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How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
If you have got this far, I would imagine you haven’t considered whether you are inspired for your fitness journey.
Or that you even should be?
Because all we talk about in Fitness is: Motivation.
Seriously…its all anyone focusses on when it comes to starting their fitness or carrying on with their fitness. The number of people that tell me they are lacking motivation, or they have lost motivation…
So how does Jacquie, who is 46, and that person you always see at the gym, no matter how infrequently you attend, how does she always seem to be there…how does she keep going if we know motivation fails people and shouldn’t be relied upon?
Well, I believe that motivation fails you if you don’t add inspiration to what you do when working on yourself physically.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the great Russian composer said this:
“Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.”
In this article I want to address the following so that you can go away from here lit up and ready to keep going for the amount of time you need to keep going for to be a success at what it is you want to achieve.
Table of Contents for: “How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?”
3. 6 Ways To Find Your Fitness Inspiration
4. Conclusion
If you want to watch my YouTube Video that accompanies this blog then please head here:
How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
The Difference Between Motivation and Inspiration
The wonderful Humanitarian Leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar describes it thus:
It has also been described like this:
“Motivation is a push factor,” he explained. “It’s an outside force that is compelling you to take action, even if you don’t necessarily want to. Inspiration, on the other hand, is more of a pull or driving force. It’s something that comes from within that gets us to proactively give our best effort. When someone is inspired, they’re with you for the long haul.” — Sam Taggart
I find both quotes interesting.
In Fitness the topic of Motivation is a very prevalent one. It's the go-to word that people use when it comes to describing the state of their fitness.
You fall into two camps:
Motivated
Not Motivated
It is completely linear. The majority of people see that if they fall into Camp 1 (Motivated) they are then taking action and doing the things they need to do to get to their goals.
If you are in Camp 2 there is no point at all. And that's that.
The much-misunderstood truth is that there is a Third Camp:
3. Motivated and Un-Motivated
Which is what every single human being in the world is. No one ever has the perpetual motivation and no one ever has perpetual un-motivation (I’m sure that's a word…leave me alone!).
The human condition is a blend…like with everything else.
Now we know that the best way to find your Motivation is the following:
You follow this Loop.
Start with Action, then you get Results and then you find your Motivation.
Or a simpler way I like to put it is: Do, Track, Repeat
However…if you know Motivation will fail you…how do you bolster that part of the loop? How do you make sure that when you hit Motivation you then are able to restart the Loop with Action again?
As Sam Taggart says in the quote above:
“Motivation is a Push Factor”
“Inspiration is more of a Pull Factor”
Now if you have followed me for a long time you will be very aware that I am a proponent of Balance in your Fitness journey.
I am sure you have seen someone with a Kyphotic Posture in their life? A very over-pronounced upper spine tilting someone's head forward.
This Kyphosis occurs, presuming there are no other health issues at play, the Kyphosis will occur if someone has spent too much of their life “hunched over”. It could be someone has worked on a laptop for 20+ years, it could be they have hunched over a Games Console for too long, or they just stand that way as they lack strength.
My point is it comes from an imbalance.
To correct this in the Gym we would have to strengthen all of the back muscles using many Pulling Motions and stretch out the shortened chest muscles. We would have to work on counterbalancing the body.
So, if Motivation is a Push…
…and if all you do is Push you create an imbalance in yourself.
We need to create a Pull in your life.
Just like we would create balance in your workouts in the Gym.
And that Pull is your Inspiration.
You need to turn your Motivation Loop into a Success Loop:
You must do both: Repeat AND Learn.
You need to find your Pull and your Push in order to be able to stay in perpetual motion towards your Goals.
With my clients in The Fitness, Collective success is always attributed to those who work on their inspiration. Motivation and Inspiration are very close bedfellows and one thing they do have in common is they must both be worked upon.
Neither of them will just appear or turn up, they will require you to work on them in order to allow them to have the correct effect.
How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
What Is Inspiration in Fitness?
Personally, I think I came a little late into the game when it came to Instagram Fitness Inspiration
Or should I say #fitspo
And I am eternally grateful because I had I have joined the industry maybe 4 years previous I might have fallen foul to the bandwagon, but instead I have found clarity and my message which is miles away from the selfie hell that #fitspo truly was and probably still is.
A quick search on the good old Instagram and 70.7million hits of Fitness Inspiration show up and they look like a pile of sick:
Please read this next bit really carefully: THIS IS NOT FITNESS INSPIRATION
This is Fitness Self Indulgence. This is a bunch of very fit people trying to make a bunch of unfit people feel very very shit about themselves.
