This is the start to succeeding with body transformation; food shopping, scheduling workouts and getting clear with your purpose.
Mindset
Desire
Why are you spending your hard-earned money to be a part of this program?
Strength training, mobility work, cardio/conditioning isn’t just a walk in the park… which means you need a really good reason to tell your mind and body why you’re making it eat different foods and push through these workouts.
When life gets busy and you have things that make you busy, you’re going to want that “why” to actually make sure you follow through with things.
“Those who have a ‘why’ can bear with almost any ‘how.”
– V Frankl (Holocaust Survivor, Author “A Man’s Search For Meaning“)
You will likely have moments that will cause you to question your dedication. This means you need to put time and energy in today to write out specifically why you’re doing this.
This is the reason that you’ll lean on when tough decisions need to be made when life throws curveballs in your schedule and/or Ben and Jerry’s start selling their pints for $1.
- Are you doing this because you want to buck the trend of unhealthy lifestyles and early deaths in your family?
- Are you doing this because you want to look in the mirror and be proud with what you see?
- Are you doing this because you want to set a good example for your children so they grow up healthy and happy too?
- Are you doing this because you want a better life for yourself, and you aren’t doing a lot of the things you want to?
Whatever the reason, you need to make it personal to you and your life.
Go Deep With 5 Why’s.
Here’s what I mean by this:
When a lot of us ask ourselves why, we don’t go deep enough to the real reason.
We’ll start at the “First Why” which is usually something like “I know I should eat better…” or “I know I shouldn’t be this overweight…”
But here’s a news flash we all already know: No one gets in shape because they “should.” No one loses weight because it’s “the healthy thing to do.”
It takes something much deeper to really motivate and drive us.
Ask yourself “Why?” again to dig in a little deeper. Maybe you’ll say, “Okay the real reason is I’m always so tired and I want more energy” or “I want to be able to walk up stairs or play with my kids without losing my breath.”
Now, we are starting to get somewhere. These aren’t wrong and I’m sure for many they can be motivating. But I’m suggesting that you can go even deeper if you really dig down.
Ask yourself “Why?” again. And again. And again. By the time we’re at the 4th or 5th “Why”, we’re usually getting to where our real motivation lies.
Here’s some specific, personal and deep examples that I’ve received:
- “Every day I wake up in the mirror and am depressed at the physical and mental shape of the person I see. It sets my day up with a bad attitude from the first few moments and I’m sick and tired of it!”
- “I want to be able to get intimate with my [husband/wife] without feeling tired and/or disgusting. I want them to be attracted not only to my personality, but my body and my confidence as well!”
- “I don’t want my kids growing up having poor fitness and eating habits modeled after me. And hell, I want to be able to see them get married – and not only have energy to play with them, but play with my grandkids too!”
Again, these are just examples of people who have dug deeper than the traditional “Everybody knows it’s good to be more fit.”
Dig deep down.
Be honest and write out the real reason that drives you in this program.
MOtivation
Is it true that if we’re not happy with how we look and feel, it’s because we lack motivation?
One of my mentors said it best:
Exercise and eating well is ambivalent. Some days you feel like doing it… and you do. Other days you don’t feel like doing it… and you don’t.
I think the real problem lies in the fact that [people] think the feeling should drive their action.
But you might wonder: If I sometimes feel “hell no”… is there something wrong with me? Of course not. Join the club.
Eventually you must learn to dissociate feeling from action.
You must go to the gym, or eat your vegetables, even if you’re downright screaming “AW HELL NO!!” like Chris Rock.
For the first little while, this is confusing. Dissociating a long-held belief system (hell yes = go to the gym, hell no = don’t go to the gym) is tough and probably feels weird.
“Not feeling like going to the gym” — or “feeling like” doing anything else important — is irrelevant. You just go anyway, and get started.
Once you get started, it’s amazingly easy to finish.
And once you finish, you feel good about what you just did. And that makes it easier to go next time. And so on…
You won’t always feel the “hell yes” — in fact, you might feel that only rarely. You will sometimes feel the “hell no” — in fact, a lot more often than you think you should. If you feel “hell no” it’s OK — it’s totally normal and nothing is wrong with you.Regardless of whether you feel “hell yes” or “hell no” the only response is to go to the gym or eat the right food anyway.
Regardless of how you initially feel about it, starting the right action makes it easy to finish it. And once you overrule your “hell no”, it gets easier to do it the next time.
Dr. John Berardi
Exercise/Recovery
Warmup/Cooldown
A proper warm-up is all about getting your body ready for the workout to come. In large part, that means your joints and connective tissue. A good warm-up will start to get these “loose” and lubricated. Also, getting some blood into the area is a prime way to prevent injury.
Click and save the following link so you have access to the TF warm-up and cool-down routines.
https://transformations.fitness/member/warmup
Strength Training
Your semi-private workouts are structured around some general strength training principles.
One of them is called Progressive Overload.
This means that each time you come in to train, I’ll be adjusting a variable (i.e., exercises, sets, reps, weight, rest time, tempo, etc.) to make the workout a bit harder than the previous session. This is to challenge the body beyond what it’s adapted to. Doing this increasing the metabolic demand on the body, thus more calories burned.
Good movement is another way to think about your progress.
Whether your goal is to get bigger or smaller, to get stronger or faster, or just to feel better and more energetic with less pain, how and how well your body moves matters as much as (or more than) how much it moves. Especially over the long term.
