doesn't do something well, I will tell them that it wasn't very good. But they also know, when something is good, I will tell them how good it was too. It works both ways and the right people will respect it. 2. People Want to Relate, or They Cry Out to Be Heard Next time you have an interaction with someone, pay attention to what they're saying. Not the content of what they're saying, but more importantly, how they are saying whatever it is that they're saying. One or two things will probably happen. They will try to relate and connect with you over a certain topic, or they will be come off as if they're complaining about something. People like being a part of tribes. They want to feel connected to others, as if they want to belong. Maybe they want to talk politics because they know both of you guys voted the same. Or they may come off like they're complaining. The complaining is simple, they just want to be heard from someone about their problems. That's usually it. They put enough trust in you to that they want to be heard. So next time you talk to someone in person, see which way they take the conversation, or which way you take it. Or even more fun, scroll down your Facebook Timeline and watch this happen over and over again lol! 3.) Less is More with People People want value from you. Yes YOU, you have something to offer the world. But they usually can only handle so much of it. A little rule of thumb I've learned, is offer some value to them, let them chew on it for a little while, and when they're ready, give them a little more value. If you give too much too soon, one or two things usually happen. One, they get annoyed with you. Imagine sitting around a Holiday Dinner, and that one person won't shut up by telling stories. They think they're doing the party a favor by sharing stories to entertain, but eventually people get up and walk to the other room because it's just "too much." Or two, people get analysis by paralysis with too much value. It's like teaching math to someone. You teach them simple addition before you teach them multiplication. We can only handle so many tasks at once until we shut down. Allow people to catch one rabbit at a time. Once they catch one, if they enjoy it, give them another to catch. Conclusion These are 3 of many of some valuable lessons I've learned so far in my coaching career. I would never have imagine that working with hundreds of individuals day in and day out, that I would have learned so much so soon. Pay attention to the details about people. I study fitness, but to make fitness work at the highest levels, you have to know and study people too! We all interact with people every day, so be genuine, listen to what people are trying to say to you, and remember, less is more! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins Ok, so two things…Number 1, powerlifting really didn’t save my life. I just loved the title and ran with it because it sounded epic! Number 2, this post will be about my own personal experiences with the sport of powerlifting. This sport has given a lot to me. So I felt it was right to give back to powerlifting by sharing a few genuine thoughts in this blog about the sport that many people do not understand, yet so many people love! Powerlifting is a sport where you have three attempts at the Squat, Bench, and Deadlift. The highest total of the three lifts for the day is the winner in each weight class/division. First, let me take you back a few years ago, way before powerlifting began for me. Growing up in Ohio and loving football, football became my life and obsession. In Ohio, powerlifting has had a strong underground following in the lifting scene, but it is nothing like the football culture here. For myself, to be honest, I loved training for football and was familiar with powerlifting growing up, all of the way through college, and even into my early years of coaching. I was familiar with it, I thought it was awesome how strong some of these individuals were, but I never really pictured myself being a powerlifter. As cool as I always thought it was, and even learning coaching techniques and cues from really good lifters and powerlifting coaches, all I saw in my mind was a bunch of big, strong, fat guys who could lift a lot of weight. I didn’t see them as athletes. This was just was my own ignorance and perception of the sport at the time. So that’s my background with powerlifting up till about 24 years old of age. I’m currently 29 as I’m writing this blog. The rest of the report I am going to outline 3 reasons of what got me in to powerlifting and why I plan on sticking with it and pursuing my goals over the long haul. And with these reasons you will see why “powerlifting saved my life.” Reason Number 1 I always believed the main reason I loved playing sports and why I love training in general is the simple fact that I love being competitive. Having a goal and being able to set out to reach that goal is an adrenaline rush in itself for me. While playing college football I suffered a lower back injury which cut my career short by my last two seasons of eligibility. I