It causes eating disorders, poorer self image and can really really harm those who look at it.
As I outline in these TikTok Videos which I created after the awful news of Nikki Grahame’s death from Anorexia Nervosa:
I’m not saying they are doing it intentionally, but that is the effect and the result of this horrible practice and anyone who utters the word “Fitspo”.
70.7million photos of unachievable physiques, highly edited photos, and extremely lucky genetics have caused a failure to you. It has caused many people to think that Inspiration is the perfect body, unachievable results and beauty that can only truly be achieved by Adobe Photoshop.
Looking through all of those photos…I personally do not find a single one of them inspirational.
They just make me feel rubbish about myself…and I wonder if you feel the same?
The good news is this: Fitness Inspiration doesn’t exist on Instagram.
Inspiration for Fitness comes from within, not an external source. It comes from your own desires, beliefs and wants from yourself.
Inspiration in Fitness is Learning. It’s the studying. It’s developing your “fitness brain” and figuring out how it interacts with your life. It's learning how you manage under heavyweights, it's feeling your Glutes fire, it's walking out of the Gym feeling strong.
It’s finding out about how much you are struggling with it and how much the professionals struggle with it. It’s the understanding of your humanity in the field of Fitness.
I know that sounds like a lot…I’m not saying just because you are trying to become fit you need to become a PT…believe me you really do not need to do that.
What I am saying is you need to be a little more immersive in the subject.
How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
6 Ways To Find Your Fitness Inspiration
At Drama School, we had to keep inspired, and just like Motivation, I found the harder I worked the more inspired I became.
When we would get a new script…it was like learning a new language. A script doesn’t come alive until you have read it at least 8 or 9 times…and you need to do that before…well before Day 1 of Rehearsals.
The reason it reveals itself slowly to you is because of all the other research you do around it. You find out the History of the time the Play was set, you find out the stories of the people who lived during those times, you listen to Music and look at Art from the period to try and help make the world believable to you…make the world seem real to you.
Many people dislike Shakespeare because they quite simply “don’t understand it”. When I first pick up a play of his…I don’t either. But the more I work on it, and the more I read it, and view it from different angles…the more it reveals to me.
The difference is that I give Shakespeare an 8th and 9th chance. Most other people don’t give it a second chance.
And Fitness is the exact same. You have to delve deeper sometimes, you have to ask insightful questions and you have to allow it to reveal its work to you.
If you just go to it with a standoffish attitude, then you can expect standoffish results.
So here are six strategies to help you find your Fitness Inspiration…and spoiler alert…
…None of them are “Check Instagram”
They will all help you move towards the Learn aspect of the Success Loop. You don’t have to do all of them, but I do recommend you do as many as you can take on without feeling stressed out about them.
How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
CONNECT TO A HIGHER PURPOSE
When you set your goals, I don’t want you to think too much on topics like:
I need to lose 2 stone
I need to look good in this top
I need to get into those jeans
I think they are quite materialistic goals, but I do know they will let you down eventually and will not fulfill you fully if at all.
What you should look more towards is:
I want to be a role model for my family
I want to prove to myself I can change
I want to feel more alive than I do right now
With the second set of goals, you are looking more “Intrinsically” than “Extrinsically”.
Edward Deci in his book Why We Do What We Do says this in relation to Intrinsic Goals:
“…strong aspirations for any of the intrinsic goals — meaningful relationships, personal growth, and community contributions — were positively associated with well-being. People who strongly desired to contribute to their community, for example, had more vitality and higher self-esteem. When people organize their behavior in terms of intrinsic strivings (relative to extrinsic strivings) they seem more content — they feel better about who they are and display more evidence of psychological health.” [1]
And this in relation to Extrisnisc Goals:
“The researchers found that if any of the three extrinsic aspirations — for money, fame, or beauty — was very high for an individual relative to the three intrinsic aspirations, the individual was also more likely to display poorer mental health. For example, having an unusually strong aspiration for material success was associated with narcissism, anxiety, depression, and poorer social functioning as rated by a trained clinical psychologist…[1]
Here we can see that you can literally inspire yourself…and as a by-product, it will make you happier as well.
Think how many times in the past you have used an Extrinsic Goal like “get into that pair of jeans” and you achieved it. Are you now…months or years later still able to get into that pair of jeans?
