1. Vulnerability - The gym teaches you that you must be crap at something before you can be any good at it, and deliberately practicing and repeating the process will be your key in doing just that - The first time that you set foot in a gym, you are going to struggle, feeling weak and completely out of your depth - But as the days and weeks progress, you will quickly find yourself improving - And the same is true in life - If you want to get good at anything, then you need to become vulnerable, and just fucking do it - 2. There Are No Failures, Only Lessons - In the gym, failure is usually a good thing - When you “fail” in the gym, let’s say to hit your last rep, it’s only because you felt and acknowledged your limits and decided you had the capability to push beyond them, and you tried to do just that - This is exactly what “failure” is in life - It teaches you resilience, it teaches you patience, and it teaches you that each and every time you are knocked down, you have a choice whether or not you will stay down - If you accept that failure is a natural part of success it will become one of your most valuable teachers - 3. Life Has a Compounding Effect - Success in the gym is very gradual - Your body will not change overnight, it takes time - But the change does come, little by little, bit by bit, until one day there’s a stark difference between the person you started as and the person you are now - There is power in this compounding effect, the build up of little actions over time to create significant and noticeable results - 4. The Value in Pain - Pain of certain types can be good, and even healthy - Pain builds mental and physical toughness the way few other experiences can - It increases your threshold for discomfort, which allows you to open yourself up to more experiences - 5. Conquer Yourself to Conquer Your World - The gym is ultimately designed for one thing and one thing only: Self Improvement - It shows you that you are capable of making a difference, making a change for the better, for yourself and even for those around you and also throughout other facets of your life

Quitting can become a habit - If you give up on the things that matter most to you, you will likely establish a pattern of giving up on anything when things don’t go the way you hoped - You will not learn the importance of persistence — and anything worthwhile requires persistence - Also, know that your values are the most important thing - Persisting with goals that are important to you means placing most significance on your values, rather than convenience or expedience - Hopefully, you wouldn’t ever give up on your values, and you wouldn’t give up on the ideas that reflect those values - And your self-belief is everything - Giving up on your important goals is tantamount to giving up on yourself - You are a unique person with your own gifts and talents and no one will invest in them more than you - Perhaps millions of people have had the same goals and dreams as you, but everyone manifests these aspirations differently and uniquely - I pushed through the struggles I faced during the early stages of this business, and learned a lot about my dream by implementing it and bringing it to life - I learned to adapt. I learned that if you’re not being challenged, you’re not living life to the fullest - I learned that if you follow someone else’s dreams, you won’t be as engaged and excited as you are when following your own - So never quit on the things that are important to you. Self-belief is the most important belief there is

Do you know how much you’ve progressed so far this year? - When you exercise, do you do so with purpose? - Do you know exactly what you’re going to do and how long it should take you? - Or do you kind of wander around the gym like a lost sheep, trying to figure out which machines look fun to use that day - If you’re serious about getting in shape, you need to start tracking your workouts: - If you did 5 sets of 5 reps of squats with 80kg last week, this week you know you you need to increase your volume (reps/sets) or increase your intensity (the weight on the bar) to get stronger - Likewise, if you did 3 pull ups last week, you know you need to pull 4 this week if you want to get stronger - Or, if you did 2k on the rowing machine, in 8 minutes last month, you know you need to improve on that time next month to measure the progress on your cardiovascular fitness - To keep track of your workouts, I personally prefer just using an Evernote - That way, I always know exactly how I did in my last workout, so that I know what I need to do in my next workout to progress - I encourage you to do the same

Planning your meals flexibly Based on the guidelines above, which assume you’ll be eating about 4 times a day, you now have a simple and flexible guide for meal planning - For men: * 2 palms of protein dense foods with each meal; * 2 fists of vegetables with each meal; * 2 cupped hands of carb dense foods with most meals; * 2 entire thumbs of fat dense foods with most meals - For women: * 1 palm of protein dense foods with each meal; * 1 fist of vegetables with each meal; * 1 cupped hand of carb dense foods with most meals; * 1 entire thumb of fat dense foods with most meals - Of course, just like any other form of nutrition planning — including calorie counting – this serves as a starting point - You can’t know exactly how your body will respond in advance. So stay flexible and adjust your portions based on your hunger, fullness, and other important goals - For example: if you’re trying to gain weight, and you’re having trouble gaining, you might add another cupped palm of carbohydrates or another thumb of fats - Likewise, if you’re trying to lose weight but seem to have stalled out, you might eliminate a cupped palm of carbohydrates or a thumb of fats at particular meals - Remember: This is a starting point. Adjust your portions at any time using outcome-based decision making, aka “How’s that working for you?” Source: www.precisionnutrition.com

