Long Island's BEST Personal Training!
Ice Cube is definitely my all-time favorite gangster rapper, slash film director, slash passable actor. Remember this 1993 hit?
♪ You need ta check yo self before you wreck yo self,
Chickity-check yo self before you wreck yo self,
Yeah, come on and check yo self before you wreck yo self,
Cuz not being clear about your goals and collecting data before you pliggety-plan your fitness plan is bad for your heath! ♫The Cube biceps curls massive amounts of his autographed swag.
You see, everybody who really wants results when they set out to get in shape needs to heed those (official and unadulterated) lyrics of Master Cube.
YOU MUST CHECK YO SELF!!! — OR YOU WILL WRECK YO SELF!!!
This is massively important. What the heck do you want to have happen? And you need to be specific here. ”Get in shape” is not good enough. ”Get ripped” or “get jacked” are not any better. Even “lose weight” won’t really work. Here are some good examples:
“Lose 5-7 pounds of body fat in three weeks”
“Add 2 inches to my arms and drop 3 inches on my waist by Memorial Day 2012″
“Increase my mile time from 13 minutes to 10 minutes before the date of [race x]”
“Max bench press: add 75lbs in four months”
In my case, it’s “Gain 3-5 pounds of overall muscle mass in 30 days while eating a vegan diet”.
There’s something that all these goal statements have in common — a specific and measurable outcome PLUS a physical deadline.
YOU HAVE TO WRITE THIS DOWN!! And you should put it somewhere so that you read it every day and night. When you were a kid you probably knew exactly what you wanted for Christmas right? And what did you do to make sure you got it? You wrote that sucker down!! And then you probably thought about that thing you wanted every day until Dec 25th came. If you didn’t write it down, then your parents Santa probably got you some totally lame bullsh!t toys. Even if you told them what you wanted but didn’t write it down, you were much more likely to get some “close but not quite what I wanted” crap.
Kid should've at least wrote down **NOT BOOKS!**
Doing check #1 makes the whole process much less stressful, less confusing, and increases your odds of success, probably like, a million percent. Not exaggerating. Look it up.
Okay, next you need to check your life. Write down all these questions and the answers to them:
Schedule based checks: Where in your schedule will you fit time for exercise and/or food preparation? How much time can you realistically commit to your goal? What exact days and times? Is it enough time to achieve your outcome?
“Am I really Serious” checks: What are you willing to give up? What supposedly “important” stuff will you be willing to “demote” in order to make this work? If you don’t achieve your outcome what will be the consequences and how would it really make you feel about yourself? (Probably sad and pathetic)
Social checks: Who can I turn to to keep me on track? To workout or eat healthy with me? How do I make sure my family, friends, and co-workers don’t accidentally (or purposely) sabotage my efforts?
The social checks are more important then you realize, so don’t skip em just because I listed them last. In fact, studies have shown that if a person becomes clinically obese, their friends are 57% more likely also to become obese- and a friend of a friend of that obese person is about 20% more likely to become fat — even if the weight of the linking friend remained unaltered. What?! Really?!
Friends with benefits? Mmmmmmaybe not.
I’m certainly not saying that you should go out and dump your overweight friends or all your friends who hate exercise, but I am saying you should be aware and communicate what you are trying to achieve to your social network. Wouldn’t it be awesome to get in shape and also help get your pal in shape, instead of making late night trips to dunkin’ donuts with said friend. AGAIN?!?!?
Okay, from now on your “goals” are not to lose weight, gain muscle, get strong etc. Your goals will be things that you can know at the end of the day GOT DONE.
So the goals you focus on daily should always be related to your behaviors or actions. Here are some good goals to reach for in order to get to your outcome:
“I will eat a minimum of 5 cups of raw vegetables every day”
“I will wake up 20 min early and do 15 min of interval cardio every morning ”
“I will limit ice cream intake to only one scoop per week – Fri or Sat with lunch”
“I will make sure to consume x grams of protein and x total calories per day and log my intake to be certain”
“I will weight train for four hours per week — on x days at x times”
These are all things that you can definitely know whether or not you’re actually DOING it! Right? And as long as these goals are all in line with your outcome, you’ll have success!
Goin' Downtown ta Clown Town!
You got the most important checks down now. But there’s still more to come. You gotta take down all the right physical data, so you can actually plan the correct workout and diet, and measure if it’s working along the way.
I’ll have that for you in my next update.
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