If they were your sole aspiration…I would give a fair bet that you have gone through cycles of yes and no with that.
If you wanted to get into those Jeans to feel a lot sexier, and it makes you feel more alive and healthy when you do….chances are you are wearing them right now…
Connecting to your intrinsic values will educate you on yourself, it will help you look at what is driving you forward and what and who you really value in your life.
How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
2. FOLLOW INSPIRATIONAL PEOPLE
Don’t follow them on Instagram…i mean you can…but can you actually follow them on more meaningful platforms too?
Do they have a Podcast? Do they have a book? Do they have a blog? Do they have a website? Do they have a YouTube Channel?
All of these longer-form contents will inspire you a lot more than a quick flick and tap on the old IG.
A list of humanoids I find Inspiritational in terms of Fitness and the content I find of their’s most inspirational is the following:
Achieve Fitness Boston (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/achieving-fitness/id1294470614)
Jordan Syatt (https://www.syattfitness.com/blog/)
Mike Vacanti (http://www.mikesmacros.com/)
Tony Robbins (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Awaken-Giant-Within-Immediate-Emotional/dp/0743409388)
Richard Nicholls (https://www.richardnicholls.net/podcast/)
Dave Cottrell (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/master-the-mind-master-anything-with-dave-cottrell/id1287141836)
Mike Matthews (https://legionathletics.com/blog/)
Simon Sinek (https://www.ted.com/speakers/simon_sinek)
Mark Manson (https://markmanson.net/books)
Dan John (http://danjohn.net/)
Dr. Spencer Nadolsky (http://drspencer.com/)
Or there is you know…
Me and my new Instagram page: @the_gym_starter
I may have found some of these initially on Social Media, but without a doubt, their longer-form content is what has inspired me the most and actually that is what I will go back to most when I need that inspirational lift. Not their latest post on Twitter.
Some of them are uber famous, some of them aren’t, and that is the beauty of the list. I gravitate towards people who speak my language. Your list could be extremely different.
This is also just my inspiration in terms of my Fitness and part of that is running my business. Your list could have musicians on there, playwrights, artists…
And that brings me to my next point…
How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
3. ENGAGE IN ART
I’m sorry. Coronation Street just doesn’t count. Eastenders is not Art.
In the same way, I think Long-Form content form inspirational people can help you more than their Social Media feeds can, I too think that Art can help you stay connected to your Intrinsic Goals.
Find the things that light a fire up inside you.
For me, it’s the Theatre. For you, it could be Robbie Williams’ “Swing When You’re Winning” or Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets.
Art has a wonderful way of making us understand the human condition. When someone can pluck a phrase or a lyric and sum up exactly how you are feeling at that moment, and finds just about the right words, and puts it in a way that speaks to you like you never knew something could…
That lights you up.
And to be inspired…being lit up is very important.
When I am feeling my lowest I would jump on a train and head to London to do two things.
I would walk past my Drama School and listen to Jackson Brown’s “These Days”
Head to Trafalgar Square to go and stare at paintings in the National Portrait Gallery.
Yup. I’m a rock star.
(I challenge you to find another Fitness Blog that uses Bob Ross this effectively)
These were two strategies that have always helped me feel alive. They have made me understand my condition as Adam, they have guided me and connected me with who I believe I truly am.
There’s a lyric in These Days that says:
“Don’t remind me of my failures, I have not forgotten them”
It drives me forward. It teaches me compassion and empathy. It allows me to reconnect to some of the most inspirational times in my life…and I just love it.
Find your song that does that. Watch Movies that aren’t about Superheros beating each other up but that are about real humanity.
Art can and will keep you inspired. Inspiration isn’t linear. If you can get inspired about life that will bleed into your Fitness. It will help you reconnect with your higher purpose.
I was always taught: “You must fall in love each day”
Do that…because it will reconnect you with your Intrinsic Goals and educate you on your own humanity — which is something none of us do enough of.
How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
4. BECOME PART OF YOUR FITNESS COMMUNITY
Being part of a community can improve Mental Health. One very significant reason for that is that you begin to feel connected.
Connections in this day and age are getting more and more lost in the world of WhatsApp and Email. We don’t talk as much.
And when you have a community you communicate.
Communication is one of my big must do’s for a client. I won’t work with someone if they aren’t willing to communicate with me. They must also communicate with others.
