Strickland Fitness

Weight Loss Resolution?

Is one of your New Year’s resolutions to lose weight? The best way to conquer this goal is to slowly change your lifestyle. What most people do is immediately go on a diet. Let’s just say the diet works and you reach your ideal weight. What do you do then? Most will fall back to old habits and gain all the weight back. That is why they don’t work in the long run. Diets are just a short term solution. If your resolution is to lose weight, try changing it to lose weight and keep it off.

Losing weight and keeping it off comes from changing your lifestyle. Healthy eating habits, getting plenty of rest, having a consistent cardio and resistance program, and keeping stresses down are all the components of a healthy lifestyle. These are the things that will help you lose weight, keep it off, and live a healthy life for good. You will feel great and you will look great.

How do you successfully change your lifestyle? The answer is to set yourself up for success. Most people use the New Year to try and change everything all at once. This is a very difficult thing to do. The best way is to make small changes over time to give you and your body the time to adapt and implement them into daily life. Make a list of all the things you need to do or change in order to meet your goal. Then start with one. Once this change has become part of your new lifestyle, move to the next one. Move through each change as the previous one becomes normal to you. Over time, all the changes you have made will not feel like changes anymore because they will be part of your lifestyle. Have you ever noticed how gyms get really crowded at the beginning of the year and then taper off to normal crowds by March? This is a perfect example of people trying too much all at once. They give up because they say it’s too hard to do all the things needed to reach their goal. This may not be the fastest way to lose weight, but it will have the longest success.

How to keep it sexy

With the holidays coming and more things taking you away from your normal schedule, now is the time to gear up your workouts and maintain your healthy lifestyle. Here is a list of things you can do to stay fit through the holidays.

1. Put your workout time into your schedule. Just like meetings, if you don't schedule them, it's harder to make them happen.

2. Get a workout partner or trainer. Having someone to keep you accountable makes all the difference.

3. Switch it up. Don't get bored. Look for new routines, exercises, and programs.

4. Make a new short-term goal. Set a small goal to achieve by the end of the year. This will help you to stay on point with your gym time and you will not be stuck like everyone else making a New Year's resolution. You will be ahead of the game.

5. Find some new healthy foods that you haven't tapped into yet. People think healthy food is boring tasteless food. I like Arugala salad with grilled chicken and avocado. Tasty!!!!

6. Start logging your workouts, cardio sessions, and food intake. This will paint a clear picture on how musc you are putting in and how much you are taking out.

7. Take up a sport you have always been thinking about. Join a league or make a weekly game with your friends. This will get you practicing and working on something you are not used to. All while burning some extra calories.

8. Read up on the new findings in the fitness world. Fitness is always evolving and some of the new thing out there will blow your mind away.

9. Change your music. I noticed the other day that the music I listen to while working out has been the same for months. Putting some new tunes in completely energized me.

10. Stop looking in the mirror and focus on the inside. How do you feel? Get good rest, eat healthy, and stay active. It makes all the difference!

You are the Star

One of the things I have been touching on while working with my clients is how they approach each exercise, set, and even each individual rep. In my previous video I talked about turning off the autopilot to maximize your workouts. Well, the next thing you can do to take it to the next level and make each exercise count is to pretend that you are a 10 million dollar athlete filming a commercial for your sponsor. Think as though while you are working out, there are lights and cameras all around you filming your every move. How do you think your workout will go? What will happen is you will push yourself to the max making the workout that much better.

Here is an example: the other day I had a client do a warm-up lap around the track. I could tell that he was just running because that was the goal. While running, his shoulders were slumped, his feet were dragging, and his brain had obviously shut off and he had gone into auto-pilot. I asked him to run the lap again, but this time to think that he was in a commercial as a highly paid pro-athlete. I also told him to run at the same pace. The difference was astounding. He took off at a much faster speed, his shoulders were back with this chest up, his knees were driving up, and he was thinking about what he was doing. When he came back, I asked why he ran so fast. His response was, “I couldn’t slow down.” We used only 5 pound dumbbells for the rest of the workout keeping the “commercial” concept in mind. By the end, he was sweating, exhausted, and feeling awesome. All this with 5 pound dumbbells!

The next time you workout or do cardio, imagine you are at the top of the game!

Bored?

Have you just hit the top of the boredom mountain when it comes to your workout routine? Take a bite out of the conventional workout book and bring fun back into your fitness time! While working with a new client today, I was struck with the fact that there are a lot of people out there that are bored with their routine, do it anyway, and never look forward to going to the gym because they know they will do it again! While training, my client said to me today, “I have never done any of these exercises before. I love it!” And then she continued to say, “This is what I have been looking for. I have been doing the same stuff and I was so bored.” This client went from wanting to train twice a week to four times a week. That’s what I call looking forward to going to the gym and working out!!! Besides mixing up your routine for the purpose of bringing enjoyment back into your regiment, that change will also help you to avoid hitting plateaus; thus, getting you that much closer to hitting your goals. Our bodies are used to being in auto pilot. This means the body going through motion in the most easy and energy efficient way. That’s not what we want our bodies to do when we are working them. We want the body to be under constant demands from start to finish, burning calories, and putting on lean muscle. Search for new ways to work the body. And a final good reason to change it up is because our bodies are made for it. Think about this: Most traditional exercises are very one dimensional. The body however, moves in three dimensions. The best results, both functionally and physically, will come from training it that way. This will help to strengthen support muscles, increase flexibility, and help to reduce the chance of injury. The next time you are doing a lunge for instance, lunge forward (1^st dimension), lunge to the side (2^nd dimension), and then turn and lunge away from your original position (3^rd dimension).