When faced with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle in life, you really have only 2 options – go forward or go backward. Backward is to quit, to give up, to walk away. Backward is not a viable option unless you don’t mind living with regret. But regret is a pain that does not go away. It haunts you forever. It’s like dying a little bit each day, over and over again for the rest of your life. No thanks. Not for me. Pass. Continue reading
How many people do you know who rarely, if ever, get the results they are seeking from their exercise regimen? You may be one of them! The question is, why don’t you (they) get results? These people may be “exercise nuts” or “gym rats” or even “exer-holics”, or they could just be fascinated with the idea of exercise, but never actually doing any. The four points below summarize what I feel to be the most important keys to progress when it comes to getting results and achieving your health and fitness goals, whatever they may be.
Daily joint mobility is a requirement to keep your progress moving forward. Not only does it provide nutrition and lubrication for every joint in your body, but it also aids in removing waste products and deposits that tend to form over time causing pain. The mobility increases our range of motion and acts as a prehab for enabling us to avoid injuries. Additionally, it is an excellent way to warm-up the body prior to exercise or to get ready for the day first thing in the morning by increasing local blood flow to muscles.
Since every action we do, as in exercise, or don’t do, as in couch sitting, causes an adaptation in our body, movements need to be specifically unloaded to bring us back into balance. Compensatory movements remove tension caused by exercise and leaving us with the beneficial effects. These movements are generally used as a cool down right after exercise or as a low impact recovery workout in and of themselves. The selection of yoga asana (postures) has to be paired with each exercise performed as the complementary functional opposite of the movement to have the maximum desired effect. By effectively integrating compensatory movements into your program, you can accelerate your progress, avoid injury, and keep moving forward.
Incremental progression is what keeps us from doing too much too soon and causing an injury. Often we find that our bravado outweighs our brain when it comes to exercises, especially in the beginning. We tend to want to jump right into the deep end in order to “get results faster”, but often end up injured, exhausted, or both with this approach and are unable to sustain the effort. Health is about the long haul, not the short term effort. If your program is unsustainable then it really has no value nor will it aid you in achieving your goals.
Having a plan is what brings all the prior elements together in cohesive, useable manner. There is a tendency among some people out there to avoid having a program and to simply do the type of exercise they feel like on a particular day. They also change the selection constantly in order to avoid boredom or so they can be “ready for anything”. On the surface, this seems logical, but in reality unpredictable exercise selection simply leads to unpredictable results. That’s no way to make progress.
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!