Warrior Fitness » motivation

Wisdom by Will Smith

Jon — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:41:13 +0000

This montage of clips from Will Smith interviews is simply awe-inspiring. There is absolutely nothing you cannot accomplish when you put your mind to it. “The first step, before anyone else in the world believes it, is you have to believe it.” Check it out. Listen to the wisdom!

Goals for 2010

Top 5 Mistakes When Starting an Exercise Program

Jon — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:39:26 +0000

In my experience there are several things that can contribute to failure in an exercise program, or any other goal for that matter. In the past when I would fail to achieve a specific fitness goal or suffer a setback, minor or major, I’d chalk it up to fate and just try harder the next time. As I grew older, and smarter, I began to see a pattern emerge. These things didn’t just happen, there were particular sets of circumstances, most often at the outset of an exercise program, that combined to allow them to happen. The list below comprises what I consider to be the top 5 mistakes. You may have discovered others, and I would encourage you to share them in the Comments section below, but in my mind these are the most critical errors. As Saint Thomas Aquinas rightly taught many times, “An error in the beginning is an error indeed.”

An Error in the Beginning

1. Too much too soon. Everyone wants results NOW! The problem here is that when talking about results, incremental progression reigns supreme. Let’s face it, if you are trying to lose weight, for example, it took a long time, maybe years, to get to be over-weight. Losing fat is not going to happen overnight, no matter what the TV ads tell you. It took time to condition yourself to be out of shape, it will take time to re-condition your body to be in shape. Be patient. Focus on the process – you’ll get there!

2. Lack of a training plan. In my mind, it is essential to have some knowledge of how to program an exercise selection to correlate with the goals to be achieved. Without this it’s pretty much hit or miss as to whether you achieve your goals, or even remain consistent.

3. Lack of effective warm-up and cool-down strategies. This goes hand-in-hand with lack of a training plan above. DOMS, or Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, is a significant contributor to people actively deciding to not pursue their fitness program. When joint mobility as a warm-up, and yoga postures, as a cool-down, are effectively combined with the exercise selection needed to be successful, they tend to reduce or eliminate DOMS.

4. Nutrition that does not support the exercise program. While the diet OR exercise approach has some merrits, it’s simply not enough. Get your eating in line with your workouts, and in line with your goals. Diet AND exercise is a powerhouse combination.

5. Quitting. Yes, this will really ruin an exercise program. But seriously, how many people begin a regimen with the best intentions yet due to other life pressures, lack of motivation, lack of results, or lack of interest, fail to be consistent?

How about you? What things contribute to derailing you from the fitness track? And, more importantly, how do you remain focused? I’d love to hear from you!

8 Ways to Fit in Your Fitness

Jon — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:07:28 +0000

It’s often been said that if you want something done you should give it to a busy person. While this may be true of some busy people, namely the ones who are highly motivated, highly productive, and highly efficient, what about all the other busy people? What about those who are busy through poor time management skills, or maybe those who are simply overwhelmed? How about them? Does the task they are given merely get thrown on top of a growing pile of “To-Do’s”, or even worse, shuffled to the bottom? What if the task they are given, or give themselves, is directly related to increasing their quality of life and most likely longevity as well? What if that task will help them be more productive at all their other tasks by reducing stress levels, increasing energy, and their overall sense of well being? What if that task would help them to reduce, remove, or otherwise prevent a host of daily aches, pains, and illnesses that are stoically (or sometimes not so) suffered as things that “just happen” as we grow older?

Here’s a list of 8 ways for these busy people to fit in their fitness and reclaim a healthy lifestyle.

1. Plan it out. Scheduling is the key to successful time management. Look at your weekly calendar and plan to exercise just as you would plan an important client meeting, a lunch with an old friend, or coaching your kid’s Little League team.

2. Exercise wherever you are. Joint mobility sessions can be done at your desk – see here.

3. Work in an office building? Take the stairs instead of the elevator. See how fast you can make it to your floor – beat those lazy suckers in the elevator to your floor!

4. Have a lunch break? Go outside and go for a walk. 10 minutes in the fresh air will do wonders for you. Eat at your desk while you work and then go for a walk. Want to make your walk more productive? Try inhaling for 5 steps, holding you breath on the inhale for 5 steps, exhaling for 5 steps, then holding the breath after the exhale for 5 steps. When you can comfortably do that for the entire duration of your walk, increase to 6, 8, 10 steps!

5. Get up earlier and workout **warning – this one requires effort and commitment!!**

6. Spend quality time with your kids. Exercise together – see Warrior Fitness for Kids.

7. Brief workouts. Got a spare 15 minutes? Bring the intensity and lose the long, boring workouts. See the Warrior Fitness WOWs for some ideas.

8. Isometrics. These require very little time to be effective, need no equipment, and can be done literally anywhere.

Obviously, this list is neither exhaustive nor all inclusive, but I do hope it has helped you and sparked some ideas to help you fit in your fitness no matter how busy you are. What ideas do you have?

Do You Know the Enemy?

Jon — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:54:35 +0000

Do you know the enemy? I do. It inhibits peak performance. It makes you lazy and keeps you unmotivated. It cajoles you into seeking comfort. It distracts you from your goals and dulls your mind. The enemy sells you on an “easy” lifestyle and lulls you into a false sense of security. It conspires to sabotage every move toward a healthier diet or consistent workout program. It will aim to destroy any action or activity that moves you towards bettering yourself, be it education, a new job venture, a move towards a more spiritual life, or writing the great American novel. Ultimately, it weakens your spirit.

What is The Enemy?

