Did your Dallas Personal Trainer get you ready for July 4th?One of the most common goals among Dallas personal training clients is to be fit by July 4th.
Often new Dallas clients show up in January and say "I wanna look great by July 4th." This provides a full 6 months for them to get in shape. This is sufficient if two criteria are met:
The best way to find a quality personal trainer in Dallas - or in any other city for that matter - is to look at their track record. If a trainer has a record of getting real results for clients then the chances are they can get results for you too - if you are willing to put in the work. So if you live in Dallas and you are serious about getting results and you are willing to put in the work work necessary, get yourself a quality personal trainer today.
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Should you go all out and then stay perfect forever or else crash and lose all of your progress? Or just be reasonable and aim for sustainable results that allow you to live life and look at feel good too?
My personal preference is for the latter, but ultimately everyone has to make their own decision. When new Dallas personal training clients come in to meet with me and we discuss their goals, I invariably recommend goals that will achieve their desired appearance, performance, and ability goals and yet also allow them to enjoy things they love. Personally I love pizza. And ice cream. And hamburgers. And milkshakes. :) But do I have these everyday? Absolutely not. However, a plan that restricted me from having them at all would be doomed to fail. I would be miserable and being on such a diet would leave me in a constant mental state of deprivation and this would only increase my desire to indulge in these foods and "cheat" on my diet. Such a strategy is a recipe for failure. Instead of such an approach, I prefer the freedom based approach. It goes something like this: I can eat anything I want any time I want. Sounds nice right? If I want ice cream for breakfast then so be it. but interestingly enough, giving yourself freedom actually typically results in better behavior rather than worse behavior. I can have ice cream for breakfast if I want, but because I know it wouldn't make me feel very good, I don't do it. Beyond the absurd ice cream for breakfast example, the reality is really that when you give yourself the freedom to choose, rather than forcing strict rules upon yourself, it is amazing what will happen. You will often find yourself making better and better choices, more and more consistently. This is because you never feel deprived or restricted and thus you are not feeding an unnatural desire for the "forbidden fruits" so to speak. You know that you could eat junk food any time you want, so what's the rush? It becomes easy to say "no I don't feel like eating that junk right now, maybe later." And interestingly enough later often gets postponed for a very very long time as you enjoy your freedom and simultaneously enjoy the results that you are attaining from making good eating choices so consistently. Then your good choices tend to become more and more self reinforcing. It is a beautiful virtuous circle. So, be a real American, choose freedom and enjoy the results it can bring :) Every year gyms flood with new members as well as old members who have dusted off their workout clothes and decided to head back in to get in shape. After a long holiday season of Christmas parties, big Thanksgiving dinners, drinks, late nights, and New Year's celebrations its not uncommon to put on anywhere from 10-15 pounds in a matter of only a couple months.
Shedding that weight fast is a difficult task regardless of who you are and it is all the more difficult if you are not even in shape to begin with. As a result, most people quit trying within a month. the gyms are packed in January and by mid February, the exodus is already beginning as the crowd thins out rapidly, leaving only the faithful few who are year round gym rats. The reality is that motivation typically follows results, so the real key is getting results quickly so that you will have the motivation to stay the course and see your goal all the way to its completion. If you are like the average person, you do not consider yourself to be a fitness expert. That is fine. No one can be an expert at all things at all times. We each have our specialty. You are an expert in your field and as a result, people seek your guidance when they have goals related to your field of expertise. Fitness is no different. If you have fitness goals, seek a fitness expert to guide you in the way to achieve them as quickly and effectively as possible. A quality Dallas personal trainer is the surest way to achieve serious, real, lasting, reliable results. If you want to be motivated in February, then you should insist on getting results in January. If you want to look better than ever by spring break, then you need to make a huge dent in your goal during January. If you don't make progress right out of the gate, your motivation will steadily dwindle until eventually you don't even have enough fire in you to make yourself show up at the gym at all. Sure, paying a personal trainer is more expensive than just joining a gym. But what exactly do you want? Do you want to pay to just go workout or do you want to pay for a legitimate opportunity to achieve serious results. Ultimately you will have to workout hard. That part is unavoidable. But by paying an expert to guide you along the path of efficiency is worth every penny. Nobody joins a gym to say that they go to a gym. They join a gym to get results. Make 2016 be the year that you truly get results by doing it right. Late August and early September every year, the gyms fill back up. People get back from vacation, get their kids settled into school, and then they head back to their personal trainers to hit the gym again.
