Joel Younkins You may often hear me talk about consistency builds results. Well at least being consistently good, because we can be consistently bad too. But I get it, being consistently good isn't really all that easy...In matter of fact, sometimes that's the hardest part about training. So, in this Lifestyle Blog, I wanted to share three ways that you can help build consistency in your training routine whether you are a beginner, or life has been seeming keeping you off track and you're trying to get back on your A Game! 1.) Put Yourself First In today's society, we are so eager to meet the time schedule of everyone else's agenda. I'm not saying that being on time is a bad trait to have, in fact it's good to be on time or early right? But let's not forget about being on time for ourselves too. If we have something schedule for ourselves to do that will benefit us, why do we put these things off so easily? If you have a meeting with someone, we will be sure to show up on time or feel the need to apologize if we're late. But if we show up late to our own schedule workout that we are doing for us, do we apologize to ourselves for being late or even worse, missing it? My point is, remember you matter too, you need to put yourself first in order to meet the demands around you. I have to be sure to put myself first so I can be the best coach I can be for my clients. If I'm not continually learning, taking care of my body, and living a life where I'm not fully happy, how would I expect to the best for my clients? This is something you need to remember as well for yourself to be the best you. 2.) Show Up I get it, not everyday you want to go to the gym and workout. I'm going to share a little secret with you...I work at the facility where I train at, and sometimes even being there, I still don't want to train. So yes I can relate to how you feel. But you are trying to be consistent with your training. So even on the days that you're not feeling it, JUST SHOW UP. Have no expectations of your workout other than showing up. Go in and do your warm up, and I'm 99% positive that your mood will change and you will at least achieve something on that day. Train yourself to SHOW UP even on your bad days. 3.) Embrace Pain Everyone tries to sell you on things to make you more comfortable. As people we sure do like our comfort. But I know you've heard this before, but nothing good comes out of your comfort zones. In good, we mean growth. We really need to get back to the idea of embracing challenge is cool. Because when you feel pain, it usually means there is weakness in a certain area of your life. So we need to attack it! Now this isn't an excuse to go and destroying yourself every day like you're trying to impress someone. In fact, we believe in pushing you right to your limit, but not smoking right past it. This keeps us in check of hard training and not dumb training. You can read more HERE on my latest article that I wrote for EliteFTS! When building consistency, embrace the pain of feeling uncomfortable. Because when you can flip this idea of, "this sucks I'm not good at this" to "this sucks I need to improve" your whole training and mindset will make a huge shift! You will look at training through a new lens. My best clients that get the best results all have this common trait in common...They embrace the challenge of improving their weak areas! Conclusion We live in this time where the world is moving fast, and we expect to have to do everything for everyone first. But lets not forget about you. You want to build consistency in your training or at least maybe get it back. You're tired of feeling like you're failing yourself. You want to feel like the best you that you can. To feel good and healthy. To look good in your clothes. And feel confident. If this is where you're at, keep these three things in motion on a daily basis and you will build that consistency that you need. Practice putting yourself first, make sure that you are showing up, and embrace the idea that at times it's going to be tough, but keep going because this is where you find real success! 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 You've made the decision, you're ready to start a training program for yourself. No matter what your goal is, to either put on size, tone, lose some weight, or prepare for your sport, there are 3 Rules that you need to focus on when beginning your program. These are things that you really need to focus on in the first month of your new fitness journey. I will tell anyone this, in the first month, nothing big happens to your body. Your mindset and behavior? Yes, big changes can happen mentality and behaviorally in which this Lifestyle Blog will help you with your training approach so you can experience success and not failure. So below, these 3 Rules will help you get through the first month of your new training program and get you set up for big training results that are soon to take place in the near future! 