Around the New Year, The masses start to make "New Year Resolutions" and begin to think about how they can make the next year better. One of the most common "New Year Resolutions" is to get healthy and this leads to a large surplus of people joining gyms. While these new go-getters are certainly well-intentioned, sadly for the majority, the motivation doesn’t last. Quora.com reports that 80% of resolution gym goers will stop attending by the second week of February.
There are lots of reasons, and many of them are specific to the individual, but one overarching reason is that for most people, a gym is simply a place to work out, and that isn’t enough to entice most to make it a regular part of life. People join gyms and become a number and are not provided with direction or even acceptance in some cases. If you stop showing up, no one else notices or cares; and soon, your yourself stop caring, because the space adds no value to your life. After a few weeks, once the fire of the new years resolution fizzles out and the desired results have yet to show up, it’s difficult to drag your butt out of bed at the crack of dawn (or before) to go to a place where you are alone, physically uncomfortable, and nameless to the other bodies sweating next to you.
Here are four reasons why it’s important and in your best interest to join a gym – or enroll your kids in a gym – that is more than just a gym.
1. A gym that is more than a gym helps you train to become better, not just workout…
…and yes, there is a difference, both between working out and training, and a gym and a training center. Any local gym will be a decent fit if you are the type of person that enjoys exercise in itself – the discomfort and the exertion wrapped up into one 60-minute sweat fest. Some people think exercise is fun, and this direct pay-off is sufficient to propel them to create their own discipline and accountability. But for most of us mere mortals, the individual sweat sessions are just not enticing enough. And if you are just hitting the gym with no direction or the latest Pinterest workout in hand, the sessions start to seem disconnected and purposeless, making you question if the discomfort is really worth your time.
That’s why it’s important to join a gym that is, specifically, a training center. Meaning that the institution has a mission statement that hinges on coaches who come alongside you to help you focus and adapt your sessions toward a clearly defined goal.
is the key idea here. We would all laugh if, while we were driving, we saw a man in a field throwing darts in different directions, aiming at nothing. Throwing darts only becomes meaningful and recognizable as a sane activity when there’s a target involved. This illustrates the distinction between working out and training. It’s easy to quit showing up if you’re not sure where you’re aiming. Working out is simply a task; training is a goal-oriented process, spilling over and reaping its benefits into other areas of life.
A great coach helps you identify and define that target, articulate WHY it’s important in your life, and then works with you to create a path for your journey and helps you form tactics to adjust when hardships come about. A training center operates daily with the purpose of helping its clients embrace an improved quality of life, whereas a gym simply exists to make money. In short, a training center cares about YOU, while a gym may not.
2. Such a gym can become a second home
A gym that is a second home is composed of staff and members who create community by fostering and maintaining meaningful relationships. If you join any local gym, chances are, you’ll see the same people a few days per week...You may say hi or introduce yourself....but you’ll never actually get to know them and connect. It is no more to you than space with weights and faces that have no significance.
As a coach on the floor at 5:30 every morning, I relish the opportunity to be the first positive interaction in a client’s day. As Strive coaches, we focus our efforts on staying in tune with every important aspect of our clients’ lives – family events, work changes, surgeries, and victories both inside and outside of the gym.
At most gyms, you’ll walk in and out of the door without anyone acknowledging your presence. Make sure you find a gym that can also be a second home.
3. Community creates accountability
Belonging to a gym that feels like home entices you to make training a habit. Community fosters accountability. Period. When you know you will be missed, you are more likely to go. You are far less likely to skip when you know a coach will be calling or emailing you, checking up to make sure everything is okay if you don’t show up.
Here at Strive Fitness and Performance, your coaches are just as serious about your goals and training as you are. They are consistently positive and relentlessly demanding, and they, along with the clients who have become your friends, will remind you of what you really want even when you don’t feel it. They’ll help you maintain focus when your own vision of your target gets blurred by other life stresses or periods of low motivation.
The truth is, we aren’t wired to be our best on our own. We need accountability where discipline wanes. Join a gym that fills that need.
4. Enrolling your children in such a training center provides them with positive role models
If you want your child to become a more well-rounded athlete, seek out a training center with coaches who are positive role models. Sending your kid to the gym might make them stronger and better at their sport, but being regularly under the guidance of coaches who are relentlessly positive, demanding, as well as caring, will reap a much vaster benefit. Kids adopt the habits and mannerisms of people they look up to, so placing them under the guidance of coaches who are excellent role models is a move that has the power to transform the way they think, see, and conduct themselves on and off the field.