Recently I overhauled my Private Facebook Group and I was really surprised that when I messaged people that I would have to revoke their access unless they joined The Fitness Collective for just £20/month how many of them said thank you to me for allowing them to be in the group for the period of time they were.
They said that although they hadn’t commented much they still got great value from it.
I was astonished.
The words Community, Communication have the same Latin Origin: “Communis” and this means: to share.
Ever heard the phrase: “Sharing is Caring”
If you find a Fitness Community, you will find a place where you can communicate, where you can share and where you can care for yourself and for others.
The Gym floor is this place for many people. Online Fitness Communities are that for others. When you see stories from people, whether you personally know them or not, but when you see their stories, and you spend time with them it’s amazing what kind of an effect they can have on you.
You can learn a lot from other people and especially if those people are just like you. They will share your struggles, your beliefs and your energy…and it will keep you inspired when you see them both succeed and learn.
How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
5. LONG BOUTS OF LISS
This is a fancy way of saying “go for a walk”.
LISS means Low-Intensity Steady State Cardiovascular work.
This doesn’t just mean Walking though. It can be a light jog…but stay with me.
You can also do all kinds of things like:
Canoeing, Stand Up Paddle Boarding, Mountain Biking, Tandem Biking, Mountain Climbing, Hill Walking, Beach Surfing, Rock Climbing, Rafting, Kayaking.
The list can go on, and I appreciate that some of them aren’t that accessible to do regularly.
But they do all have one thing in common.
Nature.
And nature can be so moving it hurts and it can be so much fun!
Nature also teaches us insignificance which is a terribly humbling thing to go through. Have you ever been stood in a Mountain Range and felt like a speck of dust?
When we are humbled by nature it gives us perspective on our lives, and perspective is something that you very much require in Fitness.
Find out more about how Perspective influences your Fitness in this Article: Your Scale Strategy
How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
6. ACTIVE VISUALIZATION
The first thing a Professional Golfer does before hitting aTee Shot is visualise the shot. Where is the ball going? How will it land? How will the swing feel?
Professional Athletes visualize everything they do. They see how their race will go, they see how that pass will look, they use their imagination in this way for two reasons:
To create a consistent outcome
To drive them forward for success
Have you ever wanted something so badly that you have sat there and imagined how it might feel if it would ever happen?
The imaginative version of try before you buy.
Well, when you visualize your ability to create something you also learn to sense what it will feel like. This will teach you control and understanding, this will train you how to react when things won’t go wrong, you are helping increase your hours of practice in what you are doing.
There are very few things that teach us better than practice.
Afterall; practice makes permanent.
Therefore when you spend time in your imagination, thinking about what it is you are working towards you begin to develop sensual and behavioral responses.
These are known as Manifestations.
When you want something, and you think about it, you visualize it, you sense it…you feel it in your body you then will find the behavior change you desire for that outcome a lot easier.
Because you have mentally practiced for it.
How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
CONCLUSION
When you can get Motivation and Inspiration into your Fitness Journey everything will become easier.
Both require action, to be able to get there, but they have slightly different pathways.
Motivation is a Push Factor. Its what drives you to do something.
If all you do is Push in your life, whether that is in Fitness, Business or anything else you will become imbalanced.
To fix that balance you require a Pull.
This is Inspiration.
In order to find inspiration for your Fitness Journey, you need to allow yourself to learn. Learn about the subject of fitness by following inspirational people who will teach you, you need to form an opinion, you need to question why you are doing what you are doing.
It’s almost not enough to just “Do” fitness. You have to allow it to permeate your life…if you want to learn to be ruthlessly consistent and achieve your goals.
I wrote this a few months ago…and I think it sums up this article quite well…
How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?
What’s Next?
I have plenty more articles about Motivation in your Exercise and Weight Loss Journey right here on my website.
Here is a selection I think would make great further reading for you:
If you struggle with motivation for a Home Workout then read this:
How To Stay Consistent with your Fitness and why it’s important
How Long Will It Take To Lose Weight with Diet and Exercise?
You are also invited to get a bundle of Fat Loss Goodies from me including:
Get yourself a free month of workouts (Home and Gym-based options)
Get yourself a free copy of my e-book ”27 Ways To Faster Fast Loss”
Get yourself a free customized Calorie Calculator
And a Free Month of one to one Coaching…
Straight to your Inbox
All you have to do is put your email address in below:
How To Count Calories
How To Count Calories
There I was on Instagram doing my daily video asking my audience what I might be able to help them with…and I got this response:
“I don’t know how to count calories…can you help me?”