1.) Make Every Session It's so critical that in the first month of your new training regimen, that you make every planned workout. This is big for you for mainly two reasons. Number 1, you need to create the habit of not skipping your workouts. You're training your behavior to not skip the gym, without surprise, this is important to any successful program. You are becoming accountable to yourself and goals. Number 2, you're body needs to be exposed to your new training to adapt to it. You're building yourself a foundation now. You need to basically tell your body, "we're doing this whole fitness things." No matter how sore you are, or unmotivated, suck it up and force yourself to show up now, it will only speed up your progress in the future. Our clients who have good attendance in their first month, ALWAYS get results faster than those who are hit or miss. So don't miss if you want results! 2.) Choose Intensities That Are Doable A lot of the time, when people embark on their new fitness journey, they come into it super motivated. I love the enthusiasm, but we need to be clear that this gives us no reason to red line our bodies in the first couple weeks of training. I get it, you're ready to take on the world and transform your body, but like I said above, it's not happening this month, so slow down...You see, right now in the process, quality of work and reps are what is really important. Train your body now to be efficient at the movements and learn to perform them with a high skill level first. This way, when training needs to be heavy down the road, you're already good at it. It's like trying to learn how to drive a car at 16 that has a big block and can run a quarter mile in under 10 seconds. For most people, a four cylinder sedan will probably be a better option to learn how to drive first. 3.) Leave A Little In The Tank This is very true for the first month. And honestly, for 95% of your training no matter who you are. Remember, we are training, not competing...In competition, yes leave nothing in the tank. But in training, your body will adapt much better to your training if you leave a couple reps on the table and have a little more in the gas tank when doing conditioning work. This is especially true for your first month. This is not an excuse to slack off or taking it easy. We just need to stimulate the system with small amounts of stress and our bodies will positively adapt. But if you crush yourself, especially in month one, your body will actually react as if you're injured and it may take too long to recover in which can mess up the follow training days a head. At this point you're actually delaying progress. Remember this the next you're bragging about how sore you are. Train today so that you can train tomorrow... Conclusion Getting off of the couch and starting a new training program can be scary and exciting all at the same time. Try your best to control your emotions, it's only the gym that we're talking about, this is not D-Day. If you plan on training for longer than a month (which I hope is your intention) remember to follow these 3 Rules in this Lifestyle Blog. Focus on making it to every planned workout, perform exercises and intensities that are doable, and always leave a little in the tank after each workout. The goal is to leave the gym feeling better than when you walked in. And in time, with an appropriate plan for yourself, you will continue to keep pumping out more and more results and hitting new goals that you never imagined possible when you first started on Day 1! 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 A new trend has seemed to strongly emerge in the Fitness and Health scene. Along with the popularity of Low Carb/Ketosis Diets, we have seen Intermittent Fasting take a strong presence as the diet of choice by many people trying to lean out and look their best. A lot of people are following this type of eating/diet whatever you'd like personally call it. And many are having a lot of success using it and flossing their results of not eating for long periods of time on Social Media. If you're new to the Intermittent Fasting concept, let me explain to real quick the basics of it. Most people follow it daily by usually fasting for 16 hours and eating between a window of 8 hours during the day. So you basically wake up, skip breakfast, and only eat between 12-8 p.m. or say 2-10 p.m. Some even like to push the window further by going to 18-20 hour fasts which in the Intermittent Fasting crowd is pretty hardcore. There are other protocols for fasting but this seems to be the most popular one that most tend to follow. This is the part where I'll tell you, yes it works to help you lean out and look your best, especially if you're coming off of a bad diet. It's a plan that's pretty easy to comply to if you're not someone who will go crazy without food for a few hours. It sets up a guideline to eat only during a certain period which allows to only be able to eat only so much per day. In the end, it does what every diet plans does, it restricts your daily/weekly calorie intake. Therefor you lose weight. Sounds pretty good right??? You will only have to sacrifice a few hours of not feeding yourself to allow for a couple big meals in a small window. Most proclaim