For parents with young girls especially, it’s a great moment when your fourteen year-old daughter comes home from her training session and says, “Mom, I want to be STRONG,” instead of “Mom, how can I look like a Victoria’s Secret model?” Entrusting your female athlete to the care of coaches who emphasize the importance of feeling strong instead of being skinny – both through their coaching and their own habits – has the power to reverse the damaging societal norms associated with female body image.
If you want your child to get stronger, buy them a gym membership. If you want your athlete to become stronger, more inspired, increasingly confident, and a better teammate, entrust them to a training center with coaches who are positive role models.
Contact us Today and set up your FREE Success Session
Committed to your success,
Derek Ledwidge
Weight loss is hard!! Not only are you trying to accomplish something that is not your normal...Often times life gets in the way.
When our clients here at Strive Fitness and Performance become insanely busy, it can be tough to focus on your goals in a healthy, sustainable way, let alone work towards them at all. It’s easy to fall into pitfalls. Here are some helpful tips that you can avoid as you start your weight loss journey.
1. FOCUSING ON WHAT YOU CAN’T EAT
So many people embarking on a weight loss journey focus on what they can’t have. Examples are things like no sugar, no alcohol, no dessert, no bread, no cheese. They restrict everything that they usually have...This often causes the relapse after a couple of days or weeks as they start to crave those foods.
Instead, people should not necessarily worry about eliminating the bad foods, but adding some healthy foods. As you add healthy foods, you will start to eat less of the bad foods.
2. ADOPTING AN ALL-OR-NOTHING ATTITUDE
The all-or-nothing attitude is very similar to the above tip. Too many people who are trying to lose weight develop the all-or-nothing attitude. This way of thinking can be detrimental in the long run. Instead of depriving oneself of foods they love, they should learn how to incorporate them into their diet in a healthier way. For example, love pasta? Instead of adding a creamy high fat sauce, add lots of veggies, grilled shrimp, and toss in olive oil and garlic. Can’t live without bread? Well, you shouldn’t have to. Make a healthy sandwich for lunch on 100 percent whole grain bread with grilled chicken, avocado, lettuce, and tomato.
3. EATING TOO FEW CALORIES
The biggest pitfall I constantly see my clients falling into is the calorie counting trap. Many women come to me struggling to follow a 1,200 calorie per day diet and ask me what would help them to feel more full during the day. My answer is always to eat more! We live in a culture that is so obsessed with calorie counting that oftentimes we are depriving our body of the very nutrients that will actually help us not only to live healthier, but lose more weight.
4. TAKING THE WEEKENDS OFF FROM HEALTHY EATING
You should take the weekends off from your job, not your diet. Sure, you can still have fun and go out to eat on the weekends, but make an effort not to stuff yourself to the brim with food or drink. Getting away from the healthy habits of the week and going the exact opposite way can be very disastrous. A simple weekend day can easily amount to 5,000 calories (beer, pizza, wings etc.).
Simply eating mindfully when you are enjoying good food can be enough to not wreck your hard work during the week. If the weekends are a problem for you, consider eliminating one of the party days
5. Not Having A Plan
Not having a solid, realistic plan is a huge mistake. People should set themselves up for failure by going all in and not having a set plan of action....They just know that they want change. Start off with a few actionable and specific goals for the first week. Once you master those, keep adding on. Before you know it, those action steps will become lifelong healthy habits.
If you need help with organizing your plan feel free to contact us here at Strive Fitness and Performance and we can go over your nutritional breakdown
Isn't it interesting how obsessed we get with losing weight?
Seriously, a LOT of people will start their day happy or sad based entirely on the 3-digit number they see flashing back at them each morning.
But what's even more interesting than our obsession with losing weight is the fact that "weight loss" isn't always the most useful marker of progress. You see, there are a buttload of things that influence your daily & weekly body weight....
🍕 A higher/lower salt intake than normal
😷 Food intolerance's
🙋 Where you are at on your cycle
💦 Hydration levels
💩 You need to good to the bathroom
🍔 Food still in your body
💉 Hormones
💊 Supplements
💪 DOMS from your heavy workout
You know what you don't see on that list? FAT LOSS
Reason being, fat loss doesn't happen over the course of a day or even a week (well, it does "technically", but not in a very noticeable or meaningful way.) Instead, fat loss happens over the course of multiple weeks and months.