Well, of course, it's my pleasure to help anyone if I can. But with this message, I felt like the person sending it to me felt guilty that she didn’t know how to do this — which is absurd. Why would you know how to do this if it's not something you have looked into how to do it. In the fitness industry, we spend a lot of time talking about things which we know…and we don’t do a great job of informing people about actually how to do what we talk about. This is for one reason…many people in this industry want to make them seem like they have a secret you don’t have…thus you will part with your cash in order to get said secret. It's nonsense. Nothing makes someone actually want to invest in you more than you empowering them to solve problems themselves. Helping them when they think they will never be able to figure it out.
Therefore this article is here to:
Explain why you should count calories
Show you how to count calories
Make you aware of the positives and negatives of counting calories
and
4. Send you on your way feeling empowered to take control of this part of your Fitness Journey.
Why You Should Count Calories
Most Diets you have ever heard of, will in some way do two things.
Count your Calories
Get you into a Calorie Deficit or a Calorie Surplus
For the purposes of this article, let's just use the premise that you want a calorie deficit to lose weight. Whether you followed Slimming World, Weight Watchers or Atkins they all incorporate a “system” for counting your calories. The issue with these diets is they also encourage you to develop very questionable relationships with how you view your food which in the long run creates a very messy relationship between you and your diet. They also use this calorie counting system to restrict your intake of calories…hence getting you into a Calorie Deficit.
These companies have clearly realised that part of a successful Fat Loss diet is that you manage to get the dieter to learn how to restrict their food, and thus get results.
Have you ever heard the phrase “what is measured can be managed”?
Well, that is why you should count your calories if you want to lose weight. We need to keep track. And that's it. Keep track of the amount of energy you are eating.
That's all a calorie is: A unit of energy.
In the same way, a mile is a unit of distance. A calorie is a unit of energy.
And in the same way, you are tracking how far you are running or walking, or how much you are lifting…you must also track how much you are eating.
You wouldn’t step foot into the Gym and not take note of how heavy the dumbbell you are lifting is, would you? So why are you not treating your food the same?
Emotions. Which I empathise with…(and if you need help with that then please read my article titled: How Do You Define Binge Eating?)…but that's not for this article.
It is also my belief that counting calories is important as we habitually wildly underestimate how many calories we are eating. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (1) and an article published by Public Health England (2)both state that participants under-report their calorie consumption.
This is why I believe it is very important for you, if you want to begin to lose weight to start counting your calories as accurately as possible. In the Western World we are so poorly educated on this subject…it leads to a huge overconsumption of caloric intake. We just have very little idea on two things, how many calories we actually require each day (our Total Daily Energy Expenditure) and how many calories are in our foods.
There is:
97kcal in a Cappuccino from Starbucks (Tall)
130kcal in a bag of Salt and Vinegar Walkers Crisps
214kcal in a large glass of Red Wine
1064kcl in a 200g bar of Cadburys Dairy Milk
1720kcal in a medium Dominos Pepperoni Pizza
Now imagine you had some garlic bread with the pizza or a dash of syrup in your cappuccino. Maybe had two glasses of wine not just the one…you can see how the little bits here, the little bits there add up.
And if you don’t track that…you can begin to take away from all of your hard work in the gym.
That being said…
“All calories count, but you don’t have to count all calories” — Jordan Syatt
You can get into a Caloric Deficit without counting calories, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t educate yourself on them. Learning how many calories are in the foods you eat is a simple and easy way to make sure you can keep track, even when you aren’t “tracking”.
How Do You Count Calories?
Great question.
Before we get into this…I want you to know that at times it's not easy to be very accurate. It used to drive me bonkers, the few times I have counted calories that it was never perfect. So right off the bat…i’m telling you this is NEVER an exact science.
In fact, even the calories published on packets are not 100% accurate. The FDA in the US allows up to 20% deviation on what the packet might actually contain either way…
So how do you get around this? Well, you give yourself a nice long time frame to lose weight…you experiment and keep making little changes until it starts to work for your goals.
Personally, I recommend to my clients to download the app “MyFitnessPal” although some clients have had great success with FitBit Tracking too.
With MyFitness Pal you set up your Goal Weight…and it will give you a Daily Amount of Calories that you can consume.
Then throughout the day you scan barcodes, type in and figure out what you are eating in order to find out how many calories you are eating. It has an extensive list of food stuffs in its library and there are few things in this world that aren’t on there. Including Restaurant Menus, Cocktails and your favourite Fast Foods.