that it makes life simpler because you don't have to worry about breakfast, prepping as many meals, and a lot of people claim that when they're fasting, that they can even think clearer and have more energy, even during their workouts! This all sounds good so far...I myself have even tried IF (Intermittent Fasting) a few times over the course of almost 10 years now. Yes, fasting has been around before 2017. In fact, a lot of cultures have practiced or have been forced to fast since the beginning of time. It's just become popular again in the mainstream over the past couple years. Anyways, yes I have dabbled with this, because I love food. It's a borderline hobby for me. So I wanted to experience what happens when you follow a fasting protocol. And for myself personally, I have never been able to do IF for more than 2 months at a time. At first it was easy, convenient, I could lean out pretty quick, but as soon I saw the pitfalls come on I'd always abort the mission each time I would try it out. I would try to give it another shot and make small adjustments, but it would always lead me to regretting starting it given what I do know about nutrition and the human body. Let's talk about some of its drawbacks that I experienced while doing IF. I myself would get really weird cravings after fasting for only a couple weeks. That's not healthy behavior and I'm pretty sure that's your body screaming for certain nutrients...I would lose weight initially, but it wasn't magic and it would be hard to keep dropping the pounds after that first 5-10lbs came off to allow me to get really lean. I did feel mentally clear once I got used to not eating breakfast, but when I went back to eating a good breakfast, it wasn't even close to how good I'd feel with good food in me! My performance in the gym suffered. If you're fasting and claim that your workouts are more productive, you probably need to consider stepping up your training (but that's just the Coach coming out in me right now). And the worst part, over time when I'd be in my feasting period or after I'd stop doing IF, I would feel bloated from everything I ate. It was like my body was trying to hang onto this food that I was putting back into my body. So now what? What do I really recommend with this whole Intermittent Fasting thing going on? Do I think it really works? Yes, I said earlier I do and I can see why people have success and get all pumped on it. But we really need to look further down the road with this stuff. Let me explain... What if we reversed our thought process of food and looked through the lens of eating more, not less?! Whoa...I know crazy right?! Sorry if I offended you by telling you that we should be eating more... We're conditioned to think that we eat too much. And yes we do, we eat too much stuff that we shouldn't be eating. But in general, we're not eating enough of the good quality whole foods that we should be consuming that our bodies want and need. So we get conditioning to thinking that things like Milk and Sweet Potato's are terrible for us and that's what's making us fat. Not, our binging behaviors that like to feed us only our self guilt (see what I did there?)...READ THIS real quick if you're in your feelings right now... Read This Paragraph! So let's create a simple example so you can wrap your head around why eating more, could really benefit you for a long term approach that creates way more freedom than not eating LOL...Ok, say you're eating 2000 calories a day. That's what your body is used to eating to maintain itself and survive. And you would like to see your abs pop out a little bit more so you see your friends talking about IF and how awesome it is. You decide to give it a shot. You do it for a few months, lose some weight, but now your body is used to only needing to maintain off of 1500 calories a day now because you have reduced daily calories. It has adapted to this new level of food that you consume. Now when you have a day when you over consume 1500 calories, say like your previous 2000 calorie day that you used to eat, your body will want to store it as fat because it's now considered "extra." And when you're ready to cut again because you want even more ab definition, you'd have to eat even less than 1500 calories to make another cut. This isn't looking good is it? Read This Paragraph Too! Same person, different example. Say this person decided to slowly increase their food consumption up to 2500 calories a day. You do this slowly so that you do not add extra weight that you don't want. But you allow you body to get used to to the extra food and now your new maintenance is 2500 calories. Now when you sit down at Thanksgiving Dinner, your 2500 calorie body is already used to consuming larger amounts of calories and it will not seem like that big of an amount when compared to your 1500 calorie body. And if you want to do a cut, you don't have to keep dipping down to scary low daily caloric consumption's. I'd rather be able to cut at 2,000 calories a day compared to 1,000 calories a day. We get to create more freedom and wiggle room when we can handle larger amounts