lettered two years and then boom, one day it all ended not knowing that I could never play again. Up to this day, I can say my back hurts every day. If it’s 90% I can still feel the pain, but that is what I consider a good day for my back! For a couple years after the injury, I switched my focus to becoming the best coach I could be and put my own training on the back burner. I only trained to train for the sake of training and to help reduce my back pain. This was fine for a while, until I realized I was bored of just being a coach. I love coaching but I also thrive off of competing. There is a thrill there for me that I’m not ready to give up yet in my life. I started looking for hobbies or sports I could get involved with and be good at. But with my coaching schedule, I’m always in the gym and this was a challenge. Thus, the idea powerlifting emerged. When I first thought of competing in powerlifting, I thought it was a far-fetched idea that my back wouldn’t be able to handle it. But then again, I realized that was a competition to me in itself. I hate being told what I can and cannot do. I figured at least I would be strong with a bad back instead of being weak with a bad back… Reason Number 2 Remember how I said I would look to powerlifting for coaching techniques? And do you also remember me saying I always thought powerlifters were basically all fat dudes who could lift a lot? Well I came across this guy named Dan Green. If you’re familiar with powerlifting already, I’m sure you know exactly who I am talking about. I saw a guy who was lean and jacked and breaking all of these world records. This was 180 degrees from my own personal perception of powerlifting. He looked like a world class athlete and was really good in the sport and he will go down as one of the best lifters ever. Then I started learning more about the sport and seeing other lifters who looked jacked and were lifting weights most people would seem to be unrealistic or even possible. Now, I’m not saying I only started powerlifting because I wanted to look jacked. If that were the case, I would’ve just done bodybuilding routines instead. But I knew I didn’t want to be a lifter who got sloppy-big just to hit big numbers on the platform. I had to acknowledge to myself that if I were going to do this (powerlifting), I needed to treat myself like the athlete that I am, and have a solid diet strategy to go with it. So again, this wasn’t about just getting jacked, but coming from an athletic background, gaining weight just to put more weight on the bar wasn’t going to cut it for me and knew I would just be miserable like that. I wanted to add muscle and decrease my body fat levels. I wanted to be and feel like athlete again… Reason Number 3 Powerlifting is a very black and white sport. Other than controversial judging calls at a meet, you’re either strong enough to lift it or not on that day. I love the fact that you can either set very small goals, maybe 5lbs, or big goals like adding 100lbs to your total. It’s just you under the bar and 45lbs will always be 45lbs. During these moments of lifting big weights, it’s one of the realest moments personally for you, and especially for myself. Some days you’ll feel untouchable and other days you may be questioning yourself. It’s a very honest and character building sport. So far I have learned I loved it. It helps regulate me as a person and makes me feel like me. There are times I wished I didn’t love it as much as I do, and two weeks may go by where I’m questioning if I still want to do this or talk myself in to “taking some time off from it”, but that thought process never lasts. Why do I say that to myself? What do I say to myself to refocus? I say it because it’s hard, we’re only human, and I think if you don’t push yourself to question things like that where you need to check yourself, you’re not pushing yourself enough physically and mentally. What do I do to refocus? I think of why I started. Why did powerlifting save my life? It didn’t exactly. Rather it helped shape me as the man I am today. Conclusion So yeah, I don’t need powerlifting in my life, nor was I going to die if I didn’t start powerlifting, but I’m sure glad I did! I had many misconceptions about the sport at first and the more I learned the more I realized how awesome it is. I wrote this mainly for the sake of hoping that my personal experiences may help open your eyes to at least give the sport more respect, and maybe even a chance to try it yourself. Like I said, it’s given me a lot by helping elevate my life and me as a person, but I enjoy seeing such a great sport do the same for many others too! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins & Caitlin Glenn Your training should be hard, and you should be spending time recovering from it while you’re not in the gym. With recovering and looking to make progress in certain areas of your fitness goals, there are some extra options that are viable for “extra work.” These methods will also help promote recovery from your primary training program. You will see below, these are not set programs to follow, but instead parameters based on each individual fitness levels, their time management, need for recovery and fitness goals. Fat Loss/Conditioning (Joel) Whether your goal is to burn more body fat, improve your aerobic fitness, or even both, these two methods below will help increase extra aerobic volume to your weekly training program. Both methods are highly effective for improving both fitness goals, but more importantly they will not heavily interfere with your recovery from the previous day(s) of training. And in all actuality, if done with lower training volumes (amount of total work) they will actually enhance recovery! With the use of any extra work you are doing, always start on the lower side of training volume and see how you respond. Meaning the amount of days per week, how long each session is, and the amount of work performed. As you adapt, you can add in more volume later when you’re ready for it. Method #1: LSD (Long Slow Distance) This is a great way to improve aerobic capacity and increase additional fat loss work to your program. You can pick a variety of means of exercise to perform this as long as it’s continuous and you maintain a state of movement that WILL NOT make you feel muscle burn or exhaustion. It should be aerobic in nature, meaning using oxygen as our main source of energy. Your heart rate should increase and perhaps break a light sweat. Frequency: 2-3 times a week Duration: 20-60 minutes per session Sets: 1-5 sets per session Intensity: Heart Rate: 120-150 bpm Means: Walking (Incline or Weight Vest), Jogging, Bike, Rower, Elliptical, Variation of Body Weight Exercises performed as a circuit Method #2: Tempo Intervals When most people think of interval training, they are thinking of HIIT or very grueling intervals that make you hurt when you are done. These intense sessions can be good for burning off excess calories to help reduce fat, but they can easily be counterproductive to recovery of your current training that you are already doing. Instead, welcome to the world of low intensity tempo intervals, designed by the late track and field coach Charlie Francis. These intervals are a great alternative to high intensity intervals that will still give you a great Conditioning, Fat Loss, and Recovery effect. These can be served as extra conditioning or simply as recovery work to promote blood flow. Frequency: 2-4 times a week Duration: 8-20 minutes per set Sets: 2-3 sets per workout Intensity: 20 seconds on @75% effort, 40 seconds active recovery (Ex: Cycling for 20 seconds @75% effort, then pedaling slowly for the remaining 40 seconds then continue after the minute) Means: Run/Walk Combination, Cycling, Elliptical, Rower Glute Training (Caitlin) Strength through the posterior chain is vital for explosive strength, stabilization of the spine, and posture. Our glute strength maintains forward translation whether it is in weight training or running. With poor strength through our glutes and extensor musculature, compensation comes from our quadriceps, hip flexors, and postural muscles. Aside from being aesthetically pleasing, glute work is vital as we need to be able to recruit muscles appropriately for optimal strength, endurance, and dynamic stabilization. Finding the right recipe for improving glute strength can go a long ways and should be considered on your off days. Included in the video below are three of my favorite glute exercises. These can be performed on off days, or pre-workout to strengthen the neuromuscular connections for improved firing patterns. Ab Training (Joel) Extra abdominal training can be trained as often as you’d like as long as you’re not so sore that it’s affecting your posture or affecting you primary workouts. Other than that, you can spend an extra 2 minutes up to 10 minutes per day performing extra ab work. It’s best to perform a wide variation of exercises the longer and more often you’re doing extra abdominal work. Also keep in mind; you can mix in your extra ab work during your extra Conditioning, Glute Work, and Stretching on your off days. Stretching (Caitlin) Flexibility in terms of mobility and preventative maintenance work is essential in improving pliability of major muscle groups, decreasing unwanted torque on the musculoskeletal system, and aids as good recovery post training session and during/after your extra conditioning work. The focus of a good mobility program should focus on the major muscle groups which can include: quadriceps, hamstrings, hip rotators, iliotibial band, and latissimus dosri. When designing your flexibility program, target areas of concern and use your time wisely. There is no evidence that holding a stretching >30 seconds is of any additional benefit. Most times performing each stretch as 3 repetitions of 30 seconds is sufficient. The best time to perform sustained mobility as discussed above is following your workout session. Frequency: Unlimited. Best to perform following a workout while muscles are warm. Duration: 30 seconds for each major muscle group Sets: 2-3 sets per exercise Conclusion So as you can see, performing extra work can go a long