Want success more than you want to sleep

I find myself reciting the article title a fair bit. There is a tonne of motivational videos on the internet which is where this line comes from. Whilst some have switched off from the day long ago I am writing this article not for me, but to help you. On the other hand, there are some who will work long into the night more than me and these people want success more then they want to sleep. Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about sleeping faster in one of his videos. I found this really funny, but he also talks about working your butt off in that same video.

It doesn’t matter what it is you want to achieve at some point you will have to roll up your sleeves and do some hard work. If it is fitness related most likely it will take more work than you think. But it isn’t the end result where you learn the most and get the benefits. It seems to be the journey where you learn what you can do and endure not the destination. Often you will hear advice given that habits make us what we are or that we are our habits. I think this is largely true. So if you are new to fitness maybe you should focus on creating the habit of exercise. I have talked about goal setting in the past, here. Behavioral goals are very often overlooked, but this is a powerful, subtle goal to set. Setting a behavioral goal to create a habit could see you on the journey to success without you realizing it.

Something you should do is set up behavioral goals to create habits. This will help you become successful easier. You will become your habits. If your habits are exercising, eating healthy and working your butt off for success more than you want to sleep, then the journey will be hard and tiresome but worth it.

A challenge done.

So I wrote about how not only should we set goals but we should set ourselves challenges and get us out of our comfort zone. You can read the article here but in that article I mentioned that my challenge was to swim 1 kilometer (0.65 of a mile). For some of you reading this it is no big deal but for me it was. I considered that it would take at least half a year of swimming to get to the point of swimming 1K. I went to the pool last week, I asked my partner to go with me as she is a great swimmer and I figured I might need someone to save me from drowning. You see I wanted to see how far I could swim in a session much like testing before starting an exercise program. Well it turns out that in one session I hit my challenge I set for myself. Yep I managed to swim 1k, I was really surprised by myself and I will mention that I did stop a couple of times for short rests. So I have upgraded my challenge to swim 1k without stopping. So to get to that I plan to swim 500 meters first without stopping, gradually progressively overloading how much I can do by adding 100-250m each week.

I am really keen to get your comments back in regards to your challenges and how your exercise testing and programs are coming along. For those of you that are reading for the first time I have linked the other articles I have written to help you set your challenges, test yourself and plan a exercise program.

Success leaves clues

Strangely I hear that term a lot and I often find myself pondering its meaning. Seriously “success leaves clues”, what could that possibly mean? It could be interpreted in a million different ways so I decided to try to find out what exactly it means by looking for clues to success. Honestly I believe people don’t seem to look for clues to success. Instead they choose to believe that someone success comes from luck, excessive money or something else. Whilst it couldn’t hurt to be lucky or rich it doesn’t seem to be the primary reason someone is successful. Now I could talk about the clues I have found in various endeavour’s that make someone successful but I’d rather give an example of someone that has found success.

Recently my brother has discovered movement and healthy eating kind of like how someone finds religion. Off course what I mean is that his new outlook has literally changed his life. I know because I have seen this happen many times before. Some of you that have read my previous blogs may say that your brother had you to help him. Perhaps he does but in the end he has to do the work himself, I can’t do it for him. So how did he flip the switch? Well the first clue to success is access. Successful people often have access to resources, people and helpful information. In my brothers case the organisation he works for has a gym that employees were free to use. For my brother not having to pay was enough to get him motivated. The second clue is support, and yep seems obvious but a little bit of support goes along way. You are 50% more likely to achieve a goal if someone close to you does it with you. My brother’s partner who also enjoys fitness was always trying to get him into eating better and working out and once he was receptive to hearing the message they both managed to support each other. Goals are the third clue, my brother set himself a goal. He always wanted to be muscly but never really tried to achieve it. I watched a TV show called Muscle TV on local access and if I recall right I got him onto it. On that show they had a fitness challenge and his partner said she was going to do it. Off course then my brother also said he would do it. I don’t think anyone in my family is capable of saying no to a challenge. This challenge in particular provided a framework for competitors to use including diet, exercise and accountability. Accountability often is associated with consequences and bad stuff but it is not always about that. Often being accountable for yourself is the most important thing if you have made a real commitment. Commitment is a big clue to success. My brother’s commitment was and is still strong.