of food...Be happy and get excited about that :) So What Do I Recommend? In my current thoughts of this whole Diet/Nutrition thing, I think IF works really well at putting you in a caloric deficit to drop weight. The problem I see is that people use it as a lifestyle and not as a tool. If you're heavily overweight and you feel you need to use it as a tool for a couple months to cut out all of the junk calories that you've been consuming, that might not be a bad idea, but have a plan to come out of it to a good healthy meal plan after it has fun its course and progress has settled. For the sake of this Lifestyle Blog, I want to encourage you to allow to feed your body good nutrients of what your body really needs to operate on. Train yourself to become this "Metabolic Machine!" Follow the basic Nutrition Principles and be able to drive up the number of calories your body can stabilize itself on. Use that as a challenge to see how much you can eat and still be or get lean, not how little you can consume in a day. When you need to do a cut in the future, do I think you can still use IF as a tool to do so? Absolutely, I think it could work to your advantage of using it on your off days from the gym to create a calorie deficit that you need for the week, or help you out in moments of work dinners and celebrations. But I do think that if you choose the route of IF as a lifestyle diet, you're leaving a lot health and freedom on the table for yourself that you're missing out on! 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! A Joel Younkins There's never really just ONE THING that makes or breaks you in the world of fitness success stories. It's always a multifaceted approach. You should focus on ONE THING at a time, but in reality, it takes a bunch of things to come together to create the ultimate package. Everything impacts something else in this world. But I still get a lot of questions where people want just a one solution answer to a problem. I get asked questions like... "What's the best exercise to do?" "How many times a week should I train?" "What is the best exercise to increase your vertical jump?" Usually I respond with... "It depends, tell me more about your situation." But I get it, we're looking for direct solutions to our problems. Sort of like, let's cut to the chase way of thinking. The foundation of training should rely on the basics to build it's base, but as a professional, if I give you a one size fits all answer, I'm not properly doing my job. So, since I can't just give out one solution to a broad problem. I will provide you with more than ONE THING to do! What I will give you today, is 3 Things All Athletes Need To Do In Training! No matter what kind of athlete you are, assuming it's a physical driven sport however, these 3 Things are essential to a successful training program. If anything else, you should be trying to always fit these 3 Things into your training plan. I'll explain more in detail as you read on! 1.) Squat All athletes need to be squatting. No matter what age, gender, or sport. You need to build a strong lower body. This will help you simply with being on your feet. It will help become faster and jump higher. And it will simply strengthen you in your athletic positions in your sport as you bend at your ankles, knees, and hips. It doesn't matter as much which type of squatting you're doing, as long as you have a solid reason for why you believe it's appropriate. But for athletes, squatting in a gym is considered to be very general. So you can Hi Bar, Low Bar, Box Squat, Goblet Squat, and or Single Squat Variations, just whatever will make you get the most out of the movement. The point is, if you're an athlete, get comfortable with the idea of squatting, and start squatting yesterday...Your Power and Speed will thank me! 2.) Abdominal Training Most athletes actually want to avoid Ab Work because it takes up time and it's hard to see a visual direct connection to the sport. But the bad news is, that our lower spine is the only skeletal structure connections our upper body to our lower body. So you need to rely on your trunk muscles to be strong and stable. When this is in effect, your upper and lower body works together much more efficiently and will also decrease the rate of potential injuries. Abdominal Training should be a part of your program throughout the whole year! 3.) Aerobic Conditioning A lot of athletes may be rolling their eyes right now when they see the words Aerobic Conditioning. But guess what, everything we do has an Aerobic component to it. So whether you're a Thrower on a track team, or you run Cross Country, you need to have some sort of Aerobic Conditioning to compete as a high level athlete. For more strength based athletes, you need this to be in your program because it will help when you're at your events, you will have more energy and a faster recovery time between your bouts/attempts. When your aerobic system is more developed, the efficient blood flow to your muscles will keep you muscles warmer, which means they can fire faster if they're warm. And also, with this system being more