ways by just simply adding a couple of these methods to focus on your weak areas. You do not have to add in all of these areas in to your extra work, but for instance, if you feel like you want to work on burning some unwanted body fat and would like to focus on improving your glutes, we would suggest just adding in these two areas to focus on as your “extra work.” And better yet, any of these above training areas can be combined together to add to your Extra Weekly Training Volume! A lot of people go wrong with spending too much time doing the wrong things to add in extra work. So let’s be sure to start slow and be smart, so that we can actually let our training help us, not hinder us… Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Kelly Bako LPC People have a natural tendency at this time of year to use the fall months to reflect on the positive and challenging life events from the past year to create meaningful ideas and goals for the future year. At ONE EVO, one our core beliefs of human functioning is the deep seeded presence of an innate desire to evolve. Fight over Flight - no freeze!!In the book “Psycho-Cybernetics”, Doctor Maxwell Maltz calls this instinctual drive and natural tendency of humans our “servo-mechanism”. We literally have within us a success mechanism that thrives off of having a dream, a goal directed activity to chase after and conquer! Thus, in capturing the essence of goa setting, or any unique focal point of our lives, we invite you to identify new goals, revisit tucked away dreams, and re-ignite stifled passions. This is one of our team’s most enjoyable ventures (individually and collectively) and we welcome you along for the adventure! Dreamstorming But first, you must choose to dream. Dreams remain dreams unless you take action.Specific action! Dreams become goals when you give them deadlines. However, without a plan, an estimated timeline and specific tasks you must check off along the way (and in my opinion, some accountability to someone or something else), many people drift through life not ever really experiencing the tremendous joy and overwhelming feeling of accomplishment of a Dream or a Goal realized. People fall victim to some of the most common distractions and derailing moments, steering them away from some of their heart’s deepest desires. Life happens quickly and it doesn’t take long until any one of us are going through the motions. Yet every year, this magical celebration of ringing in a New Year beckons us to connect with what we want most in our lives: health, happiness, love, fulfillment, value, purpose, and achievement-whatever it may be. No Dream or Goal is too small, too trivial, or too big; but it must live within you with conviction. Take Action! Over the next few days, I encourage you to try this exercise. Find a piece of paper or go get a $1 notebook. I want you to find some time to quiet your mind and your body. Spend some time with yourself. No distractions. Think back to what you dreamed of doing and being as a kid. What did you want to accomplish in your lifetime? Write it down. Visualization & Manifestation Think of your life now as an adult. Consider the domains of a person’s life: personal, health/fitness, professional, education, home, family, financial, spiritual. Jot down notes of what you want to accomplish or how you envision those areas of life to be, or what you wanted it to look like from your heart’s deepest dreaming place. Feel free to write down adjectives of how it might look, smell, taste or feel to have whatever vision it is you have of yourself in those areas of your life. What is the vision for your life? Who are you with? Where do you live? What do you drive? How are you dressed? What do you do for fun? How do you enjoy life on earth if you could spend your day any way that you wish? How would you design your life, if you could have it exactly as you desire? This is the start of the process, the process of turning dreams into reality. The process starts with Visualization. Visualization is a form of Guided Imagery that allows you to dreamstorm the reality you wish to manifest. The overall Goal is to continue to create and expand that vision, writing it down on paper, being able to name it and describe it as you move along in your life. It has been said that there is something powerful that happens when you see your dreams or goals written on paper in your own writing. Judge it for yourself. But don’t forget to check in with that special notebook at any point in the year- it doesn’t have to be at just the New Year. In fact, I recommend you revisit your notes throughout the year so that you don’t lose sight of what it is that you are after! Make your Dreams & Goals Known The next step in Goal Setting & Execution is share! Share your goals, dreams, and vision. You must make them known to people. By sharing your vision with others, you not only own your dreams and goals to yourself, but you own it to the Universe. The Law of Attraction would say in doing this, you harness the idea of what you think about you bring about. If this sounds too crazy or simple, it