The enemy comes in many forms and assumes many guises. It may tell you that it’s alright to sit down on the sofa and watch Lifetime Television with your wife after dinner; you can get to that workout later. It may convince you that just one brownie bite is okay, after all, they’re just “bites”. You may feel tired from a busy day at the office, and rightly so – the enemy will whisper in your ear that you can begin your fitness regimen tomorrow and that will be good enough. What exactly is this enemy who kills our motivation and procrastinates our calling (sometimes indefinitely)? Steven Pressfield identifies the enemy as “Resistance” in his excellent book, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.

“Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will perjure, fabricate, falsify; seduce, bully, cajole… If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get. Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.”

Sometimes the most insidious form the enemy can take is the form of knowledge. We fall into the trap of, I know what I need to do, I just need to do it. Knowledge comforts us. It allows us to rationalize that since we are in possession of it, we can carry out the action at any time. We don’t need to do it now. Tomorrow is fine. Next week is OK to start. So, why worry? One of my favorite quotes (just ask my daughter, she’s heard it often enough!) on this subject is:

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

How Do I Defeat The Enemy?

In his book, Awakening Spirits (Religion and Spirituality), famed wilderness survival guru, Tom Brown Jr., gives the enemy a different name, calling it the “Demon of Distraction”. No matter what you call it, if you call it anything at all, it’s the very same impersonal, unrelenting force pushing us away from our calling, deferring our goals to a “better time”, or for when “conditions are just right”. Here’s a hint – conditions are never perfect. There is no better time than right now. How do you defeat this omnipresent enemy? By doing your work. By starting right now. Don’t delay. Don’t defer. Begin. Do the work(out). Trade the 3 o’clock junk food snack for an apple. Skip McDonald’s on the way home from work and prepare a healthy meal. Don’t allow yourself the luxury of excuses. Be firm. Be strong. Get it done. Be resolute and committed to your health and fitness goals.

Motivation

Jon — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:48:43 +0000

Everything sounds like a great idea when you are thinking about it and planning it out. The problem, as they say, is in the execution. Sunday afternoon you are superbly confident of your plan to get up at 5 AM Monday morning and do your prescribed workout. However, when that alarm goes off, suddenly your mind finds every excuse in the book to hit the snooze button and sleep “just 10 more minutes….” How do you remedy this? What do you do in the early hours of the morning to drive the demons of laziness out of your head and get up to get that workout done? Well, there really is just one way. Force yourself. Drag yourself. Make yourself get up and do it. I know, that’s not what you wanted to hear. You expected something magical, something logical, something practical, something that wouldn’t require you to exert any effort to make it happen. Me too. I used to think the same way. Why isn’t there some sort of crazy mental trick I can use to motivate myself? Why does it have to be so hard to force myself to get up and get the workout done? There actually is a trick, in a way. It’s called the law of accommodation. Whatever you keep doing over and over again becomes easier. If I’m lazy and unmotivated, then as I repeat that action of hitting the snooze alarm, it becomes easier for me. If I drag my lazy ass out of bed and make it to my basement gym just one day, it becomes slightly easier the next. As I keep pushing, prodding, coaxing, cajoling myself to get up at 5 AM and workout, it becomes habitual. It becomes easy. My body and brain naturally “accommodate” me. Don’t just do it. Get it Done.

How do you get and stay motivated? Discuss!

The “I Don’t Have What I Need to Start” Myth

Jon — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:09:37 +0000

So many people want to begin a diet or start an exercise program today, but labor under the false pretense that they can’t start because they don’t have what they need yet. I want to start my diet, but I didn’t get to the grocery store, therefore I have to wait. I want to start working out, but I don’t have a gym membership, so I have to wait. I want to start working out, but I don’t have the right equipment yet, so I have to wait. Or, my favorite one, I want to begin an exercise program, but I have to wait until I have the time. None of these things are true. They seem like such insurmountable hurdles only because the people who subscribe to them are looking for excuses. They somehow believe that if the excuse is good enough, then they are, well, excused. That they are off the hook. They tried. Better luck next time. Maybe things will be different – NOT!

The problem is that things will never be different unless you actively do something to make them different. You want to lose weight? Start now. You want to be in better shape? Start now. You want to improve your athletic performance or martial art skill? Start now. Don’t wait. Don’t let those excuses become so entrenched in your psyche that you actually start believing them. Start now.

Goals for 2010

Jon — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:44:49 +0000

Happy New Year!

Welcome to Warrior Fitness in 2010. This year, like every year, is full of potential. It’s a new beginning, another opportunity to change, to reinvent yourself for the better. To make improvements by forging your body physically, challenging yourself mentally, and growing spiritually. There is a sense of excitement at all the possibilities that lay before us.

How will you change yourself this year? What goals have you set? What do you want to accomplish in your training and in your life? Whether the goal is to improve your fitness levels for martial arts training, to enhance your performance in those martial arts, to lose weight, to gain muscle, to improve mobility and increase flexibility, or just to be a healthier, more fit you, Warrior Fitness can help you achieve all these goals and more.

January is the busiest time of the year for gyms and health clubs, but guess what? In February, those places are ghost towns. How do all those well meaning goals become unsustainable for so many, so quickly? How can you assure yourself that your motivation won’t quit, that your will won’t weaken? One way to do this is to have someone else hold you accountable for your goal setting, progress, and accomplishment. Motivation is a funny thing. When we think no one is watching, it becomes much easier to slack off or make an excuse to ourselves as to why we can’t workout today, or why those cookies are better for us than that salad. When you must hold yourself accountable to a third party, it’s much harder to stray from the goals you have set.

Warrior Fitness offers personal training services, both in person and online, to help you hold yourself accountable. Together, we will set goals, create a step-by-step plan to meet them, and work toward achieving them. If you would like more information, or want to get started now, please email me here. and reinvent yourself this year!