But figuring out portion sizes can be difficult.
There's another catch with MyFitnessPal if you want to lose weight…and its this:
Image from @thegymstarter on Instagram
MyFitnessPal gives you back Calories burnt from exercise as per your exercise tracker (the red arrows on the illustration above). Fitness Trackers don’t accurately calculate the number of calories you have burned through exercise and therefore the number of calories MyFitnessPal says you can have back is not going to be accurate.
Added to that…if you have increased your movement…and burnt some calories…why would you then want to eat that back?
You are just undoing your hard work.
What If The Food I Eat Is Home Cooked and Doesn’t Have A Barcode?
Tracking Home Cooked food is terribly irritating on MyFitnessPal. As you will have to weigh all your food, every ingredient and figure out how you cooked it because how you cook food changes its calorie content…there becomes a lot of barriers in place which will stop you from tracking your calories.
And as you may well know…my number one rule for Fitness is enjoyment. As enjoyment leads to adherence. And if there are lots of barriers in place you simply will not remain adherent to what you are doing…because its no longer enjoyable…but onerous.
Luckily for you, I have a Fat Loss My Fitness Pal rule in place for this very problem.
If you are eating home cooked food, or whole foods nearly the whole of the time, that sticks to the rule of Protein and Veggies at every meal…and Carbs come along for the ride (one of my 5 AwesomeRules for life) then it is my belief you don’t have to track that food.
But…
And its a Big But…if you eat anything with a Barcode on it…you must scan and track that.
If you are finding you are getting to within 60% of your Calorie allowance (the Goal Number on the image above) from Barcoded Foods…then it is a fair statement to say that you are eating over your calorie allowance.
This means that if you have a calorie allowance of 1500kcals a day and you are eating 900kcals worth of Coffees from Costa, Wine, Crisps and Dip, Sodas, Chocolate or Sandwiches from Pret then I think we can assume you are going over your calories each day.
So the Big Food Number on your MyFitnesPal should read no more than 900kcals (60% of your Daily Caloric Allowance) in this example.
YOUR BMR or GOAL CALORIES — Know Your Numbers
I set all my clients up with a calorie target of two numbers.
A Lower Limit
An Upper Limit.
The lower limit is set to their BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) which is the number that dictates how many calories they burn just by being them. Their Digestion, Respiration, Minimal Daily Movement all leads us to this figure.
If you want to know your BMR then email me a request and I will tell you how to get a number (adam@thegymstarter.com)
The upper limit is normally their Goal B/W ins LBS x12.
This figure is always higher than we expect and scares a few people. But if you are consistent with your training and your NEAT especially, then it will work fine for you.
I ask all my clients to try and make sure that each day they will fall somewhere between these two numbers, and by doing so…they will over a course of time…lose weight, and keep it off.
One last important point…
I heard this from Susan Neibergall on my Podcast: The Fitness Solution (listen on iTunes here). Susan said that the aim of being in a Calorie Deficit isn’t to see how little you can eat…but to see how much you can eat within that number.
That's the challenge.
It's not about restriction.
It's about abundance within your limits. Imagine you driving a car, and you are coming onto a Motorway, you know that your limit is 70mph on the motorway…you are going to drive damn near to that number. You aren’t going to travel on the motorway at 40mph because you want to get your destination as quickly as possible, and you know that going that slow…when everything else around you is going that quick…is damn dangerous.
Yout might cruise at 60/65mph…but no slower.
What Are The Positives and Negatives of Counting Calories?
The positives are the following:
You can educate yourself on the calories you are eating each day and see how that is effecting your Fat Loss Journey
It gives you a way of looking at food as just energy. Not good or bad foods…it just is literally a combination of calories formatted in a certain way for you to consume.
It is time-restricted. This is not something you need to do for the rest of your life. Once you get a handle on the foods you like to enjoy…and learn how much energy is in them then you are free to roam the world and keep looser tabs on what you are doing. Then if things go array…you have a tried and tested format to help you get back on track.
It will lead to results. If you track accurately…it will lead to results for you.
It allows you to stop being a Dieter. You can finally walk away from Slimming World and Weight Watchers and actually learn that food is just food…and if it fits inside your number…then you can eat it. It basically gives you guilt-free freedom.
Read number five again.
I know I spoke about negatives a the top of this section…and there are a few. But what I really mean are pitfalls. There are common mistakes that people make when tracking calories which will drastically hinder their progress.