Summer vacation is over and its time to get back to work. Between the time school starts and Thanksgiving, there is almost 3 months. In 3 months with a good personal trainer, if you work hard, you can make alot of progress in the gym. This will make it much easier to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner without any guilt or regrets. My clients always ask me if I eat a big Thanksgiving dinner and if I think that its okay to eat a big meal that day. I say "Yes, of course! Enjoy it! We're not training to be monks. Have some good food and enjoy some relaxing time with your family as well...there's alot to be thankful for here in the good city of Dallas in the free country of the United States. You have all year to watch your diet. Give yourself a day off and just relax!" Now, all that being said, if you haven't trained hard and eaten right in the meantime, I'm gonna have a hard time telling you to take a day off for Thanksgiving...because you've already been taking a bunch of days off! Work hard for a couple months, get your body in the shape that you want, get your metabolism going fast, and then enjoy the holidays without guilt and regret. If you put on a couple pounds over the holidays, so be it. If you got in shape before hand, and you hit it hard again in January, no harm no foul. Live a little! We train to live, not live to train! Enjoy life, train hard, live with balance. And, of course, get started with a good quality Dallas personal trainer if you haven't already. There's nothing more frustrating than giving something your absolute best effort only to find out that you were doing the wrong thing and consequently will get no results.
Cardio is one of those things for many people. Walk into any gym around the Dallas any day of the week and you'll see dozens of people on the cardio machines pushing themselves hard, straining, giving it their all. Bless their hearts, they are working so hard...but they are not burning an ounce of fat.. After a while they will typically either quit or try hiring a Dallas personal trainer...and hopefully their trainer will know enough to direct them to a wiser approach... Anytime you are pushing your body intensely, carbohydrate is the energy source being used. Not fat. This means that if you are straining yourself working hard on a cardio machine then you are not burning fat, you are burning carbohydrate. (ie you are operating in the anaerobic energy zone rather than the aerobic energy zone). There is nothing inherently evil about the anaerobic energy zone. In fact, its the energy zone that increases your metabolism,. stimulates anti-aging hormones, builds lean muscle, etc, etc. However....and this is a big big however... If you are in the anaerobic energy zone constantly for an extended period of time (more than 1-2 minutes) then you cease to derive the positive benefits mentioned above and instead you begin to elevate your cortisol levels which causes you to accelerate the again process, burn off lean muscle tissue, and exhaust yourself with no actual benefit gained. No fat lost. No muscle gained, No metabolism improvement. Just accelerated aging and extreme fatigue. Its possible that you might have seen a few ultra lean bodybuilders doing cardio for an hour or two straight...nice and slow. Heck they may have just been walking on the treadmill enjoying a movie in fact. You may have wondered how the heck they can get so lean if they're not even pushing themselves. Well, the answer lies right there in the question itself... Its the not pushing themselves that is the key. In order to burn fat during cardio you absolutely must keep your heart rate at a level that is low enough that your body is not induced to enter into the anaerobic energy zone in which carbohydrate becomes the primary energy source instead of fat. We want to burn fat right? Good, then let's burn fat...not carbohydrates. There is plenty of need for anaerobic exercise done in a burst type of fashion...but that's not cardio. to get lean and muscular you need to do
Don't get the two of these backwards. Many people do. they take it easy when they're lifting weight and then they push hard when they're doing cardio. I couldn't come up with a better recipe for staying chubby if you asked me to. If chubby is the goal, follow that plan. If not, follow steps 1 and 2 above. This is an extremely common question and the answer really depends on a variety of factors.
First off, it depends on what your primary fitness goal is. If your current goal is to lose maximum amounts of fat ASAP, then a higher quantity and frequency of cardio can be greatly beneficial if done correctly. On the other hand if your goal is to gain maximum amounts of muscle then you will need to be very cautious about doing too much cardio and causing your body to burn too many calories for it to be able to have the energy and resources available to build new muscle tissue. So, for arguments sake, let's assume that your goal is to lose fat. If that is the case then, frequent cardio is very good thing. In general, doing your cardio for 40-90 minutes is ideal and doing this 1-3 times a day will only increase your progress. Bodybuilders and fitness models have been cutting fat before their competitions and photo shoots using this simple approach for decades and it works like a charm (when performed in conjunction with a good fat loss diet as well of course). On the other hand, not everybody has 40-90 minutes everyday, let alone 40-90 minutes multiple times a day! :) So, the reality is when it comes to doing cardio for the purpose of fat loss, the main focus for most people should be on getting enough cardio, because getting too much is almost impossible for the vast majority of us because of our busy schedules. That being said, the risk of overdoing cardio actually has more to do with doing the cardio incorrectly to begin with, rather than from doing it too frequently. And that is exactly what we'll talk about in our next blog post. So how do you determine which energy source you are in need of?