developed, you will be able to recover from training sessions faster as well! So anything from walking 10 minutes at a time with a weight vest to distance runners running miles at a time, you should always be concerned on where your Aerobic Conditioning is at any given time of the year! Conclusion By now, you should see why at least these 3 Things should be in every Athlete's training program. And in fact, there's a lot more than can be added to this list, but these 3 jump to the front of my mind as they often want to be neglected rather easily. So if you're an athlete, a coach, or a parent of an athlete, take a look at the big picture of what you're doing, and make sure these 3 Things (Squat, Abdominal Training, & Aerobic Conditioning) are being included in your preparation for the upcoming season! Talk to you soon! 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 It's pretty amazing, it seems like not very long ago, I was turning 20 years old. I would be getting ready for my second season as a Collegiate Football Athlete, figuring out the College Life, conceptualizing what I really wanted out of my own life, and what I would possibly do once my playing days were over. Today, I'm the owner of a Private Training Facility, I own my own Supplement Line, I own and rent real estate, I'm happily married to the love of my life Kelly, and she gave birth to our amazing son Levi! On July 23rd 2018, I will be turning 30... As I look back over my 20's, I can't grasp at how much and how fast life has changed. I'm very thankful for that I feel like I was able to accomplish a lot in this period of my life, while still experiencing a lot that life has to offer. I know that in your 20's, especially in today's current culture, things can be tough and confusing for us to figure out. There's a lot to think about and moves to be made. You might be asking yourself: "Am I where I'm suppose to be?" "Did I make the right career choice?" "Should I be making more money?" "Should I be married by now?" And the list can go on and on. It's easy to get caught up and compare our lives to everyone else's. Well, I now can basically say that I've lived it (my 20's). I've learned a lot on the fly while figuring out how to run a business and navigating through this thing called life. I've made just as many mistakes as I have had successes, if not more. I've felt completely lost at times, and I've also felt like I was on top of the world! This isn't me saying, do what I did in my 20's, I have the blueprint for you. This is based from my experiences of what I have come to realize to be true as a man only days away from turning 30 years old. So I wanted to share this with you. Take from this what you will, especially if you find yourself in your 20's. Trust me, I've realized way more than 20 things. This list isn't the most important things I'd say, nor in order of importance, but just 20 of them that I think you may be relate to and help put things into perspective for yourself as you navigate through your 20's in this Lifestyle Blog Post! 1.) Hustle or Chill
2.) A Lot Changes In A Year
3.) Find Your Purpose
4.) Balance = Average
5.) Winners Win
6.) Few Actually Hustle
7.) You're Not Missing Out
8.) Find You, Before You Find Someone Else
9.) Marry Your Best Friend
10.) Having Kids Is The Best Thing In The World
11.) The World Doesn't Care If You Have A Family
12.) Misery Loves Company
13.) Real Problems Can't Be Calculated
14.) Be Open To The Universe
15.) People Accept The Judgement You Place On Yourself
16.) The More You Know, The More You Realize You Don't Know
17.) Be Comfortable Becoming Uncomfortable
18.) Morals Over Everything
19.) Keep Going
20.) Be A Genuine Person
Conclusion Thank you for reading through this list. Like I said, this isn't everything that I've learned and realized, but these are the 20 Things that I wanted to share with you. I'm sitting here telling you that I have mastered these things myself. But they have helped me realize some concepts to get through my 20's and have given me a standard to work towards when building my character. When I'm struggling with something, I keep these things in my mind and rely on them for clarity and direction. Hopefully at least one of these will help give you some clarity and direction in an area that you may be struggling with today. Until next time! 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 Assuming that you've set realistic goals and expectations for yourself, chances are, you may unfortunately not be making the progress that you would like to see. We could look at all of the training variables that go into a program. Volume, Intensity, Frequency, Means, Nutrition, and Recovery are all important variables that need to be addressed to really excel in a fitness training program. But, no matter how good the plan is, or how hard you try in the gym, there is always one factor that you need regardless of how good the plan is. And that is CONSISTENCY. The NBA Finals have just wrapped up, and LeBron James is still one of the best athletes that exist on this earth. You can love him or hate him, think that Jordan or Kobe were