What's Your Motivation?

After being a personal trainer for over 12 years, I have realized that no matter how good the exercise program I write up and the exercises that I do with clients, that people still don't get all the results that they want. Upon saying that, some might think that the program is flawed or that there is a missing link. What I have found to be the majority of people's problem is a clear lack of motivation. When I say motivation, they will show up and do the things that we need to do in the gym but after they leave the gym something else happens. It's like outside of the gym, the goals that they had set to accomplish physically implode. I blame this on a not so strong motivation.  Motivation is what drives someone to do something. Motivation can be both intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is what comes from within or what people will do without external inducement. People who do things for the interest and enjoyment that accompanies an activity are intrinsically motivated. Malone and Lepper (1987) came up with a synthesis of factors to motivate people intrinsically in which they subdivide the factors into individual factors and interpersonal factors. I will discuss some of these factors and how they pertain to health and fitness. The first factor is challenge. Using this factor, people are best motivated when they are working toward personally meaniful goals which are attained by doing an activity continously with a moderate level of difficulty.  An example of this can be anyone beginning an exercise program or activity which they are not skilled in or accostumed to but as time goes on, they become more acclimated or accostumed to that skill and they need to be challenged with more progressively harder workouts or introduced to a new set of skills.  The second factor is curiosity. Curiosity can be achieved through the senses or cognitively. A good example of this is by having a person to stand on one leg and then tossing them a tennis ball directly to them or towards the outside of the body or lower portion of the body (spatial awareness).  An advanced way of using curiosity is by doing the same exercise above while keeping one eye shut. This challenges the body's spatial awareness even more and stresses the cognitive senses more too. The third factor is control which means that we want control of what happens. This is probably the biggest factor in terms of intrinsic motivation whether you are exercising, working or in life in general. When dealing with the control factor, people have to understand that there is a cause and effect relationship between what they are doing and what happens in real life. An example using health and fitness is eating and drinking too many calories(cause) over a period of time which leads to unhealthy weight gain (effect). I tell my clients and people all the time that if you don't exercise any control or discipline when it comes to eating, you are leaving everything to chance and you will not be able to  successfully manage your weight. The fourth factor is fantasy. Fantasy uses mental images of things and situations that are not actually present to stimulate behavior. A good example of this is to envision how you would look with the added weight off and how much better you would feel and the extra attention that you would receive from people because you have lost the weight. Now lets focus on extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is when you are motivated by tangible rewards or pressures rather than doing things just for fun. An extrinsically motivated person does things because they feel like they have to and really don't enjoy it. I personally believe that more has been made about extrinsic motivation for people exercising than actually enjoying exercise for the sake of exercise. That might also be one of the reasons why a majority of Americans don't exercise now. They haven't found the joy in exercise like a child might find in just playing which is also exercise. Extrinsic motivation will have you believe that it's all about hot bods and hot guys and girls. If you don't want to be hot like that then a person might feel alienated by people in a gym setting. The problem with extrinsic motivation from the "hot bods and hot girls" viewpoint is that it is only very superficial.  To further this example would be when these same people got married (exercised only to attract a mate and then stopped some time afterwards or no longer viewed exercise as being of importance. It was viewed as superficial only). Exercise then becomes an afterthought until years or decades later. I'm not saying that exercise should encompass one's life but it should be a core value for everyone. After all, if you don't have your health, you end up spending your wealth on your health! If you are not motivated by going to a gym, that's not the end of the world. You must find an activity that you like, love, or have fun doing and let working out enhance that activity that you enjoy. That is when you can feel and see the difference that working out has on that activity but also ease in doing normal day to day physical tasks. Vanity is a good extrinsic motivational factor but in the end your true motivation will come from within. So what's your motivation?

INTERVAL TRAINING FOR FASTER RESULTS

Lets face it. How many people have 90 minutes 5-6 times a week to workout? That is the new guideline for exercise put out by the American College of Sports Medicine. However, this guideline can be whittled down to 60 minutes or less if you exercise at a vigorous intensity versus the 90 minute workout done at a moderate intensity. Intensity can be manipulated by load (weight),  rest periods, sets and volume (reps). Out of the two recommendations for exercise, the former turns out to be better than the latter for two reasons. One when you are exercising at a higher intensity, you will burn more calories than if you were going at a moderate pace. Secondly, you will be pushing yourself beyond what you would normally do. Eventually, as you progress, you will be able to do more work in shorter period of time. It's not how much time that you spend in the gym that matters most but the quality and effectiveness of the work that you put in while there. Check out the full article on Interval training.