is. Yet, it works! In addition, sharing your dreams and goals enlists support, and you may be surprised how many people who want to see you accomplish your goal and will find ways in seeing your become successful. You will also meet those who are the naysayers. For the most part, in order to be successful, you’re going to have to remove most of these people from your life. There isn’t much room for that kind of negative energy on the “Energy Bus” traveling toward success. A Note about your Naysayers Naysayers are going to offer you 2 powerful benefits along your journey: they will identify obstacles that lie ahead where many other travelers have been derailed, but on the other hand, they will (hopefully) reinforce the conviction that lives inside you about the dream that you are after. The difference, in my opinion, between the people who move past these people versus those who allow themselves to get paralyzed by a naysayer’s negativity, is one’s ability to harness and focus the vision you have nurtured for your life. Create a Timeline Once you have made your vision known, you should identify an estimated timeline for accomplishment. Dreams and Goals are personal to each individual, and each will have their own time frame, circumstances, and tasks to take care of. Some goals have similar time frames though, and it’s important to be aware of them. For example, to say you dream of a college education and you set yourself a goal of obtaining a College Degree, this isn’t going to set yourself up for success over night. Most of us know that it typically takes 4 years to accomplish a traditional college degree. Throughout the course of those 4 years, you’ll have milestones and markers to reach along with the inevitable setbacks that are bound to come. However, just the sheer awareness of this process using the vision of a timeline puts a person at an advantage over those individuals who just tend to “wing it” in their approach of trying to reach goals. Therefore, awareness of the process of goal setting and execution is an advantage itself, and if you’re reading this you are already doing your part, or revisiting a well-known truth, that helps a person stay on track. As I mentioned before, Dreamstorming and self-actualization is a process, just like learning. It’s also designed to be a lifelong process…So hopefully you will fall in love with the process over and over again; Visualization, bringing things to life on paper, creating a timeline, sharing it with others, and taking action daily toward your goals. I’m going to leave you with a thought from Paul Coelho’s book, “The Alchemist” in which it’s touted that the Universe conspires with you not against you. Whatever it is that has lead you to even reading this article on Goal Setting and Execution is working with you in actualizing whatever it is that you’re after. Follow up Look for the follow up to this article Goal Setting & Execution Pt.2 for additional practical strategies and exercises for: dreamstorming, organizing your goals and environment in a conscious effort toward goal achievement, breaking down broad goals into smaller achievable goals, identifying areas of self-sabotage, and encouraging you to take a look at the concept of willingness and sacrifice. There will be examples and added resources! *Concepts/Resources mentioned throughout this article: -Psycho Cybernetics; Dr. Maxwell Maltz -The Alchemist; Paulo Coelho -The Energy Bus; Jon Gordon -The Law of Attraction -Dreamstorming -Guided Imagery -Self Actualization Joel Younkins Nutrition appears to be treated as one of the most misguided variables in any fitness program. Whether it is all together neglected, or overemphasized by someone who majors in the fine details of it, I’m here to help clear up some confusion on this topic. And confusion just may be an understatement when you look at all of the nutrition ideas we hear being thrown around and argued about every day. We hear things like; eating clean, healthy carbs, no carbs, high fat, low fat, high protein, carb cycling, flexible dieting, eat a bunch of small meals, eat just a couple big meals, become a vegan, become a vegetarian, consume dairy, consume no dairy, eat power foods, become gluten free… Yes, the list can go on and on. Regardless, it’s critical to be clear on one thing. We’ve all heard the phrase, “nutrition is everything.” I hate to break it to you, but nutrition is not everything. If it was, than all we would have to do is focus on the nutritional component to get ALL of our fitness results. However, nutrition can be a catalyst to your training or an inhibitor. How you use this integral variable separates your level of achievement. I genuinely feel for the general public having to wrap their heads around dieting, as there is so much conflicting information floating around and it’s difficult for lay persons to identify which approach may be the most beneficial for them. It’s no wonder why people just say “screw it” and eat whatever they want, or jump from fad diet to fad diet. So with this report, I am NOT going to outline a diet for you to follow. That’s not