So really, it is just a matter of understanding that weight loss and fat loss are not synonymous. Once you realize that, you can start taking steps that will put the power of the scale back in YOUR hands.
✅One way is by taking measurements:
Soooo many things influence your scale weight, which makes it difficult to know if you are making progress. But if you are losing inches, even at the same weight, it is a good sign you are losing fat!
✅ Another tip is to start analyzing your AVERAGE weight over the course of weeks and months.
The bottom line: Don't let your daily and weekly fluctuations in body weight discourage you. Instead focus on fat loss by tracking your measurements, weight averages and progress pictures
Losing weight is hard. We focus solely on the number on our scale (mostly because it is fast an easy to do). That number goes up, it goes down and so does our sanity.
Losing weight it involves spending time at the gym, stopping yourself from eating your favorite foods, and saying “no” to things that make you happy in general and “yes” to things that don’t.
If you’re like most people, you want to see results that justify your hard work. And that result, more often than not, has to do with seeing that number on the scale go steadily down. So you weigh yourself. Even though you know you shouldn’t, you weigh yourself every day because you need a reason to keep going.
Everything is fine, until the unthinkable happens: the scale stops going down. Or, after one “cheat day” you find yourself 8 pounds heavier and you think, “Oh no! Everything I’ve done for the past 2 weeks is for nothing!” Repeat this a few times and before you know it, you’ve given up on working out and you’ve dumped your diet and are back to squat one.
The truth is you were probable doing a great job. You were just overly focused on the wrong indicators. Wanting to lose weight is a great goal, but the scale is just a number. It tells us how much you weigh (water, fat, muscle, bones etc.) not how much fat you have in your body.
Here are some reasons why you should not depend on the scale.
First and foremost…
It’s a safe bet to assume that when people want to lose weight, what they really mean is that they want to lose fat. The problem is, many people use the words “weight loss” and “fat loss” interchangeably, which are two separate concepts.
Losing Weight is not hard– you’ll drop a few pounds if you sit in a sauna for a while. Fat loss is harder to achieve, depends on several factors, and it takes more time than you think to truly lose it. Here are a couple key points about fat loss to consider:
Muscle and water are two other components that make up your weight, and when you lose weight, you can lose some of each. How much of each you lose depends in part on how much fat you have to lose when you start. Overweight people have more to lose than thin people, and will be able to lose weight faster as well.
Many people set fat loss goals for themselves that are unreasonable (see any challenge/product that will get you to lose 30 lbs in 6 weeks). The truth is, without going on an unhealthy near-starvation diet, you can only expect to lose 1-2 pounds of fat per week at best. If you are unsure about whether you are losing weight or fat, contact us for a FREE INBODY ASSESSMENT SCAN
Don’t expect to lose 10 pounds in a week, because even if you do, that weight is not going to be all fat. Losing muscle is not good for your health, and you will want to preserve it as much as you can.
2. You’re retaining water due to your salt intake
Salt (or more accurately, sodium) is everywhere and extremely hard to avoid. It might not surprise you that a single patty cheeseburger contains over 500 mg of sodium (nearly a quarter of the daily recommended levels).
Sodium is linked with water retention, and it is the job of your kidneys to expel unneeded sodium out of your body. Until your kidneys are able to do that, you will temporarily be holding onto extra water.
So, if you were on a diet but flooded your body with more salt than you normally have, you can expect to see a temporary increase in weight. It doesn’t mean that all your hard work is for nothing; it just means that you’re experiencing additional water weight because of the extra sodium in your body.
However, there are other factors other than diet that can lead to fluctuating weight on the scale, including…
3. Your muscle gains are outweighing your fat loss
If you’re lifting weights as part of your strategy to burn fat and lose weight, you’re doing something right! Adding resistance training to your fat/weight loss plan is a great way to protect and preserve muscle loss as you subtract fat from your frame. This is why we focus on changing the body fat % of clients, so we focus on not only losing fat, but also focus on getting our clients stronger.
However, if you’re new to weightlifting and you’re pushing yourself hard, you’re going to see some things on the scale that may surprise you. Your weight might actually not go down; it might go up! Why?
This is because as you are losing fat, you are replacing that weight with muscle. Your weight may not go down, but your body fat percentage will.
There are so many things that can affect your weight, so you should never get into the habit of weighing yourself every day. So if not that, what should you be doing?
As difficult as it sounds, if you are using just a scale to determine your progress, you have to take the averages from your measurements. This will help us determine trends in your weight and will help you go against going all out for some quick fix or to get to a certain number fast in order to win a competition.