While all this led to him getting into shape it is the deeper success I have seen that seems to really matter. He has literally changed himself for the better. This is the biggest clue I find in people no matter what they are successful in. It’s the positivity they feel from changing themselves, physically and mentally. Mindset off course is always the biggest clue to success. Never underestimate the power of positive thinking. My brother’s success has seen him change from an angry, introverted and low self-esteemed person into an outgoing, happy, confident person in the space of 6 months. Physically he is able to bench 120kg (264lbs) at 72kg (158lbs), run 5km (3.1miles) no stress and just has tonnes of energy. Sure I was there to offer advice and instruction but it was up to him to do it and become successful at it. If you think you could use some advice and instruction I can help you with Exercise Physiology services. If you want success you now have some clues so stop wasting time and go out there and use them.

Get on your success path now!

Flip the switch.

                   Motivation is a very interesting and a unique emotion, in fact I would say that it is almost a phenomenon. Some people seem to be born with it while others only seem to have it for select moments in time. It’s something that’s hard to find and easy to loose and for some it can only be found in groups. It is something that can be tied to emotions, confidence and above all else aspiration and strength.

                  Motivation reminds me of money in some ways. You see motivation can be a real source of pleasure or pain. It can help us achieve great things or sometimes it can make us feel worse than when we started. It is important to be motivated, but the biggest problems occur when it comes to the inspiration of the motivation. If the wrong thing inspires you, it can lead you down the wrong path. For example say you are motivated to get active and the thing that inspires you to do it is to lose weight. That is all well in good for some, but for most people this will lead them down the wrong path.

                  I am sure most of us out there have fallen into this trap of eating well and exercising for a few months while weighing ourselves each week. It starts out great with slight loses in weight but eventually that stops and the very thing that originally inspired us to be motivated starts to bring us down. Off course most people will tell you that there are many changes that happen in your body when you are getting healthier and weight loss is never the biggest or most important change.

                Factors such as muscle gain can affect your weight. You may have still lost weight that week but because muscle weighs more than fat when you get on the scales or you see is negatives. When anyone is in that frame of mind other changes such as toning and loss of inch’s all seem to fall to the wayside. Now that is just one example of bad motivation I am sure there are many others out there.

               Now I should add that having a positive motivation doesn’t necessary guarantee you will succeed. It will set you up with a stable base but there are still many other obstacles that will come between you and your goal. Motivation is like flipping a switch, it works both ways. So weather you have flipped it to get healthier or improve at you particular sport they both generally require complete lifestyle shifts that can be hard to maintain.

               I know I may be repeating myself but I am very serious about this. The important thing to remember is that it’s not uncommon to not always feel like training, or eating clean. At times like this we all need to start saying “I’ve flipped the switch now I have to keep the light on”. I find the reason why people don’t do this is because they don’t hold themselves accountable. The excuse is always something got in the way or someone led me astray. Long story short nine times out of ten you can find a way past this. That`s when we come back to keeping the switch flipped.

              There are very simple ways to combat this kind of thinking. The first thing I would recommend when you flip on your switch is to write down your goals using the S.M.A.R.T acronym (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely). Specific relates to what is it you want to achieve and the more detail you use the more likely you will be to achieve the goal. Most people say to me,”I want to lose weight”, followed by my reply “can you be more specific?” really what they want is to reduce fat. I have a specific goal of lifting more than an 80kg snatch and 110 clean and jerk to go to nationals. You will want the goal to be measurable otherwise how will you know if you achieved it? I am measuring mine by kg`s. You might measure yours by cm/inches. Is it achievable this and realistic tie together well. I can realistically hit my goal this year within the time frame I set. If you’re an 80kg female setting a goal of losing 60kg this isn`t realistic or achievable without losing a limb or two. Timely is a favourite of mine because it can be hard on your own to set a time for something you aren’t 100% sure of. My goal is to be achieved by the 7th of October. Remember that you can have smaller goals tied into your overall goal in business sometime KPI`s is the buzz acronym, key performance indicators. I set smaller goals based on the above principles. So should you.

                Record things or situations that can get in the way of reaching those goals it is just as important as setting yourself a realistic goal. Writing these things down can provide perspective and you can brainstorm ways to overcome them. This goes a long to keeping the light switched on. It is so important to set yourself up for success. If you have even a small amount of motivation embrace it and focus on it and it will grow. Once you have the switch flipped keep the light on by using the two methods above. If you have any questions email us at therandomandthefit@hotmail.com

The doping crystal ball: A sporting performance future.

