We love new beginnings. Fresh starts. Another chance to get it right. With another new year approaching, it’s resolution time! Because most of us are overweight and underactive, changes to fitness and nutrition habits are very popular resolutions to make. Unfortunately they are also very popular ones to break.

If “lose weight and get fit” is going to be your resolution this year, I have a request for you: Please reconsider. No, I haven’t gone to the dark side. I still believe exercise and healthy eating is the best gift we can each give to ourselves. But I also believe that well-intentioned promises with a very slim chance at success are a bad idea, and that’s what “lose weight and get fit” is. In fact it tops last year’s Time Magazine’s top ten list of broken resolutions. Eat healthier and diet makes it in at number 4.

For anyone who is thinking of lose weight, eat healthy or exercise more as a resolution this year: is it your first time? Or does this resolution get dusted off every year or two? If it’s not your first time, what is different this year? My goal here is not to make you feel bad about your self-improvement goals. In fact I applaud them! So much so that I want you to succeed. But an overhaul of your eating and exercise habits is a big change. The reality is that big change is hard. Little changes, however, are manageable.

Whatever you are considering as a resolution, instead of saying: “On January 1st, I will eat well and exercise regularly”; say this instead: “On January 1st, I will eat well and exercise regularly, and continue to do so for the rest of my life”. Now be honest: Can you even say the words? If not, that’s a powerful sign. Are you feeling doubt? Starting to think about foods you love that you’re not sure you’re willing to give up? That’s okay. In fact it’s quite normal. It’s very important that you be honest with yourself now, as that will pave your path to success later.

Now, let’s reconsider the “eat well and exercise” as a new year’s resolution.

If you are very confident that you can do it and sustain it, then go for it! You probably will succeed. If not, break it down! Pick something small but achievable. For some reason we have a “go big or go home” attitude about new year’s resolutions, which unfortunately lead to going big and then going home.

Here’s the thing:
- A small resolution that you do for a long time becomes a big change.
- A big resolution that you do for a short time becomes a small change.

If you resolve to, say, have dessert half as often, and you stick to it for all of 2012, it will be equivalent to having quit dessert entirely for 6 months. If you resolve to give up dessert entirely, do you think you will make it until the end of June? There are some people who can say “I’m going to stop eating junk food now” and they just stop forever without problems. Odds are, that person is not you. If this is not your first “eat well and exercise” resolution, then that person is definitely not you. Accept that and work with it.

Whatever you chose as a resolution, say it out loud and add “and I will do this for all of 2012″. If you can’t say it out loud, you definitely can’t do it. Break it down until you have a resolution that you can say with confidence that you will sustain for all of 2012.

Don’t be among the 99% who make big resolutions that are lost before March.

Be the 1% who makes a small resolution and turns it into a big change.

I was watching one of my clients doing the “World’s Greatest” stretch as part of their warmup, and I decided to do a little experiment. So I grabbed my flip video and asked him to start over without any instruction. Here is the video:

Then I asked him to take his shoes off and start again; also without any instruction. Read more…

More people these days seem to follow the adage that “abs are made in the kitchen”; yet there still seems to be hope among many that doing more crunches or planks will help cut out some of that abdominal fat.

Researchers at the University of Southern Illinois put it to the test, with a recent research study to determine the effect of abdominal exercise on reducing abdominal fat.

Survey said… Read more…

I love food. I particularly love the trifecta of food: delicious, nutritious and easy to make. I haven’t always done a lot of cooking. Or I should say, I used to be a much lesser cook. I’m not really sure what happened. It’s almost as if I used to think that really delicious meals took hours to cook and required some sort of refined skill. And so I didn’t cook really delicious meals. Instead I stuck with a few very basic meals that took very little effort. They were relatively healthy (back in the day I thought a bowl of pasta with tomato sauce was a healthy meal), and they were definitely easy to make. But they were far from delicious. They lacked…the third heat.

Maybe the relevance of that clip is a stretch…but what can I say? I’m a fan of hilarity. But back on topic…

I’m not sure when I made the discovery that truly delicious (but still nutritious) food can actually made with little effort and little time. But it’s something that can’t be unlearned. And so now I cook delicious and nutritious meals often; but I am far from a slave to the kitchen. In fact most of the meals shown in the photos scattered throughout this article took about 30 minutes to make. That’s 30 minutes fridge to fork (F2F); not 30 minutes once you’ve already cut and measured everything like you see on most cooking shows. Read more…

I’m still not sure why pullups and chinups are so awesome. But they are. I like to do them and so do my clients. Despite the high awesome factor (HAF), it’s actually quite hard to make progress with them.

So how can you improve on them? That depends on where you stand (hang?):
1. Can you do a full pullup (no shame if you can’t!)?
2. Can you do at least 1 but fewer than 5 consecutive full pullups (or chinups)?
3. Can you do at least 5 consecutive full pullups, but still want to be able to do more?
Read more…

Bret Contreras is a smart guy (and a nice one too), so I usually watch or read when he puts out new stuff. Last week, while going through Ben Bruno’s “For Your Viewing Pleasure“, a great weekly collection of fitness videos, I saw Bret’s new video showing a variation of the SL RDL (that’s single-leg Romanian Deadlift) that intrigued me.
Read more…

…you probably have anterior pelvic tilt (APT). That is, your butt probably sticks out a bit. In some cases, the upside may be that it’ll make your butt look great. Although it doesn’t always look good…

Looks aside, for many people, it can cause or contribute to low back pain, either on a regular basis, or while trying to perform ab exercises. Raise your hand if you yourself or any of your clients have complained that they feel planks in their low back more than in their abs. Read more…

I just received an email from a prospective new client who mentioned she wants an FMS (Functional Movement Screen) to see what, if any, imbalances she has and correct them as she’s training to become a firefighter. I love that she’s keen to build her body on a base of sound functional movement before adding strength. I suspect I’m going to really enjoy working with her.

As I was replying, I thought of an email that I had written to another client who decided, after he’d been training with me for a while, that he would like to do the test at some point and wondered if I could help. I took a look at the test and realized that for the most part, the training that he was already doing with me would prepare him very nicely. I wrote a detailed email explaining why I think that.
Read more…

I was at the bike store-coffee shop this morning for an Americano between clients (Cyclelogik has great Americanos – featuring beans from Francescos….mmm…) and was feeling a little snacky. It was almost 1130 and I had another couple of assessments before lunch. So I noticed the snack offerings they had today: a big oatmeal raisin cooking and a protein bar. Not thrilling, but I considered them enough to look at the nutrition numbers for each. The power bar looked decent: less than 250 calories, and it was somewhere in the 3:1 to 4:1 carbohydrate to protein ratio. It has fat, but fat is really not such a big deal – unless there is so much that it increases the calorie content too much. In fact some would call fat essential. And by some, I mean smart people who understand nutrition: The “Essential” in Essential Fatty Acids is not just a marketing thing.
Read more…

Shoulder packing. Yes, that’s right: shoulder packing. It’s really a thing.

It’s a concept of how we should position our shoulder when doing any sort of lifting with our arms. Now some will say that this is ridiculous – we just move our arms and that’s how they should move. I could get behind that line of thinking. Except for one thing: many of the people that come and train with me don’t actually position their shoulder properly when moving their arms, and then they complain of pain or discomfort in their shoulder or neck when doing exercises like pushups, rows, and planks. But when I help them to position their shoulder properly, they proceed to exercise without pain or discomfort.

That’s pretty convincing for me. Why does this happen? I’d say it’s a fair bet that your computer is the culprit. In fact take a look at your shoulders right now. They’re rounded, aren’t they? Read more…