8 Questions to Help Guide Your Fitness Development

Many are told that the best way to begin their fitness journey is to begin with a personal trainer. Like anything, not all personal trainers are built equally. What’s more important is how the personal trainer thinks about addressing the goals you want to achieve.

Based on my experience working with fitness clients for the past five years and more, people’s goals with fitness are most commonly:

• Improve body composition (look better naked or more often, in a bathing suit)

• Improve self confidence

• Overcome an injury

With the last of the above goals, that is more readily dealt with by a physical therapist who is open to strength training once the injury recovers. For the other two areas, there are a handful of questions that will quickly get to an understanding of what to include in your personal training regimen or if it’s just as good to jump into a group class that you’re excited about continuing wit a lot of frequency and consistency such as CrossFit, spinning, yoga, or other boutique fitness classes that provide some instruction and method of progression.

1. As a kid, did you do martial arts, gymnastics, or dance?

This question is meant to help understand how quickly you can learn something new. If you learned how to use your body as a kid, your “body awareness” is high and you can adapt to instruction easily. People without this background could also learn quickly, but this is often associated with a good ability to understand and apply instructions quickly.

2. Do you struggle with self confidence?

Embarking on a fitness journey is as much mental as it is physical. If you are not certain of your abilities or judge your worth by what you see in the mirror, it will be important for your training plan to give measurable progress areas so that you can see progress and keep motivated before it shows up on the scale or in the mirror.

3. Can you do a pistol (squat on one leg)?

4. Can you hold an L-sit for 10 seconds & deadlift your body weight?

5. Can you do a squat clean or have experience with Olympic lifting?

6. Can you do a pull-up?

7. Can you run or row 1600m in under 9 minutes?

8. Can you do a overhead squat holding fifteen pounds overhead?

Travel Workout Tips

For better or worse, I’m getting to travel for work more and more these days. Here are a few tips for making the most of your hotel gym away from home.

1. Set a time limit

Decide before you walk in the gym how long you have to work out. It’s easy to wander in circles wondering which of the broken equipment you should avoid or which of the novel equipment you should include in your workout.

2. If there's a pool, you better swim

This is more of a philosophy than making sure you swim. Use the opportunity to work on a weakness. For a lot of people, swimming is a weakness because they just don’t get to do it often. Working on swimming away from home is something to keep in mind, because although it will be difficult to lift heavy or do the workouts you’re used to, by focusing on a weakness you can still make progress.

3. Use the "weird" equipment

Your workout is meant to be fun. Fun often means not having an expectation of what score you’re “supposed” to get. So hop on that recumbent bike, do some bicep curls, jump on that weird Bosu ball thing that’s been sitting there for 10 years. Have fun, and do something weird.

4. On the third day, see the sun

You’re on a trip. See the surroundings. Get outside on a run, or just go for a walk. If you’re on a work trip grinding, most likely you won’t get too much chance to wander. If after 3 days, you haven’t been outside, revise your workout plans to include a run or just bring the dumbbell outside.

5. One more round? One more burpee.

If you don’t know what to do, do a burpee. You can do a burpee in your hotel room without workout gear. You can do a burpee on the sand without equipment. You can do a complicated burpee variation that includes whatever’s around you. Be creative, but don’t make paralyze yourself with choices.

The other side of this is nutrition - ask yourself if you would do a burpee if you had one more drink or one last handful of fries. If you wouldn’t want to do a burpee after one more round, probably a good idea to call it quits. Enjoy yourself, but don’t get out of control.

6. The clock is your competition

It’s hard to stay motivated by yourself. If you don’t know how long a workout should take, time your first round and try to beat it on the next one. Set a goal for every minute or every five minutes. Look at your past results, and try to beat those. The clock can be your friend, if that’s what you need.

7. Athletes warm up, injuries lock up

You’re still an athlete, even though the heaviest weight in the room is 12.5 pounds. Athletes are smart and warm up, no matter what they’re doing. Getting injured using a light weight is still possible, so be smart and still warm up, even though no one’s watching.

8. Save 10% for tomorrow

You made it to the gym. Congrats! But it’s still day 2 of a 4-day trip. You can crank up the intensity if you want to using the steps above, but your overall goal with travel workouts is to maintain your fitness level and return home without a major setback. So save a little bit for tomorrow.

Eating for longevity

So for 21 days, you've suffered through some challenge posts. 

For all the complexity of the nutrition info out there, it really is summed up best by Michael Pollan:

"Eat (real) food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

It's simple to say, and hard to practice.

I've been slacking on the plants part, and even with this challenge, eating plants that aren't starchy or have gluten is difficult. If you can do the above for 3 months straight, then I'd say you can start to worry about other things like measuring and supplementation.

In other words, I'd boil it down to:

1. good food quality (and water)

2. then think about food quantity

3. lastly think about hydration, supplementation and blood testing to refine the above

My main goal was to:

1. avoid added sugar and sweeteners

2. avoid gluten

3. record my food for 21 days

(4. avoid alcohol, although that's pretty much covered by the sugar goal)

Note: I was not trying to stick to a particular macro ratio

The first picture is my "progress". Admittedly, there's not a drastic difference. The day 15 picture shows the biggest difference and came before I had to travel for work for 5 days and made some questionable choices while eating out. 

So what did I learn?

1. Any noticeable change is going to take time. I generally eat this way, going up and down with how strict I am. So to see progress, you're going to have to stick to it -- you're trying to change habits that have built up over years. 21 days is less than 6% of just one year. Patience is key.

2. For the first week, even though I avoided sugar, I was eating a lot of fruit and dried fruit. A sweetener is a sweetener no matter if it's "paleo" or not. Don't be surprised if you're not seeing much progress if you're eating larabars and paleo "donuts" during a challenge.

3. Even on the best week, the amount of fiber I ate was way low. I need to eat more leafy vegetables. A lot more.

4. I really don't see a need to count calories. If you don't eat a lot of dense carbs, it is soooo difficult to over-eat on quality foods. You will be cooking meals and eating celery all damn day.

5. Keep it simple.

6. Limit the decisions you have to make. On day 21 I wanted to quit early. But it was more effort to buy some junk to eat than it was to make a decent meal.

7. Make a goal for what you want your body to be able to do rather than what you want it to look like. I'd love to be able to overhead squat my body weight 10 times, run a 5 minute mile and do 10 muscle-ups. I for sure won't be able to get there if I look like a slob.

8. Have fun with it. Challenge some friends. Host an iron chef meal prep day. Buy a random vegetable you don't know the name of.

9. Surround yourself with supportive people.

10. Figure out what you're living for. If you want to be around for your kids or your career impact, the path to more years to attain that goal isn't lined with donuts and cigarettes. It's probably lined with vegetables (and the occasional slab of bacon).