better than he was, but we're going to use him as an example in this blog post right now. Do you think, with LeBron being one the best players in the league, that his effort towards being the best is inconsistent? If you're saying yes, don't be naive to your emotional feelings towards him. Someone like him is obsessed and he is consistently after getting better. If he has a few down games were he doesn't live up to the hype, that happens. But guess what? All of his 50 plus point games and all the incredible CONSISTENT things that he's known so well for, will outshine his not so good moments when they do happen. Because he is CONSISTENTLY GOOD. Do you work? Do you have a career? Are you an athlete? If you answer yes, wouldn't you agree that being consistent helps produce results? Would you expect to be were you are now without consistent work? If you're agreeing with me right now on all this, then good, we're on the same page. We expect consistency to produce results in many areas of life. So why wouldn't we want to accept and agree that it would work exactly the same for fitness? How could we think that when it comes to our fitness, that consistency is not that important? Do we really think that 4 days out the week we can follow a good diet, and the other 3 we just eat whatever we please? That's just over 50% of the time being consistent. It needs to be much closer to 80-90% of the time... The best part of working on consistency, is that you don't have you don't always have to have good days. That's the beauty, you can work at it so much, that when you have a bad day, it doesn't effect the big picture. The consistency allows you to build up a lot of good work in the process. You may be right on track to hit your fitness goals or even just get the most out of your fitness. But no matter what plan or diet you follow, if you're not getting the consistency part down, you are leaving huge progress to made on the table! 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 Conditioning is a really broad term in the Fitness Industry. It's usually referred to as "Cardio" when we relate to anything that increases your heart rate. In this Lifestyle Blog Post, I want to go over a few general concepts in regards to Conditioning that may help give you some clarity on this broad topic. I want to discuss what type of cardiovascular training you should be doing, what you should not be focusing on as the primary goal, and how to track your training intensity. Focus on Aerobic Conditioning There are different forms of conditioning that train different levels of fitness. In general, for health related purposes, you will most likely get the most from Aerobic Conditioning. This is performed at heart rates between 120-150 bpm. You can perform these bouts anywhere from 10-60 minutes at a time and use various equipment too. This type of training is great for building a healthy heart and increasing blood flow. Again, in speaking of means of general conditioning, I prefer to not have the popular style HIIT Conditioning Methods to be your main source of conditioning. These protocols are actually very taxing to your body and you'd probably be better off lifting more weights instead of utilizing this method of conditioning. Yes, HIIT style training is great to save time and burn calories, but so does lifting weights. Read on... Do Not Use Conditioning as Sole Means to Fat Loss Can cardiovascular training be a way of burning more daily calories? Sure! Lower intensity aerobic training will allow you to burn calories at a faster rate in that time period of work, but when the session is done and you return to resting heart rates, you're calorie consumption will go back to normal. Therefore, people believe HIIT style training is so much more superior to low intensity work because you will be able to burn more calories after training is done. This is because of the higher metabolic stress rates. And guess what, a hard session of lifting weights will do the same thing...With HIIT you may be lucky to train hard enough to get 24 hours post workout of an uptake of calorie burning. But lifting can be up to 48 hours post workout. This is a process where your body is consuming more oxygen to recover from training and you get to burn more calories after these workouts. So to wrap this point up, you can use Aerobic Training to help put you into a calorie deficit if needed, but don't depend on it to do all of the magic. Lifting weights is far more efficient at burning away body fat. Instead, focus on Aerobic Training being the primary need to build a health heart and increase blood flow. This will also help improve your performance in basically anything physically active that you do! It's called improving your fitness levels...Also, next time you see a fitness article telling you how HIIT workouts are the second coming of Jesus, just remember, you could spend extra time lifting weights to get more bang for your buck than crushing your lungs. In reality, the majority of individuals will never actually be prepared to handle HIIT style workouts when they begin them anyways. That's another topic for another