Regulating Personal Trainers

I've been personal training for 12 years and have never up until now thought about the need for regulation in my industry. I now see why it is a big deal for regulation in my industry. The first reason is due to safety. Anyone can call themselves a personal trainer whether it is someone who is certified to the gym rat who trains 1-2 clients because he or she "looks" in shape and seem to know what they are doing. Also, take into consideration the "trainers" who gave or sold steroids to professional athletes. With the congressional hearings and negative press about personal training over the past 2 years, Congress and some states are trying to regulate our industry. I do agree with regulation for safety and having the actual words "personal trainer" upheld as a legal term like the word dietician. With all the continued education and opportunities to learn new concepts and training modalities, a trainer should know what they are doing when training a client. As a trainer, you should always be looking at and reading on the latest information in exercise science, biomechanics, anatomy, kinesiology, etc to really perfect your craft. Regardless, if you have a degree in any of the aforementioned fields or not, you still have to continously learn and understand as much as you can about the body. 

Squatting A Whole New Perspective

I have been personal training for over 12 years and have been in gyms for over 18 years and have noticed a shift in the way we view exercises. One such exercise is the squat. When I first started working out with weights as a teenager,  a majority of people weren't gung ho on doing squats. The thinking at that time was that you only want to do squats to get bigger, stronger legs and the only people who really seemed to care about that were weightlifters, bodybuilders and athletes. Also, a lot of people didn't do them because there was this false pretense that squats were bad for your knees. Fast forward to the present, now squats are one of the most popular and utilized  functional training exercises that any personal trainer can have their clients do. A lot has to do with these two new viewpoints on squats. One, people in the fitness industry finally realized that "Hey, people squat all day in everyday life activites (i.e. to sit on the toilet, to sit in a chair  and to sit down in a car)"! Also, now fitness people are realizing that from our early predecesors (the hunter-gatherers that we started out as) there weren't any chairs so you were either standing, lying down or squatting. Now putting this all in perspective, you should squat because it is something that you do on a daily basis more than you know.  You don't have to do a ton of weights to get lean, toned legs, you just have to use a variety of different techniques (i.e. sets, rest periods, load and intensity) and different variations of squats to get the results that you want. Here are a few variations of squats.

BODYWEIGHT SQUAT                                                                     PISTOL SQUAT

                             





BARBELL OVERHEAD SQUAT                                                    BULGARIAN SPLIT SQUAT

                                                           

Are Carbohydrates Fattening?

Over the past 10 years, there has been a lot of new diets and information on restricting carbohydrates from your eating regimen.Personally, I never was a proponent of any of these "fad diets" or limited research on carbohydrates being part of the blame for the obseity epidemic that has grasped America. There are a lot of other factors to look at other than carbohydrates, but today, I'll only be addressing the role of carbohydrates inyour eating regimen. The notion that carbohydrates aren't good for you stems from the information that the glycemic index has produced about certain carbohydrates. The glycemic index is theoretically based on how 50 grams (200 calories) of carbohydrate (not counting fiber) in a food will affect blood sugar levels (Nancy Clark's Sports Nutriton Guidebook, 4th ed.pg.107). For example, sugar will have the highest rating supposedly because it causes a rapid spike in blood sugar while lentils will have a very low rating because it causes a more gradual increase in blood sugar levels. The problem with just looking at a particular food on the glycemic index, is that these foods are rarely eaten alone. The other foods will slow up the blood sugar response. For example, a sandwich consisting of white bread, turkey, lettuce, tomato and mustard, won't have such a rapid spike in blood sugar due to the added protein(turkey) and vegetables(lettuce and tomato) helping to slow down the blood sugar spike response time. The caloric intake of this sandwhich is determined by the serving size and the added fat,protein and condiments if any to the meal. Also, you have to remember that the body's main fuel source is carboydrates and not fat or protein. Eating excess protein or fat instead of carbohydrates will not supply your muscles with glycogen to provide your body with all the energy it needs to make it through a workout! Lets take a look at a typical dinner. You have an 8 ounce baked potato with butter, a 10 ounce ribeye steak, a house salad with ranch dressing and a glass of red wine. This looks like a healthy meal except for the butter,ranch dressing, the glass of red wine(alcohol is 9 calories per ounce just like fat regardless if it is wine, liquor, or beer) and all the fat that is in the ribeye steak. So you are going to say that the baked potato is the problem here! I think you obviously know that it is all the fat in the meal that is making this an unhealthy meal. Reduce the fat with leaner cuts of meat, eat more whole grain carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables. However, eating too much carbohydrates will end in weight gain and lead to excess bodyfat.