Our goals: Easy, effortless, efficient, effective.
We often focus on making things harder, like having a tough workout or a long run.
When it comes to your TF workouts, I want you to see if you can make things easier and more effortless over time. More efficient and effective. I want you to focus on these hard-to-quantify aspects of your movement. In other words, movement quality.
Good-quality movement means:
- You can do more of the activities you enjoy — whether that’s a sport or daily-life activities.
- You can do those activities feeling great — less pain, fewer limitations, more confidence and better recovery.
- You have the foundation you need to add quantity in the form of more weight and more challenging workouts.
The goal is for the changes you make to eventually feel easy, natural, and automatic.
To sum up your strength training sessions, we’ll be focusing on slowly progressing your sets, repetitions, weights and time throughout the weeks with a big emphasis on movement quality.
Additional workouts
I live by the credo that out bodies are meant to move daily. This doesn’t mean that we have to be in the gym throwing weights around everyday. Movement can be anything that elevates the heart rate.
Bodyweight Circuits
Using strictly your bodyweight, you can get a nearly complete training session with almost no equipment. (With the simple addition of suspension straps or resistance bands, you can truly train your back, which is almost the only limitation when doing bodyweight training.)
You could do a bodyweight workout at-home, in a hotel while traveling or in the gym. It’s a great stimulus for greater caloric burn and improved endurance. Not only that, but it’s good complement to just about any training program.
Do the bodyweight training routines (in the link below) a couple times per week.
https://transformations.fitness/member/workouts
Cardio/Active Recovery
The truth is, cardio is best used as your ace in the hole once you’ve dialed in your training and eating.
Low intensity cardio is a great way to increase the number of calories you burn without increasing stress and creating further cortisol response. While strength training should always be your main form of activity when trying to lose body fat, it also creates a ton of stress on your body, which you then have to recover from.
Low intensity cardio is great for recovery via some of the following physiological benefits. It helps promote more blood flow, which in turn helps reduce inflammation and soreness; improves cardiovascular function along with mitochondrial, and cellular health; and reduces stress and cortisol levels.
Add in about 120 minutes of low intensity cardio each week. It’s best to break this up throughout the week.
Putting It All Together
Here’s a weekly breakdown of an example training schedule to follow:
| Mon. | Strength Training A | 60 min |
| Tues. | Cardio | 45 min |
| Wed. | Strength Training B | 60 min |
| Thurs. | Home Bodyweight Workout A + Cardio | 30 min + 15 min |
| Fri. | Cardio | 45 min |
| Sat. | Home Bodyweight Workout B + Cardio | 30 min + 15 min |
| Sun. | Rest | – |
Bonus Training Tip
One of the main factors that keeps people from regularly exercising is not setting aside time for it on their calendar. Exercise becomes one of those things that they’ll get to, if they have time for it. But, of course, they never do, because something else always comes up.
If you want time to exercise, you have to make time for it.
And the best way to do that is to schedule your workouts on your calendar and treat them like doctor’s appointments. Just as you’d tell someone you were busy if they wanted to do something at the same time you were scheduled to see a doc, you’re going to inform people you’re busy when they ask you to do something during your workout “appointment.”
Nutrition
Food Shopping
It’s not just about eating less all the time. It’s also about WHAT types of food, WHEN we’re eating, HOW we’re cooking, etc. There are so many variables to eating well. Although, we’re missing a step that precedes all of this.
We have to buy the food first.
Here are the key points when food shopping:
- Prioritize local produce.
- Buy prepared foods, sauces, dressing, et cetera that contains whole food ingredients. (Avoid the chemicals and ingredients that aren’t recognizable.)
- Grass-fed/finished red meat is, arguably, the most nutrient-dense food available. Great bang-for-your-buck.
Check out the attachment below for your downloadable shopping guide with lots more info.
Kitchen Clean-out
This is key since our environment can play a big factor in our fitness success. There’s some unwritten nutrition law that states, if a food is within our premise, at some point, it will be eaten. Let’s set up your environment appropriately.
Identify and categorize the food in your house.
- RED: These are foods that make you feel sick or trigger you to eat uncontrollably. These are foods you usually already know are not good to have around. Remove these from your house now.
- YELLOW: These are foods that are sometimes okay and sometimes not okay. Maybe they are foods that you can eat out with friends, but when left home alone with them you lose control. Have these foods occasionally and make them inconvenient to access. This makes you really think twice about having the food.
- GREEN: These are foods that make you feel good and move you toward your goal. You feel in control. These are fruits, vegetables, and lean protein. It’s best to wash, chop, and prep these foods to make them incredibly easy to access and eat.
The key to a successful kitchen clean out is to restock with green light foods. Leaving an empty kitchen can lead to impulsive behaviors like swinging by fast food place or buying junk.
Restock your house with green-light foods.
Expect Success,
Action Steps:
- Write out why you’re doing this. Get raw and honest with yourself; emotion is the turbocharger of change.
- Perform a kitchen clean-out. Identify and throw out all red-light foods, give away or finish the yellow-light foods and stock up and prepare green-light foods. Then send me a photo showing the inside of your “green-light” fridge.
- Watch the Fat Loss Food Shopping video above. Download the food shopping guide below.
- Familiarize yourself with the TF Warmup and Extra BW Workouts.
- Schedule your workouts right now in your calendar for next week.