Because your weight is made up of many different elements and can fluctuate for so many different reasons, assessing your weight by tracking your body composition is a much better way to determine how you’re meeting your goals.
Don't let your daily and weekly fluctuations in body weight discourage you. It is completely normal and it does NOT reflect fat loss programs. If you diet and exercise properly with enough patience and determination, you will reach your goals.
If you need help reaching your goals, contact us here at Strive Fitness and Performance and we can set up a consultation to figure out the right path for you.
Committed to your success,
Derek Ledwidge
High Intensity Training (HIIT) is top notch for fat loss, there's no doubt about that.
First off, The Afterburn Effect is real (it's part of your daily recovery), but if you’ve ever heard any these myths about The Afterburn Effect, you may have been lied to.
Is it as effective as some claim? Lets talk about it.
It’s not uncommon to hear people blaring on about “burning fat on autopilot for 36 hours” as a result of doing a 20 minute session at home with no equipment.
Pick up any fitness DVD and you’ll see claims of how this crucial training ingredient is the missing link between a regular body and a ripped, lean body.
But the reality of The Afterburn Effect is far different then some sales people will lead to believe.
In fact, it may not even be close.
I’ve seen tons of people greatly exaggerate the EPOC phenomenon and use it as a marketing tool, without any research to back up their claims.
Heck, these are just a few statements I’ve seen over the years:
“You will become a fat incinerating machine for 36 hours following every workout!”
“Our fitness class will boost your after burn effect x5 over any other class!”
“For every 1000 calories you burn with this workout, you’ll go on to burn an additional 500 calories after the session!”
Let’s take a moment to slam our heads on the desk before moving on.
There is a possibility that they are lying to you (if they know it or not).
--> “You will become a fat incinerating machine for 36 hours following every workout!”
Really?
36 hours?
So if I do three workouts in three days, I’ve already added three 36 hour bouts of pure fat burning, right?
So can I take the week off?
That would have unlocked the miracle fat burning system that genuinely allows people to lose weight by doing barely any exercise and not even talking diet.
No.
After a very hard High Intensity Training Session, The Afterburn Effect can last for up to 14 hours maybe (it's pretty much the time after your workout where your body is recovering).
Not 24. Not 36. Not 48.
And sure, you can find research to support anything you want to (search McDonalds is healthier than) but this comes back to common sense.
--> “Our fitness class will boost your afterburn effect x5 over any other class!”
This one could be more pure marketing hype?
They are merely trying to say our class is better than their class. And there’s nothing wrong with more people offering a service to help people accomplish their goals (since as a whole, us fitness professionals are failing, we need all the help we can get), but it shouldn’t be done by confusing the market with more fancy marketing terms.....
It doesn’t matter where you do it.
It doesn’t matter what equipment you use to do it.
It doesn’t matter whose name is on the door of the building.
Providing you are Training to you Maximum effort , you will see results.
--> “For every 1000 calories you burn with this workout, you’ll go on to burn an additional 500 calories after the session (you are going to burn calories no matter what by being alive)!”
This is not so much marketing hype.
Maybe just a totally incorrect statement?
That would give you a 50% rate of EPOC – a figure unheard of in any study on high intensity interval training. Ever.
In fact, review studies covering the full body of research on High Intensity Training report The Afterburn Effect to typically fall between a 6% – 15% increase in EPOC.
Not 50%.
Quite frankly, if you burned as many calories as some of these people were suggesting, you’d prob be dead.
The afterburn effect is 100% real.
And it sure is useful.
But it is not, and never will be, the missing link between doing 20 minutes of exercise per day and getting ripped.
It’s not the “secret fat loss formula” that many make it out to be.
If you are Training Hard – whether it is outside, in a gym, or at home – you still need to Train Hard and you still need to Keep Your Food Tight in order to Lose Fat.
That said, those 6% – 15% boosts in fat burning activity following each session might not sound like much after they were previously hyped as 50% spikes, but they sure do add up over the course of a couple of solid months of consistent training!
Instead of the quick fix it’s often billed as, The Afterburn Effect should be a long-term concept.
And the stronger you become over time, the faster your metabolism will be in general and the more fat you will burn as a result
What can we take away from this?--> The harder you train (to your Max, not what the treadmill says, but what your body tells you), the better your fat loss will be in the long term.
Committed to your success,
Derek Ledwidge
