training considerations

1. Eat moderate amounts of food 5-6 times each day comprised of equal parts protein, fat, and carbohydrate. Don’t’ over eat. This will require time, planning, and more cooking at home.

2. If it has a nutrition label or comes in a box it probably isn’t the best thing for you. Stay away from sugar when possible and limit breads, pastas, cereals, and starches.

3. Limit liquid calorie intake. Orange juice, Gatorade, and alcohol are filled with sugar and hit the blood stream faster than solids. Any liquid calories should be limited and only consumed when already fully hydrated from water.

4. Weigh yourself rarely, if at all. The number isn’t what matters and it will trick you. Focus on how you feel, look, and the way your clothes fit. Weight is not necessarily a direct correlate of fitness or health as your body composition will change over time.

5. Workouts should be hard and varied. Make them difficult and mix it up. Unless it’s an active recovery day (like a walk or light jog), you should be a little nervous about what you’re getting ready to do. If not, you aren’t challenging yourself or pushing hard enough to get results.

6. Take care of your body. Warm up and cool down before and after working out. Be sure to stay hydrated and stretch daily.

7. Motivation is key. Find and hang on to the real reasons why you’re doing this. Health, ability, kids, family, confidence, longevity, and appearance are all good reasons, whatever it is, you just have to have a reason you care about that keeps you going.

8. Sleep is important. It’s when your body repairs and you make progress. Plus it reduces stress and speeds your metabolism. Get as much as you can shooting for 7-8 hours a night.

9. Prioritize your time. With work, family, and everything else, you can’t do all of it all of the time so you must decide what it is that you care about most, and make sure it gets done first.

10. Be consistent, and patient. Look at this as a life style shift, not a diet or overnight crazy workout fix. Trend in the right direction with a chain of small changes that will result in drastic changes, not the opposite.

11. Don’t deprive yourself. Very rarely does an all or nothing approach to life work because it’s not sustainable. You should have unhealthy foods, alcohol, be lazy, and stay up late. Just not very often and not very much at a time.

12. Strive for balance. Too far in any one direction and something else will suffer. Keep an open mind and a long term outlook on your health and fitness while taking care of what’s important to you in life.

13. Run, a lot. An endurance base is important because of its positive impact on improving your ability to breathe and not get winded as easy. It’s also a great way to burn calories and reduce stress.

14. Set goals and test yourself. Daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals are important. If you don’t know where you are and where you want to be it’s impossible to put together a map to get there.