Not too long ago I was having a conversation with someone while we were doing some weightlifting. I was snatching that day and somehow we had come to the topic of drugs in sport. The person I was lifting with is an ironman and in the past I have worked with him to improve his nutrition and overall performance. As you may be aware performance enhancing substances are often linked with weightlifting and also since the outing of Lance (you know who I am talking about) the public is becoming aware of drugs in endurance based events. To be frank I don`t know of many sports where someone hasn`t tried something to get an advantage, golfers have had laser procedures to improve vision after all. During this conversation I told this person about the possible future of performance enhancement in sports and he seemed shocked. I told him I thought the future in performance enhancement is gene doping and about what potential things gene therapy could do. I thought it was worth sharing this information with all of you as well.

So first off what is gene doping? Gene doping is defined by the World Anti-Doping Agency as "the non-therapeutic use of cells, genes, genetic elements, or of the modulation of gene expression, having the capacity to improve athletic performance". Seems simple right? We also have to ask ourselves is it ethical and is it safe. I`ll leave these questions up to you to answer for yourself. 

So how do we detect and stop gene doping? Well I want to be clear about this the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and other agencies are trying to get ahead of the game here. It is well known that they had to play catch up with steroids and some other performance enhancing substances. Often I have heard through the sport grapevine that detecting for substances is done via changes in blood and urine and even now some drugs are hard to detect with current methods. Gene doping is introduced differently than these other enhancing methods.  Gene doping can be done in a number of ways these include direct injection of DNA into the muscle, insertion of genetically modified cells or utilising a virus to introduce the information. Right now you may be thinking that it sounds really far out. Gene therapy was created to help those with life threatening disease and I believe the future of medicine lies in stems cells and gene therapy. The problem exists for sporting agencies because these genes are from our genetic codes. In other words the changes that would appear seem like natural mutations in the body. For testing to be successful agencies will have to take a long term approach. Reference values may have to be established from the time an athlete starts competing. The reference values would have to take a far more comprehensive range of values and see if overall homeostasis is disturbed or altered in some shape or form.  That would include even lower levels of competition to track changes over time. This type of testing would also require tissue samples to test DNA which may have to be site specific.

It has been outlined in a basic fashion what gene doping is and how it can be administered, but how could it actually be used? Well gene doping started out in medicine to help save lives. The doping method is the same in both instances with only the outcome being different. The difference being that therapy is used for those that are very sick e.g. someone with severe anaemia requires more haemoglobin or red blood cells (RBC`s) to get oxygen around the body. In comparison a healthy athlete doesn`t require further RBC so when they dope they gain benefits which equates to an advantage i.e. getting extra capacity to carry more oxygen to muscles. There are drugs already in existence that can do something similar but they can easily be detected through testing. Another case that was brought to my attention was those born without the myostatin gene or receptors. Myostatin helps to regulate muscle growth. This happens in a number of species including humans resulting in large and powerful muscles. This is a natural mutation but since gene therapy came along for muscular dystrophy, people have turned their attention to using this for improving sporting performance.  Gene doping has even been hypothesised to be used in concert with these other changes to increase endorphins of the doping athlete to further the effects of the enhanced “abilities”.

Sounds great doesn`t it? How great would it be too be able to run all day and then lift a car and look like the Hulk. Well I want you to think about this saying  “there is no such thing as a free biological lunch” (I am not sure who said that version and if you do please tell me). Those that dope already have to weigh up the risk reward equation. Those that want to increase erythropoietin may be faced with thickening blood that may clot leading to a number of adverse outcomes. It may even come to a point that the heart may stop due to excess load. Athletes don`t seem to stop and think “what are some bigger muscle going to do to me?” There are repercussions for all doping, connective tissues such as tendons and ligaments face extra strain which may lead to sprains, strains and tearing of tendon insertions from the bone. There is also an increased metabolic cost the body having so much muscle.  These are by no means an extensive list but provide food for thought. The ultimate risk is not knowing what could happen to the rest of the body. Will those new genes affect other genes leading to a more complex adverse outcome? No one really knows the long term effects because all of this is relatively new. To me it seems crazy to even think of doing anything like this but in saying that I have always been against drugs in sport. 

So what does the future look like? Will there be hulking twelve year olds breaking weightlifting records or humans making ultra-marathons look like a walk on the beach? I can`t say. What I can say is the future is here and now. I am sure this is not the last of the discussion on gene doping and this will begin to be seen more in the public eye. Who knows maybe the future of sports will be dominated by the genetically doped and manufactured battling it out for our attention and money.  What do you think the future will look like? Post comments.

