I am going to keep this short today and let my good friend BJ Gaddour give you a great piece of advice on fat loss for the busy professional!

 
In fact, I just got some great news today that one of the Be Force Fit! Boot Camp participants and busy CEO lost 15lbs over the last 8 weeks, and he took a week of vacation! More on that next week…

You can find out about BJ’s awesome fat blasting workout soundtracks at Workout Muse.

This past weekend as many of you know Wil and I traveled to Louisville, Ky to meet with some of the best fitness professionals and strength and conditioning coaches in the world.  The event was the  IYCA Summit and it was hands down one, if not the best, fitness conferences that I have ever had the pleasure of attending.  The IYCA was created by Brian Grasso to bring the absolute best means and methods of exercise, fitness, nutrition, strength, conditiong, and agility.  The list of what Brian has done for the youth training world is endless.  

We never announced that we were the first certified Youth Fitness Specialists in the area.  We haven’t announced much of our realtionship with the IYCA, but we feel it is the right time.  We are truly passionate about helping the local athletes and youth succeed in life by means of fitness.  We do a lot more for our young athletes than build better bodies and improve performance.  Our mission is to create a culture of excellence in all aspects of their lives. 

To further develop this culutre of excellence we are incorporating more rules into the training and building a great support system for all of our young athletes.   We are going to be requiring all parents and athletes sign a code of excellence.  This will outline their committment to the program and to themselves.  We are also transitioing to a more structured group training setting.  It is important for us to be able to create this community within the athletes training times and also have structure to give them the best results.  

What did Wil and I take away from this conference:

• Training young athletes is our best means of helping to character in our youth.
• Some of the brightest fitness professionals work with our youth.
• Kids need structure and discipline to thrive.
• Kids need to play more, even our older kids.
• We are ahead of the industry by being involved with the IYCA!

If you have a young athlete in the family that would benefit from participating in a program to develop their fitness, strength, conditioning, agility, and, most importantly their character Force Fitness and Performance is the perfect place for them.

Please leave a comment to let us know what you think about training young athletes.

If you want to get a young athlete that you care about into one of our programs please contact us today!

When it comes to reaching your goals one of the biggest keys to success is establishing an action plan.  You have to understand and be fully prepared to overcome the obstacles that you will need to battle on your path to success. 

One of the biggest hurdles with fat loss and fitness related goals is planning your nutrition and the foods you should eat.  Not only that, but also the fact that you don’t know how to prepare these foods so that you don’t hate eating them.

There are a lot of plans available for fat loss that you can get from a million different sources.  You can get low carb, low fat, South Beach, Atkins, Weight Watchers.  They have all worked for people at one point in time or another.  Most people can’t stay on these plans forever and have a hard time sticking to them over the long haul.  I have said it once before and I will say it again: fat loss is simple but it is not easy.

We have found a way to make it very easy for you to reach your goals.  We can’t promise that this will help you overcome every obstacle you will encounter, but we can promise that it will help tremendously. 

We have paired up with a great nutritionist, Jayson Hunter, to bring you 90 days of fat burning meal plans a recipes!  You will get every single meal for 90 days based on Jayson’s Carb Rotation Diet and great tasting recipes to go along with this meal plan.  

Go to Force Fat Loss Made Easy to see all the details!

Let me know if you have any questions!

We often choose to reward ourselves for accomplishing a goal.  This is a great idea, but could it be sabotaging your results?  

Too often we reward ourselves for mediocre accomplishments and we reward ourselves like kings!  Kids now get first place ribbons for everything, even if they don’t get first place.  People reward themselves for being pretty good on their nutrition plan for the week.  Most people will find a way to reward themselves for just about anything.  

Why?

It makes us feel good.  I am not sure about you, but I get really excited when I think about getting a reward.  We compete for prizes, you work harder if you get something, and you will go to great extremes to win.  Well, at least an uber competitive person like myself will go to extremes.  

During a conversation with my mom, who has lost over 7lbs in the last few weeks (Way to go Mom!) we got to talking about how she was rewarding herself.  She came to the conclusion that she was rewarding herself with junk food for accomplishing a goal.  She was essentially sabotaging her weight loss by reinforcing good habits with unhealthy rewards.  Together we came up with the idea of rewarding herself with something positive that will help her with her goals.  For one, she recently bought an interval timer to help her with her workouts.  She spent about $20, less than the price of a meal out with the family, and now is having even better workouts and is making better progress than she has had in months.  She also has rewarded herself with new clothes that fit better, a foam roller, and workout clothes.  All of these things help her to realize her goals, motivate her, and will allow her to succeed without forcing her to take one step back after taking a few forward.

I am personally guilty of this as well.  I am notorious for hitting a fat loss mark and then letting myself go crazy for a day or so.  The results never vary!  I will gain a few pounds back and have to work twice as hard to get back to the start point.  

