Regular and Routine are the most important words around exercise.  

A regular exercise routine is an important part of your health, and it may be the largest obstacle between you and your goals. You know that you need to exercise and maybe you do exercise. But is it a regular routine and what should a regular routine look like?

To maintain your long-term health, your body needs to be taken care of regularly. Arbitrarily exercising, albeit better than nothing, isn’t going to do the job. You need a specific plan of action. You need a plan that works. 

To create this plan, let’s focus on the two key words Regular and Routine.

Regular

Your exercise routine needs to be regular, consistent. Exercising a couple days a week isn’t going to do the job. The first step you need to take is to commit to 4 days a week.

Why 4 days?

You should exercise more often than you don’t exercise. It’s pretty difficult to claim you exercise regularly when you take more rest days than active days.

Regular exercise promotes a number of health benefits:

1. Lowers blood pressure
2. Decreases stress
3. Improves mood
4. Boosts energy
5. Maintains a healthy weight
6. Enhances memory and cognitive function
7. Promotes better sleep

But regular exercise also means regular as in commonplace, normal, and nothing special. You probably don’t hear fitness professionals telling you to just do regular exercise routines, mainly because it’s not ‘sexy’ to market normal. Normal sounds boring.

In reality, regular is what you need and regular will out do every exercise modality fad.

Why am I promoting a regular routine?

Because you don’t need all the bells and whistles. In fact, all the extra stuff takes away from the fundamental movements that are proven to get the best results consistently.

Now don’t get me wrong, regular still means personalized to you and your goals. You just don’t need to incorporate every ‘cool looking’ exercise or use the latest and ‘greatest’ equipment. Doing what is regular works best.

Routine

The best exercise routine for you is highly dependent on you and your goals. This is why I interview prospective clients. I want to get to know them and their goals before accepting them into a program. The program, the goal, and the client all need to match.

Without getting into the specifics of various routines for different goals, here are the fundamental rules that routines should follow.

1. Compound Movements: A majority of the exercises should prioritize compounds movements to build the muscle, improve body control and balance, and maximize calories burned. 
2. Progressions: Lifting the same weight over and over will result in a plateau. You need to gradually increase the weight and difficulty of the routine to see further progress.
3. Appropriate Variety: Find the balance between incorporating every exercise you can think of and the basic compound lifts. Variety will stimulate the muscle to improve growth and control, but too much variety will hinder your progress and actually prevent improvement.

However, the most important part of a routine is actually having one and following it.

Most gym-goers use a couple machines at best, avoid the free weight section, jump on the treadmill or bike for the remainder of the workout, and call it a day. This is not a routine or plan that will get continuous results. You may have gotten limited results doing this, but you will plateau.

By creating an actual routine and following it, you will have remarkably greater outcomes and be in control of your progress.

If you haven’t been doing this on your own and you want consistent results, you may want to check out our Small Group Training or Semi-Private Training Program. Register for either one, and we’ll help you find the right fit for you.

Follow these simple rules to eat what you want at social events.  

Social events are a major pitfall of losing weight. Work events, family parties, anniversaries, family trips, and sports gatherings are just a few of the social gatherings people participate in regularly. When planning our health and fitness goals, spending time with other people is a part of our lives that we cannot ignore.

Why?

Because many, if not most, social events have food. Think of how we incorporate food into these events: potlucks, bbq’s, pizza nights, Superbowl snacks, and the list goes on.

We love food and we also love to share it and experience it with others. It’s a fact of life you should accept unless you want to be the person that brings there own food to a party. No judgement if you do, but 99.9% of people don’t do this and won’t do this long term.

So how do you eat at social events and not get fat?

Follow these simple steps:

1 – Portion Control

Eat what you want, but portion control the meal. If you find yourself going back for seconds, stop and ask yourself if you are actually hungry. It’s easy to overeat when you’re enjoying delicious food, but try your best to contain the urge to keep eating. Just because the food is there doesn’t mean you have to eat it.

Portion control is a tried and true method to dial in your food intake. It can be used not only at social events but also while in the comfort of your own home, with your own food, without the party.