References:

                     Filipp, F. (2007). Is science killing sport? Gene therapy and its possible abuse in doping.                                             NEMBO reports, 8(5), 433.

             Scherling, P. (2001, November). Gene doping, ISM. In UCL Conference on Genes in     Sport.

          Unal, M., & Unal, D. O. (2004). Gene doping in sports. Sports Medicine, 34(6), 357-362.

Whats the best thing for weight loss.

“What`s the best thing for losing weight?”, I have heard this question so often and most likely it is the question you want to have answered. First let me backtrack I have spent a great deal of time learning about the body, working out and most things to do with health and fitness. This will culminate in a Masters in Exercise Physiology soon to be completed in the next month.  I am also a qualified P.E teacher and a training competing athlete. I have worked with people from high level athletes to the little old lady that needs to be able to lift her grocery`s.  Of all of the things that dominate the world of health and fitness, obesity is the biggest of them all (no pun intended).  

So back to the question “what is the best thing for losing weight?” this is a broad question and I’ll assume that you want to lose body fat and look and feel better.  Losing fat mass and being healthier ,because that is what we should aim for is a matter of behavior change. Right now you say so “how do I do that?” Behavior change is a complex thing but I will aim to simplify it for you. Firstly lets break it down, what is weight gain is caused by? Often weight gain is due to eating too much making poor eating choices and a lack of physical activity. So what do we do about that? Well something I am passionate about is keeping a food diary. 

First though let’s look at this more logically for example a man eats 1800 calories a day and exercises for 30minutes he burns 200 calories. He then goes and eats a chocolate bar that`s 241 calories.  It becomes a little bit clearer that what and how much we eat makes a bigger impact to our waist line then most exercise an average person may undertake. There is an old saying “you can`t train away a bad diet”. Now let me make this clear this isn`t a license to not exercise in fact diet and exercise go hand in hand. In this post though I am focusing on keeping a food diary.  A couple of extra reasons to keep a diary includes a recent study that lasted for six months published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found those that kept a food diary lost twice as much weight as those that didn`t. Furthermore keeping a food diary has been shown to increase the chances of losing the weight and keeping it off. A food diary can also provide insight into what you eat and what is really going into your body. So should you keep a diary in a note book? Well you can but my advice is to use technology. There are literally dozens of apps and programs for computers that are simple and effective.  These apps and programs are often free and provide easy to access food databases and information displays. Often you will find that they will be able to track food intake and exercise. The two I have had experience with is Myfitnesspal and Mapmyfitness programs. These are both accessible on multiple platforms and are free. 

Let me start with Mapmyfitness I started using this to log both my food and my exercise  and it has an easy to access menu and is easy to navigate. I found it a little bit less user friendly for the food diary portion and this was the main purpose for me to use this app. The exercise section though is great. It contains a lot of different choices and allows you to put in many selections of activity.  Something that is handy is the ability to take on fitness challenges that can often be set in your local area. How? Map my fitness has the ability for you to map a route that you take and it can tell you cool statistics like your elevation and ascent. Of course a big factor in weight loss is support and this app has the function to share your achievements with your friends and support network. 

But what about Myfitnesspal well I have been using this app for a few years now and I think it`s great. It is simple and effective. Mapmyfitness tends to be a bit overwhelming at times and for those that are used to in some degree to using a smart phone or computers this will be easy to use. The data base is quite large so more often than not you can find the food or brand you are looking for. During set up you set your weight goal and activity levels as well as the usual information. You can also choose how many meals you have and what nutritional information you see. The drawback I have found is the exercise portion is lacking a little bit. The choices of exercise are limited and though it calculates the calories burnt it can be quite off in either direction.  I tend to use a heart rate monitor to get around this and more on this in the future.  My fitness pal is redeemed by being able to input your own recipes and share your diary with other people if you wish. For me I have always advised using myfitnesspal because it is simple to use. The results for people I have worked with are always positive when they use myfitnesspal as part of their weight loss. 

A few other things though when using either program you should measure your food so you’re accurate and try to keep notes. Make using it a habit as this will take discipline but you will be rewarded much like exercising with discipline. Believe it or not keeping a diary makes you more aware and responsible and more likely to achieve you S.M.A.R.T goals. Lastly if you are thinking I don’t want to choose you can always use booth. Both programs can now be linked so you have the best of both worlds. So visit www.myfitnesspal.com and www.mapmyfitness.com now and improve your health now. Only you can achieve your own goals, no one can do it for you.