Finding Credible Information on Supplements

I just finished taking a course on supplements for performance and there are 3 steps that you need to take in order to evaluate a supplement and to see if it is safe to take. The first one is gathering information. You can gather this information from labels, brochures, advertisements and website materials. The second is to find scientific evidence on the supplement that follows a research protocol that seeks to reduce bias and increase objectivity. It is during this process, that you should able to answer these 2 questions regarding a supplement: Is it Safe? Is it Effective? The third way of evaluating a supplement is checking its safety and effectiveness. To check on a supplement's safety and effectiveness, you can visit some of these websites, the National Library of Medicine's searchable database ( http://nccam.nih.gov/ ), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/. An even better site than the National Library of Medicine is the CAM medline website that focuses only on articles that are related to complementary and alternative therapies, including dietary supplements. The address is http://nccam.nih.gov/. You can also check out Quackwatch, which is a nonprofit corporation whose purpose is to combat health related frauds, myths, fads and fallacies. Their website is http://www.quackwatch.com/. The last website comes from Supplement Watch, Inc which is a self  funded privately held corporation consisting of a small group of scientists, physiologists, nutritionists and other health professionals dedicated to educating people about the pros and cons of dietary supplementation. Their website is http://www.supplementwatch.com/.

The Gyms of The Future

The biggest thing to hit the fitness industry since the aerobics and bodybuilding craze is functional training. Gyms have evolved from makeshift equipment and grimy settings to country clubs and  more commercialized settings. As gyms became more suited to the needs of the general public, they have gravitated away from  what brought them their in the first place which was gymnastics and bodybuilding. As machines became more prevalent, one would see less dumbbells, power racks, power platforms and bumper weights unless you went to a powerlifting or hardcore bodybuilding gym. Fast forward to the present moment and you will see an even bigger trend in which more and more gyms are resorting back to the powerlifting, bodybuilding and functional strength training format. I know some of you are saying bodybuilding can't be included in this format. Yes, it can and should. Bodybuilders have been doing squats, pull ups, dips, and feats of strength since its inception which by today's fitness nomenclature is very functional based. Here is a picture of a gym without all the machines. This type of gym is what is needed more nowadays than ever.

 We sit too much and move less and the current model of gyms with a ton of machines are only reinforcing  those bad habits even more. The newer gyms now being constructed are adding more functional training equipment and less machines as we resort back to fitness in its primal glory.

How To Motivate Yourself In the Gym

I had a conversation with a client earlier this morning and she said that out of all the diets and exercise infomercials, all of those things are just gimmicks to get you to do something that you don't necessarily want to do or allow you to do the same things that you have been doing all along. In other words, if you are looking for an easy way to exercise, there are a ton of machines out there where all you have to do is sit down and roll or move side to side to get in shape. That's what the pitch is anyway and the great thing is you get to melt away fat doing nothing! If you believe that then I have some farmland in a galaxy far away to sell you. As far as diets go, you can choose from an array of diets that will allow you to eat what you want, drink certain concoctions, eat protein this or fat that, etc. Some of these diets will work for some individuals and some won't. At the end of the day, you know if you haven't eaten a fair share of fruits and vegetables, enough protein and more than enough fat. The point out of all of this is that we all know to a certain degree of what we should be doing as far as eating and exercise, yet we don't do it. It doesn't take rocket science to establish this for most people. If you say that you have to or should do something, you won't do it. You don't have to do anything that's your choice. Your choices have gotten you to where you are now, whether good or bad. Even the choices you have made where you say to yourself, "I don't want or like to do this but I have to anyway!" You don't have to do anything! I repeat you don't have to do anything! If everything you say to yourself that you "have to" do more than likely you won't do it because you don't want to do it anyway and you don't feel motivated or excited about doing it. Change the words around to "I chose to" and you will feel more empowered to do something and more than likely you will do it. If you take small baby steps toward your goals, (1) you will feel better and more empowered, (2) those baby steps will lead to bigger and better things and (3) you will have become a better person along the way. It's not the end destination but the journey there that means more. So next time you are not thinking about going to the gym because you are dreading "having to" workout, change that to "I chose" to workout to feel better and want to so that I can maintain my healthy lifestyle.

Adding Cardio to the Strength Training Workout

I have been doing short intense burst of cardio during the my workouts since I have begun my power phase of training. I usually do something after each circuit of exercises. It can either be jumping rope for a minute, sprinting for 15-30 seconds, riding a stationary bike as fast as I can for a mile or rowing 500m as fast as possible. Traditionally, I would do cardio at the end of a workout so as not to be so tired while I was weight training. I have also done cardio first and then gone into weight training. I really think that the intensity of the cardio session along with what exercise phase you are in (muscle endurance, hypertrophy, strength, power and power endurance) dictates how you will perform in the weight room before and after a cardio session. Since I really don't want to break up my day and do a cardio or weight session first and then come back later in the day to do the other one I didn't do first in the morning. How many of you have done this before or are currently trying this and how do you feel? Have you seen a vast improvement in your cardiovascular conditioning? Mild or None at all?