2 – More Volume Less Calories

When choosing the foods to fill your plate, still pick the foods you love but make this one small tweak: Fill your plate with higher volume foods. This is going to make a huge difference in the nutritional outcome of your meal. When you eat foods that are higher in volume (aka foods that physically take up a lot of space but are lower in calories), you naturally reduce the number of calories you consume without the sacrifice.

Eating healthier isn’t about sticking to salads for every meal, but about find the right balance of foods that gets results.

3 – Hydrate First

Depending on the party you might have a plethora of different drinks: sodas, lemonade, iced tea, beer, hard liquor, etc. If you enjoy a drink with some flavor, go for it!

But follow this one rule: HYDRATE FIRST.

Before “quenching your thirst,” actually quench your thirst by drinking a couple glasses a water. Drinking your calories is an extremely easy way to gain weight, but you can help curb that outcome by hydrating your body. The only reason we need to drink fluids is to hydrate, so fulfill what the body needs. Then feel free to drink for enjoyment.

When you put what you need in front of what you want, good things happen.

If these tips were helpful in navigating social events, you’ll get a ton of value from our Nutrition Coaching. It’s our nutrition program designed to help you build the body you want with a sustainable way of eating.

The way you build good habits is the same way you build bad habits.

The Best Way To Build Habits For Health

What is the best way to build habits?

Habits have a clear impact on your health. They determine what you eat, how much you sleep, and the amount of exercise you do. Habits help you find shortcuts to completing tasks or solving problems without copious contemplation like brushing your teeth, drinking a cup of coffee, or getting dressed for work. But they aren’t only practices you do consistently, they fundamentally shape who you are down to the neurological network in your brain. Habits are hardwired into you as mental shortcuts. These shortcuts largely influence your daily actions, and those daily actions effect your health. 

This habit to health association makes addressing your habits the best place to start when seeking a specific health outcome. However, most approach the development of habits all wrong. They rely on sheer willpower or the ability to “just do it.” But in the end, this approach will likely fail you. 

Why?

Well you tried to force a habit. 

Build Habits – Good and Bad

Building habits isn’t difficult. In fact, you’re a pro and you just don’t know. (this was my attempt at making a rhyme.) How can I say that? Because you build habits and continue to reinforce them all the time. You’ve been doing this for years and it has worked consistently.

Not convinced?

Consider the bad habits you want to forget. How did you start that habit? What actions have you taken to keep it up? When do you practice it? How does it make you feel? Why do you do it? Why can’t you stop it?

There are reasons you built bad habits, continue to reinforce them, and can’t shake them. Discover those reasons and you’ll have your key to breaking bad habits and building new habits.

The way you build good habits is the same way you build bad habits.  

If your bad habit is drinking soda, I’m sure you didn’t force yourself to drink it consistently by sheer willpower. So don’t take the same approach when developing good habits. Use the method that already works for you. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Change Your Environment

Your bulletproof formula for building habits may not be clear to you at the moment. However, I promise you have one that is working for you and your ENVIRONMENT is a part of it. 

Create a conducive environment for your habits to flourish and you will drastically increase your chances of building habits. The habit building process relies on key levers that make you want to practice them, and your environment is the main lever. It wields the most power to create change.

Consider these examples:

Example 1: You know eating fruit is a good for your health. However, you don’t eat fruits nearly enough. One reason is accessibility. If an apple is in the fridge, in a drawer, pushed to the back, your chances of eating that piece of fruit decline. Now, move that apple to the kitchen counter or next to your car keys and your chances of eating the fruit drastically increases. Next time you leave for work, you take that apple with you. With your environment changed, so did your action.

Example 2: Say your favorite fruit is pineapple. You buy one and put it on the counter like the apple. After a week you realize it’s not getting eaten like the apple. You decide to change your approach by cutting up the pineapple and putting it in the front of the fridge. Within days the pineapple is gone. Why? Because you increased your accessibility to the pineapple by eliminating the preparation step of cutting it.

These examples are focused on how you can change your environment to promote action. The more consistently your environment promotes those actions, the sooner those actions develop the habit you want to achieve. You don’t need to will your way to building habits; you just need to shape your environment to reduce the friction for good habits and increase the friction for habits you want to stop.

If you’re interested in building habits to gain control of your health, register for our Small Group Program.