day... Use a Heart Rate Monitor When I talked about Aerobic Conditioning, I mentioned that your heart rate should be between 120-150 bpm generally speaking. You only truly know if you're in this zone if you're using some sort of heart rate monitor. It's like Bench Pressing and you don't know how much weight is on the bar. This is your intensity of your Cardiovascular Training. If you don't know your heart rate, then you're just guessing on what you're doing. It's easy to go too hard and too easy. If you're like me, cardio isn't my number one choice of training, so when I do it, I want to make sure that I'm actually getting what I need out of it! Conclusion As I mentioned above, Cardiovascular Training is a very broad topic. We didn't even scratch the surface of it in this Lifestyle Blog Post. I just wanted to touch on a couple common topics that I see often in hopes to clear up some confusion you may have previously encountered. Remember, when it comes to your conditioning work, focus on Aerobic Conditioning Methods to help create a healthier/stronger heart and to improve your blood flow. Added benefits will be extra calorie burning, but you shouldn't rely strictly on conditioning to get yourself into a calorie deficit to burn away body fat. And when performing your conditioning work, get used to always wearing a heart rate monitor to see what intensity you're actually operating at. Good luck! 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 It's pretty amazing, it seems like not very long ago, I was turning 20 years old. I would be getting ready for my second season as a Collegiate Football Athlete, figuring out the College Life, conceptualizing what I really wanted out of life, and what I would possibly do once my playing days were over. Today, I'm the owner of a Private Training Facility, I own my own Supplement Line, I own and rent real estate, I'm happily married to the love of my life Kelly, and she gave birth to our amazing son Levi! July 23rd 2018, I will be turning 30... As I look back over my 20's, I can't grasp how much and fast life has changed. I'm very thankful that I feel like I was able to accomplish a lot in this period of my life while still experiencing a lot that life has to offer. I know that in your 20's, especially in today's current culture, things can be tough and confusing for us to figure out. There's a lot to think about and moves to be made. You might be asking yourself, "Am I where I'm suppose to be?", "Did I make the right career choice?"," Should I be making more money?"," Should I be married by now?"... And the list can go on and on. It's easy to get caught up and compare our lives to everyone else's. Well, I now can basically say I've lived it (my 20's). I've learned a lot on the fly while figuring out how to run a business and navigating through this thing called life. I've made just as many mistakes as I have had successes, if not more. I've felt completely lost at times, and I've also felt like I was on top of the world! This isn't me saying, do what I did in my 20's, I have the blueprint for you. This is based from my experiences of what I have come to realize to be true as a man days away from turning 30 years old. So I wanted to share this with you. Take from this what you will, especially if you find yourself in your 20's. Trust me, I've realized way more than 20 things. This list isn't the most important things I'd say, nor in order of importance, but just 20 of them that I think you may be relate to and help put things into perspective for yourself as you navigate through your 20's in this Lifestyle Blog Post for you! 1.) Hustle or Chill
2.) A Lot Changes In A Year
3.) Find Your Purpose
4.) Balance = Average
5.) Winners Win
6.) Few Actually Hustle
7.) You're Not Missing Out
8.) Find You, Before You Find Someone Else
9.) Marry Your Best Friend
10.) Having Kids Is The Best Thing In The World
11.) The World Doesn't Care If You Have A Family
12.) Misery Loves Company
13.) Real Problems Can't Be Calculated
14.) Be Open To The Universe
15.) People Accept The Judgement You Place On Yourself
16.) The More You Know, The More You Realize You Don't Know
17.) Be Comfortable Becoming Uncomfortable
18.) Morals Over Everything
19.) Keep Going
20.) Be A Genuine Person
Conclusion Thank you for reading through this list. Like I said, this isn't everything that I've learned and realized, but these are the 20 Things that I wanted to share with you. I'm sitting here telling you that I have mastered these things myself. But they have helped me realize some concepts to get through my 20's and have given me a standard to work towards when building my character. When I'm struggling with something, I keep these things in my mind and rely on them for clarity and direction. Hopefully at least one of these will help give you some clarity and direction in an area that you may be struggling with today. Until next time! 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 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! 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! |
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