Don’t just pull your gun and randomly fire, because you will most likely miss your target - Take the time to put the focus where it is supposed to be and give yourself the best chance of hitting your target - It is no different in strength training; strong focus will give you the best chance to hit your target goals - This focus will range in zoom and clarity but it should always have a place in your head - If you’re at work your focus should be on your job, but training should still be in your peripheral thought - If that job gets stressful, a focused lifter zooms in their focus to realize that it is hurting their recovery and works on it - If there is a huge cake in the break room, a focused lifter thinks about their training nutrition instead of randomly attacking that cake - If your buddies want you to go out drinking all night, your focus better zoom in tight on your goals before you make a decision - It is not always easy to have good focus 24/7, but with practice it will become habit - In the beginning it helps to remind yourself with notes or with things that remind you where your focus should be - Post-it notes near doors you use or your mirror in your bathroom help - Pictures or posters of other athletes can help you remember to focus (I have Bruce Lee on my wall) - Backgrounds on your computers and phones can help refocus - There are so many things in regular life that can blur your focus and disrupt your shot at the target - We must have focus on our target, even if at times it is a bit blurred in our peripheral while we must do other tasks - So where is your focus? What level of lifter do you want to be? How strong do you want to get and how far do you want to push your ability? Are you willing to give what it takes to accomplish your goal? Are you willing to give the focus to that goal that it will take to achieve it? Align your sights, pick your target, focus on your sights, squeeze the trigger, and hit your goal!

Watching the pounds fall off after staying true to a workout program and healthy eating plan is an amazingly gratifying reward - But for many people, a weight-loss plateau (the dip) shows up at some point or another - Of course weight loss isn't the only goal of sticking with a healthy routine, but if that's your goal, it can be frustrating when your results come to a halt despite how much effort you're putting in - So, how can you step in and take control? - The best way to bust through a plateau is to engage our biological responses to work for us, not against us - Luckily, the best way to do this is to stick with healthy weight-loss habits - Here are some tweaks you can make to what you're already doing to push past a plateau - 🍔Adjust your calorie intake - As you lose weight, your metabolism can drop because your body requires less calories or “energy” to fuel a smaller you - The calorie intake that you initially had when you began your weight-loss journey will need to be adjusted to match your body’s current needs for weight loss. Make sure to revise your calorie goal every 10 pounds or so - 😴Get more sleep - Lack of sleep can throw your hormones out of whack and is connected to weight gain - Getting adequate sleep will also give you energy to power through your workouts and help you resist cravings for unhealthy foods - 🏋🏻Strength train - To keep up your lean muscle mass and keep your metabolism revving as you're losing weight, make sure to incorporate strength training into your routine at least two days a week - 💥Vary your fitness routine and kick up the intensity - Especially if you've been doing the same workouts over and over, chances are your body can perform those exercises efficiently, which means it's burning far less calories than when you started - 🎯The key to getting past any weight-loss roadblocks is to not get discouraged - We tend to be very critical of ourselves and when we set a goal and don’t reach it, we immediately see it as a failure - Instead, know that this is part of the process and remember how far you've already come

You need courage to begin something - When you begin something, there is a lot of uncertainty - Uncertainty about the outcome or consequences, uncertainty about the environment, uncertainty about whether you will be able to garner the support you need, uncertainty about the the response of others - The uncertainty is always there – it is a given. However, our mind usually responds with fear - These uncertainties give rise to fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of rejection, fear of looking foolish, fear of being alone - Confidence is an outcome - It is the result of the constant practice that allows you to hone your skills - It is the benefit of becoming very familiar with your process, product, stakeholders through long and consistent engagement - It is the dividend of encountering the unexpected and dealing successfully with it over and over again - We spend a lot of time seeking more confidence - We wait to feel confident before we take action - This is a mistake, because we will never feel confident until we try and succeed - Or fail and try again before we get it right - If we wait for confidence to begin, we might end up waiting for a long time, or forever - This is why courage is more important than confidence

Get yourself setup to get the most out of your workouts - Have a cup of coffee around 30 minutes before workout (not immediately before) - Get warm and hydrated before the exercise. You should be sweaty after a good warm-up - Have a prescribed and relatively tight window of time in which to complete the exercise - Have a prescribed plan and pattern for the exercise ahead of time; the distance, repetitions, intervals and so on - Keep a record of the same work outs over time and bear in mind what constitutes progression; I am more motivated to try for 11 reps if I know I got 10 on the same round last time - Listen to music. I find music appropriate to the effort and good isolating headphones really help me zone out of my surroundings and focus on the training - Use a timer. Set reasonable recovery and interval times and try to stick to them; a ticking clock is less sympathetic than your gasping, exhausted in mid-exercise, when determining how long to rest - Vary the effort. A small amount of variety can help overcome the plateaus of training adaptation