First and foremost lets address one very important issue: We should never use protein as our energy source. In order for your body to use protein for an energy source, your body has to convert the protein into carbohydrate which is a very inefficient process for creating energy AND it is not particularly healthy. We don't need to go into depth regarding all of that right now. The main point here is that your body needs to use protein for the purpose of repairing healthy tissue like muscle. This is how it will recover from workouts, increase muscle levels, increase metabolism etc. So now for the carbohydrate vs. fat. As we discussed before: Anaerobic exercise is performed using carbohydrate as energy and aerobic exercise is performed using fat as energy. Aerobic exercise is low intensity exercise. This includes walking, sitting, sleeping, watching TV, etc. If you are in shape, it can also include jogging, biking, etc. However if you are out of shape then those more vigorous activities will most likely get your heart rate up to a higher level causing your body to shift into an anaerobic (carbohydrate burning) state. Anaerobic exercise is high intensity exercise. This includes sprinting, weight lifting, jumping, and anything else that is vigorous and causes you to get short of breath. As I mentioned above, many activities that people believe are aerobic can actually be anaerobic if your aerobic system is not in good shape. Many people want to know which one is better (anaerobic or aerobic). There is no "better" between the two. They are both critically important in order to achieve optimum results. The key is learning to eat the proper nutrients for the proper activities. Now that we have gone over these aspects, in my next posting we will go into more details for deciding how to eat. In the past few years High Fat High Protein diets have become very popular and because Everybody seems to want to know when they talk to a Dallas Personal Trainer:
These questions are all misguided by the tendency for people to go to extremes rather than simply being reasonable and moderate. They feel that an extreme goal must require extreme means to achieve it and most magazines and personal trainers only further exacerbate the already confusing situation that people find themselves in when it comes to nutrition and fat loss. The truth is that your body has two primary energy systems:
One runs on carbs and the other runs on fat. Its literally as simple as that. If you try to do anaerobic activity without eating carbs, then it would be like trying to put diesel into a gasoline engine and expecting it to run. It simply won't work. When you learn to think of food as a fuel and learn to let the activity you are participating in determine the most appropriate fuel, the whole world looks different and it is much easier to maintain a high level of energy AND get and stay lean and healthy. This is one of the keys to effective personal training...teaching people how to view food compeltely differently than they ever have In my next entry I will go into more detail regarding how to determine which energy source your body needs for what activities etc. We all get super busy sometimes and weeks may go by without us getting a workout in. Often this is one of the prime reasons a person hires a personal trainer...simple accountability...knowing that someone is there at the gym waiting for them with an appointment.
Truly, if you only have 5 minutes and can simply do 25 bodyweight squats, 25 crunches, and a few pushups at least your body is getting its metabolism spiked and you are stimulating positive fat burning and muscle building hormones. At the end of the day, there is not such thing as "not enough time". You can literally get a workout done in 2 or 3 minutes. Obviously its even better to spend 30 minutes in the gym, but still, 3 minutes in your living room can still get your metabolism going. It may seem like an absurd question to ask if your personal trainer knows how to do crunches but you'd be surprised how few trainers know how to properly do a crunch, much less teach their clients to do them!
We all know those people who tell us what they did in their workout yesterday..."I did 500 crunches....blah blah blah" and then you look at their belly and see a huge gut and wonder, "How is that possible?" The truth is that what most people think of as crunches are not real crunches at all and are not going to get them results at all. If you want precise results, you must use precise methods. It doesn't matter if you did 10,000 crunches if they were all worthless, you're not going to get results, regardless of whether you're paying a Dallas personal trainer or not. What matters is the results you get...and the results you get are a direct consequence of the cumulative of your actions. If you want good results, you should either spend years studying the science of physical training and nutrition OR you should hire a quality Dallas personal trainer who truly knows what he/she is doing so that you can get maximum results out of your time spent in the gym. ...Then you can just let your results speak for themselves rather than having to tell everyone how many hundreds of crunches you did :) |
George Koehl
Dallas Personal Trainer. Passionate to help Dallas get fit. Archives
July 2016
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