Again, let me call on Instagram:
Image from @thegymstarter on Instagram
As you can see there are plenty of ways that this method of tracking your consumption can let you down, and therefore will hinder your progress.
I can only suggest avoiding these mistakes and you will be able to remain accurate with what you are doing.
The other negatives associated with Calorie Tracking is thus:
People can become obsessed with it.
People don’t want to see the truth.
Point 1: They can be completely obsessed with their numbers and that can totally impact the way they view their food.
What I would say about this is the following. We may all know someone who is “obsessed” with their numbers. But in truth, that is one person out of many more that you are focusing on. You are looking for the anomaly to prove your point. Far more people casually track their calories in this world, than get obsessed with it. Don’t use one person to prove your already biased opinion.
Point 2: It can be scary. If this is something that you believe you have had a handle on your whole life, but know the scale has never actually told you what you want to hear…then being accountable for what you are putting in your mouth can be a very scary moment. Seeing it in black and white…is, without doubt, a bitter pill to swallow. But if you can make your peace with that right now, then it will pay dividends, compared to you regretting not being able to when you are 55 and need a hip replacement.
To Conclude
For me the answer is simple: Track Your Calories
Its not a life sentence. You don’t have to do this for the rest of your life. But if you can accurately track for a month or so…then you will learn so much about your food you will be able to take so much more control over what you are eating.
Numbers are King. You need to know your numbers to succeed. Your Upper Limit, Your Lower Limit and hit between those each day for a long period of time…and you will succeed.
Eat as much as you can within your numbers. That's the goal here. To eat as much as possible…not as little as possible.
Stick to the 60% rule don’t let MyFitness Pals annoyances stop you from succeeding. Learn to work with it, rather than against it, and you will find success.
Guilt-Free Freedom this is your goal. To learn to enjoy all foods so long as they work within your numbers. Foods are not good, or bad. They just are.
And thats it.
How To Track Calories by me,
The Gym Starter…
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Sources:
New England Journal of Medicine. 2020. Discrepancy Between Self-Reported And Actual Caloric Intake And Exercise In Obese Subjects | NEJM. [online] Available at: <https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701> [Accessed 9 April 2020].
Ons.gov.uk. 2020. A Government Statistical Service Perspective On Official Estimates Of Calorie Consumption — Office For National Statistics. [online] Available at: <https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/methodologies/agovernmentstatisticalserviceperspectiveonofficialestimatesofcalorieconsumption#toc> [Accessed 9 April 2020].
DID YOU FIND THIS USEFUL?
You can Join The Fitness Collective which is my Membership Group. In there I give Monthly Updates, Live Q and A’s, I provide you with new workouts each and every month, and write guidance on your fintess journey.
To find out more about The Fitness Collective you can click here: The Fitness Collective
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And above all remember this…for as long as you are trying your best no one can ask for more from you.
Coach Adam
How To Do A Push-Up and Why It Took Me 15 Years To Be Able To Perform One
How To Do A Push-Up and Why It Took Me 15 Years To Be Able To Perform One
The Push Up is a very hard exercise to execute…and only after 15 years of hard work on the movement have I actually managed to achieve it. This article is going to explain how you can practice and progress your push-up but also I want to delve into why we the Push Up is one of those exercises that make us feel so useless when we cannot perform it.
Also…before we get into it…Push Up or Press Up? I’m going to use the term Push Up for this article for two reasons. 1. My Grammar App prefers it. 2. It is a Pushing Movement of the body. Press would indicate speed…and my Push-Ups are not fast. At all.
15 Years….seriously?
I kid you not. I remember when I was an Air Cadet at the tender age of 15 and one of my punishments, yes punishments, for something like not having shiny enough shoes, would be to go out into a dark cold English Winters Night with an NCO and I would have to do 10 Push-Ups.
Now I am a very tall, very skinny, floppy eared human, and so the ability to do a Push Up was not something that would ever come naturally to me.
Nor is the cold dark environment of someone shouting at me likely to motivate me to succeed at this punishment. In truth, we were bordering on abuse, but it was cloaked in Military Discipline…so its alright…right?
Because of how long my levers (arms and legs) are, it naturally makes a movement like a Push Up a lot harder.
It comes down to Three Things, as the brilliant blog Art of Tall States,
Distance Travelled: The longer your limbs the more work you have to do to move your body through a range of motion. For every inch your arms are longer than someone of a shorter height you have to travel an inch further to execute a push-up. When you increase the distance you need to travel, you increase the amount of work you need to do!