I have seen several people literally wipe away a week or more of hard work with one “good weekend” of cheating or “rewarding.”  This is frustrating for a coach and for you.  If you feel the need to cheat pick one meal, set aside one hour, or have just a little bit of what you need to keep you sane and get right back on track.

Just  a little food for thought.

Figure out a healthy, positive reward for reaching landmarks on your way to your final goal and drastically reduce the time it will take you to reach your goals.

Leave a comment and let us know what you think: do you need to add cheat meals as a reward?

If you want to know what we do at Force Fitness to maximize results when you are short on time go over to the Prograde Blog and read our recent article on fat loss for busy people.

Click here to go to read the article: http://www.getprograde.com/blog/fitness/maximize-your-metabolism-in-minimum-time/

Congratulations are in store for our Client of the Week Eric Powell.  Eric lost 6 lbs in one week using a new nutrition plan we are testing at Force Fitness and has broke through a huge barrier.  Eric is one of the hardest working clients we have the pleasure of working with and he certainly deserves every bit of credit for making such a huge leap in progress.  I can’t wait to see where Eric goes from here.

It’s probably not what you think, although I hear that doing that can also burn a few calories.  

At Force Fitness we have come with a quick workout for you to do with your significant other, lover, friend, or just someone off the street if you are a people person.  We hope that this quick interval workout will help you burn off some of that fancy dinner and chocolates!

To honor Valentine’s day and know that all the boot campers love tabata days we have planned this workout around the tabata protocol, basically 20 seconds of  intense work  followed by 10 seconds of rest for 4 minutes.  

Do each of these exercises for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds, move to the next exercise.  Go through each exercise twice.  You should then help your partner with their exercises. You can each do this circuit up to 4 times.

Exercise #1- Partner Resisted Plank- Have your partner lean their weight on your upper back/shoulders area to make the plan harder.  They can lean all of their weight on you or simply apply pressure depending on your strength level.  This one can hurt so good.

Exercise #2- Partner Press- While lying on your back with your feet flat on the ground and knees bent at a 90 degree angle, place your hands and arms straight out in front of you reaching to the ceiling.  Now, have your partner place their hands in yours and apply some of their weight to your hands.  You will then proceed to bench press their weight.  They can apply all of their weight by leaning on to your outstretched arms or take away some weight.  

Exercise #3- Partner assisted single leg squats- Hold hands facing each other.  (awwww, everyone will love it ) As your partner anchors/assists you alternate performing single leg squats as your hold your partners hands.

Exercise #4- Partner Row-  This requires you to go between the legs of your partner (no, no not like that!).  You will have your partner stand over the top of you and hold out their hands.  Grab their hands and pull yourself up as if you are doing a horizontal or inverted row.  If you have trouble with this one simply angle yourself out in front of the partner.  This will prove to be the most challenging exercise.

Try this crazy lovers exercises out on Valentines Day for a great workout.  

Don’t forget to finish off the workout with some stretching, a big hug and a big, wet kiss!

Look for a video of some of the exercises soon!

I received and email the other day from strength training expert Alwyn Cosgrove.  This email was asking if you were 5% closer to your goals for 2009.  We are over 5% of the way done with the year and now we are closer to 8%.  

This really got me thinking!  How often do you keep putting off your goals and saying I will start next week?  How often do start a goal and get sidetracked after just a few weeks?

There is no reason to panic if you aren’t a little bit closer to your goals, just work a bit harder and catch up slowly.  It isn’t too late to start making steady progress to being leaner, more athletic, more fit, stronger, faster or whatever your goal might be for 2009.

I want you to take a good hard look at where you are at in relation to your goals and ask if you are at least 8% of the way there.  

If you are not on pace to complete your goals what can you do to catch back up?  Do you need to write down your food in a food log, do you need to schedule in more workouts? 

Take a little time today and figure out how you are going to use the rest of 2009 to be the best person that you can be!  

I know that I personally wanted to make sure that I got in at least 5 workouts a week.  So far I have done exactly that and most weeks I actually get in six.  You might think this is easy for a fitness professional, but I can assure you that it is not! After training numerous clients, handling office work and doing things that every other person has to do in everyday life it leaves very little time for workouts.  I adjusted accordingly and figured out a way to get in 5-6 30-45 minute workouts each week.  

These workouts are focused on large, compound movements that force me to use as much muscle as possible and are fast paced to keep my metablism running in high gear.  The results so far have been great.  I feel better, I am stronger, and I am staying lean despite being busy.

It is way too easy to be lazy and not do the things needed to meet your goals, but I assure you that if you try hard enough you can come up with a great plan to fit your lifestyle and still look great!   If you need help with planning out your program, that is what Force Fitness is for  

 P.S. Don’t forget to BE FORCE FIT!