realistic, nor is it ethical, as everyone has certain needs and requirements. However, I am going to lay out some principles that anyone can learn and apply to their own nutritional goals. By the end of this, my goal is to clear up some nutritional confusion and hopefully make some things more clear for consumers who wish to better understand how they can use nutrition as their ally. Calories You probably already know this but in case you don’t, diets, especially mainstream diets, all do one thing very well: they manipulate daily and weekly caloric intake. That’s about as complicated as it gets. Hence, why you can really create and sell any diet you’d like as long as you can replicate some success and have credentials to sell it. However, what most people lose sight of (or, arguably may not even be able to “see”) is WHAT is being manipulated, how, and why. A key principle of nutrition therefore is understanding and honoring that all nutritional goals require manipulation. Most significantly, the manipulation of calories. Below, I will break down some key points regarding the manipulation of Macronutrients (in particular fats, carbs, and protein) and then discuss the interplay of supplements. This is why you will hear of diets that eliminate macronutrients like carbs and fats from your diet. If you eliminate calories from your daily and weekly consumption, you lose weight. It’s all a form of manipulation. When people want to gain weight, what do most people say? “Eat more” right? Well when you want to lose weight, should it be a far fetch to say “eat less”? Below, you’ll see why you shouldn’t just start eliminating certain macronutrients from your diet or even follow an extreme diet unless you understand the underlying principles and its relationship to your fitness or health goals. Most people know that if you increase calories it will help us gain weight and decreasing calories will help us lose weight. In order to individualize and track this process of determining how many calories you need or don’t need, the following principle comes into play. As a general healthy principle for weight gain and weight loss goals, you should aim to either gain or lose 1-2lbs per week. One can stay on track with this for typically as long as 3-4 months before adjusting their approach to maintaining that weight for at least a month or two. Overall, these strategies are broken down to 3 common phrases or pathways: “bulking” (gaining mass), “cutting” (aka leaning out, reducing weight), or maintenance (maintaining). So keep in mind, during your bulking and cutting cycles, it shouldn’t take you the better half of a year to stay in that phases. You’ll most likely add too much body fat from bulking or lose too much muscle from cutting. How you successfully cut or bulk (or even maintain) depends on effectively manipulating the following components: Macronutrients For macro’s, I’m going to lay out a few principles I follow as this area tends to yield a lot of grey area between differing opinions. First, the macronutrients that make up calories are protein, carbohydrates, and fats. As I mentioned above, I’m going to break these components down and identify how manipulating one or more of these yields different results. The main take home point is that each macro has different benefits and recommendations for performance and body composition. Proteins are essentially the building block to muscle. There’s a lot of different beliefs about how much, what kind, and when to take protein. So (unless you’re overweight) if you’re an athlete or avid gym goer who is looking to maximize results, a general principle for protein consumption, should be consuming between 0.8-1 grams of protein per pound of body weight. Anything more will most likely cause unnecessary calorie consumption. If your body fat levels are on the higher side, you'll want to shoot for a lower body weight goal, and base the protein off of that number instead of your current weight. There are numerous sources of protein. Whey protein and meat protein are the best kinds of sources to get protein from as far as their ability to be consumed in your body. The plant based proteins (such as quinoa, kale, soy) are not as efficiently utilized like meat or dairy protein is. The biggest take away to remember is your protein should come from lean sources. Common “lean” sources are 90% or leaner beef, chicken, turkey, or fish…. Your protein intake should be spread throughout the day as evenly as possible. During or post workout, most people will benefit from a whey protein shake as it will be easiest to digest during that time. Carbohydrates broken down to their simplest form is actually sugar stored in your body. When it comes to training or anything high intensity in nature (weight lifting, sprints, sports), carbs are the number 1 fuel source for us to utilize. Carbs are not the enemy, us being lazy and overeating is the enemy! So you should be consuming as many carbs as possible to benefit your training and your recovery, assuming your performance is important to you. A very simple rule of thumb to follow (this is dependent