It is all to common today for most people to just plain not work hard enough in the gym. The greatest exercise in the world won't bring any results if you don't work hard - Too many people start and stop workout programs all year long, never really consistently working hard for at least a respectable amount of time - If you are not sure whether or not you are working hard enough on your exercises, then you are not working hard enough - If you think you are working hard enough on your exercises then you probably still aren't working hard enough on your exercises - If you say yes to any of the following questions, you are not working hard enough - -Do you find your mind wandering during your workouts? - - Are you completely engaged in your workout, or do you spend a lot of your time in the gym socializing? - -Do you ever catch yourself quitting "in your head" first, when you know you were physically capable of squeezing out one or two more reps? - - Do you approach every workout guessing how much weight you should use, and just doing as many sets and reps as you "feel" like? - Keep in mind that when I say hard work, I am talking about the effort you put into your exercises, not how much or how long you work out for - Getting results in the gym, much like any worthwhile success is about the quality of work you put in the gym, not the quantity - Hard work is not optional if you are serious about building some muscle mass fast and effectively. You can throw around all sorts of weights and exercises all day, but if you expect to build some quality muscle mass, it's time to get serious about your training intensity - This shouldn't be a disappointing reminder for most of you - There is great joy and a sense of power that we can get from hard work, and weight training is one of the purest and rawest of forms - There is really nothing else out there that can relate to the ruthless and barbaric ways of weight training

Achieving Short Term Results may lead to Term Regret - Here's why👇 - 🎯You may achieve results if you follow a strict plan set by you from your trainer, but you won’t be able to maintain it long-term - At some point you’ll stop the diet/program and then regain that weight back because the diet/program was too impractical - 🎯While some people can stick to a rigid diet or workout program for a few weeks or even months, many abandon the routine after only a couple of weeks, if not sooner - This could leave you feeling like a total failure since you couldn’t adhere to the program - What can often happen is an individual is ready to lose fat, so they look for a quick-fix solution, follow it for a while and have some success, then, stop because again, it’s not practical - You'll most likely regain the weight, feel like a failure, look for another quick-fix solution. The vicious cycle continues - 🎯Strict nutrition rules, and especially the elimination of certain foods and food groups, is a recipe for disaster for a lot of people - This can lead to obsessive compulsive and disordered eating habits such as an unhealthy perspective of food, binge eating, and other less-than-ideal problems - 🎯My job as a trainer and coach is to help my clients develop a lifestyle they can sustain long-term - I don’t care if they look great in a bikini this season. I care if they can maintain that body with ease long-term without revolving their life around a diet or rigid gym schedule

Instead of waiting for life to happen, make it happen. Instead for waiting for a change, create a change - Create a vision for yourself and your life and use the opportunities that come when life throws you a curve ball to review your goals and dreams - You may discover a speed bump was a wake up call to focus on something important you may have otherwise overlooked - Where do you see yourself in six months, in the most important areas of your life? What is something that you enjoy then that isn’t in your life today? How do you feel? What do you do on a regular basis? - Now draw it in to three months. What has happened and needs to happen three months from now to get to your vision? Be specific! Are you trying something new? Have you changed your daily habits? What do you fill your time with? What is it like to be this brilliant you, three months from now? - Hone in, one month from today. What is different? What steps have you taken to this new-you six months away? What are you up to? What have you accomplished? What are you working toward? What have you consistently been doing for the past 30 days? - What happens to you a week from now? In seven days, how have you changed your habits and your life to steer its course to something new and incredible? What are you planning? What is being implemented? How do you feel? - Now plan tomorrow. Repeat daily - Plan your time, because time flies, but the good news is you’re the pilot of your life. Stop waiting for life to happen to you and take ownership for leading your life. You have led your life to amazing places already, and there is no stopping where you can go from here

Is What You’re Doing Really Working For You? - Be completely honest with yourself. You’re only hurting yourself if you aren’t. It’s a tough question. You'd like to think that what you’re doing is actually doing you good. That the time and effort you’re putting in is really paying off. The sacrifice you’re making is worth it. But what if it isn’t? Are you willing to change something? - If something isn’t working you make a change and see what happens. Cause and effect. That’s what health and fitness is. It’s trial and error. Do things a certain way and see what the results are. If they produce a positive change, great, keep going. If there’s no positive change, no problem, we now know that method doesn’t work. Move on until you find something that works for you - Just don’t fall into the trap. What might have worked last month might not be working anymore. This happens when someone adapts to a way of training or eats a certain way. We call this a plateau, and there’s no point doing the same thing and getting nowhere - Always reassess if something is working for your goals. If you’re not feeling any better, becoming any stronger or seeing noticeable changes in the mirror, time to switch things up and start getting better results