on the individual, training program, and lifestyle), the more activity you perform throughout the day (especially higher intensity forms) the more carbs you will need in your diet. This might come as a shock to you as it is commonly thrown around that carbs are the enemy, but again, inactivity combined with high carb intake is the enemy! It’s normally best if you can place majority of your carb intake around your workout times if possible. I prefer carbs that are easily digestible so that body can utilize them more efficiently. My top choices (but not limited to) are: Jasmine Rice, White Rice, Sweet Potato, Sourdough Bread, Rye Bread, and Non Sugary Cereal. I also like to add in a lot of fruit, especially in a cutting phase. My top fruit choices (again not limited to) are: Oranges, Blueberries, Grapes, Pineapple, Strawberries, Lemons, and Limes. Be smart about your carb intake, they are very powerful to performance and body comp results but must be planned accordingly. Tracking performance and progress will always help clarify how much you need. Fat intake should be held to a minimum if you are trying to decrease body fat. If you want to decrease fat, there’s no reason to keep consuming more fat. There are “bad fats” and “healthy fats”. Common bad fats are trans fats (fast food, store bought baked goods). Common good fats are olive oil, nut butters, avocado. Consume healthy fats (always eliminate trans fats) to maintain normal bodily function but understand that fat holds a lot of calories per gram, more than double of protein and carbohydrates. Manipulation of healthy fats requires knowledge. This can also work extremely well for you and could be one of the easiest ways in adding size to your frame. If adding size to your frame is one of your fitness goals, simply adding fat to your diet to help increase your caloric intake can do the trick. Remember, more of the right calories equals more size. Lastly, a final principle regarding fats. Fats do very little to improving performance and most of your fats should not be consumed around your workout times because of their slower digestion rates. Supplements This is a topic that can make things very interesting and the last topic we’re going to discuss about nutrition in this report. There are numerous types of supplements and supplement lines, all claiming to do a variety of things. It’s often just as tedious to weed through in understanding supplements as it is for the diets and the roles carbs, protein and fats play into nutritional and fitness goals. For example, I have my own supplement line, ONE EVO, but what must be understood here is that supplements are just icing on the cake. No matter how awesome you think the icing is, if the cake sucks, you still have a mediocre cake to eat. And no one likes a crappy cake! Therefore, all the above information regarding the ingredients to your “cake” are instrumental in nutritional approach. There are some good ideas to consider if you’re thinking about investing in some supplements for yourself. Whey and Casein Protein could be a smart choice. Creatine Monohydrate is probably one of the cheapest, safest, and most effective supplements you could invest in. Believe it or not, but Caffeine can also be great for someone with a busy schedule. And a multivitamin or vitamins that you are deficient in can be a great addition too. Make sure you check with your doctor before if you’re not sure if you should be taking any of these products. Please, please, please! You do not want to be the guy (or girll) talking about the new supplement you’re taking every week or carrying on about the differences between pre workout drinks. You’re basically saying, “I’m only in this to tell everyone I’m into fitness and that I really have never trained hard in my life before”…The real players in the game know that training hard and being consistent with their lifestyle choices is what gets you real results. They understand that supplements are just there to help make the process more convenient, they’re not game changers… Conclusion We just covered the typical basics of nutrition. There’s so much more that can be discussed in future blogs, however again the goal of this post was to provide a foundation of understanding of nutritional principles. I hope a few of these principles helped clear up some confusion or even misconceptions about nutrition and its role in achieving your goals. Nutrition, when followed correctly and consistently, can actually be very straight forward and easy to manage. The problem lies in that it takes time for consistency to pay off! No fad diet, drink, pill, or claim of quick fix can yield the results that time and dedication do when an individual has a clear understanding of what they wish to accomplish and a realistic plan to get there! People panic and look for extreme methods to make fast changes. Fast changes also mean fast reversal, I have seen this too many times. Be consistently good, patient, and train hard and the results WILL COME! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! |
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