Leverage: Push-Ups are a second class lever. Your Centre of Gravity hovers around your hips. Your arms do all of the moving. Gravity is pulling your body down at the Hips. Consequently, you need a certain amount of abdominal strength to complete a push-up, to keep your hips from sagging*. The taller you are, the longer your body and the further your hands and feet are from your hips. The further your base of support moves from the centre, your hips, the greater the amount of force that pulls the hips down.
*a point that will become very clear in the latter part of this article.
3. Muscle To Weight Ratio: Generally the taller you are the more weight you have to carry (more dense and bigger bones, longer legs). As you get taller, your organs and bones get larger and heavier, but you still build muscle at about the same rate as everyone else (regardless of height). So, if you are lean (like most tall people), you require a certain amount of strength to be able to execute a push-up correctly.
It’s usually a lack of strength coupled with distance travelled and leverage that makes push-ups harder if you are tall.
So unbeknown to myself at the time, as well as Lance Corporal Craig, a very short yappy thing…the kind of person that loved to exploit the tiny amount of power he had over anyone…I was at a significant disadvantage from the outset. But this didn’t stop the ridicule, the failure and the outright sense of uselessness I had from not being able to do a Push-Up.
It was a mental scar that was well and truly ingrained deep within me. It all linked to the bullying I would receive on a daily basis at school combined with the usual worries that a teenager would have about the world.
I was scarred from ever having to do a Push-Up.
Fast forward a few years, I’m now in the Gym. Having pretty much-avoided Push-Ups since I was an Air Cadet. I got through Drama School, travelled the world filming, played Soldiers in Films, I even Refereed in the FA Cup…but always managed to sidestep the P…U.
Until I started training Clients…I would have to joke about my inability to not demonstrate one correctly…and I would silently hear the other trainers mock me. Laugh at me…in my head they would say things like:
“Call yourself a PT and you can’t do a Push-Up????”
Well yeah. I did. I have many misgivings…and not being able to do a Push Up is (or was) one of them. Of course, this was all in my head but it still felt very real.
Then I decided to take my Strength Training seriously, I hit the Bench Press, The Overhead Press, The Pull-Up, The Barbell Row, I worked my Upper Body over and over twice a week (Legs was the other workout of the week) and I have done this now for 3 years until the other day I was in the gym with my fiancee and I was just hammering out a Push Up. Didn’t even think of it. It never felt smoother, it never felt more controlled…it did still make my face go red. But I was doing it. I then asked my fiancee to record it…onto Instagram Stories (follow me @thegymstarter) and I uploaded the video. It got a lovely response from lots of lovely people.
And I realised after 15 years my journey was complete.
Why was it so hard for me?
My mental block when it came to it.
The scars I had from my early exposure to the exercise, whether that was at school in P.E class or as an Air Cadet, it clearly made me put up a lot of walls in my mind whenever I was asked to execute a Push-Up.
Combine that with my physiology. But I’m not making excuses. I wasn't strong enough. Plain and simple. I could run a Marathon…but I couldn’t do a single push up. I had to build muscle…which is something that has always been hard for me… and that led to a long journey in being able to do the Push-Up.
Why is it so hard for anyone?
One of the most common things I hear from clients when asking them to do a Push Up is “Why can’t I do a Push-Up? I’m so weak it's ridiculous”
It's not ridiculous at all. In the world, there is a very common misconception that a Push Up is something we all should be able to do. We think of them as basic, simple movements that everyone in the world can do except for us.
Let's look at how heavy a Push Up is:
When in the Up Position of a Push Up you are lifting 69% of your body weight.
Therefore if you weigh 75kg you are lifting 51.75kg.
When in the Down Position of a Push Up you are lifting 75.04% of your body weight.
Therefore if you weigh 75kg you are lifting 56.28kg.
That's a heavy weight.
If you have attempted a Push-Up and felt like a failure…ask yourself this:
“Can I do a 55kg Bench Press?”
“A 55kg Overhead Press?”
“ Can I do a 55kg anything in the Gym?”
If the answer is no to just one of these questions then you are not a failure because you cannot do a Push-Up.
You are quite simply very normal.
How Do You Improve Your Push Up?
In order to develop your ability with any exercise that you are struggling with you can regress the exercise to try and make it more manageable for you to execute.
With a Push Up there are two regular regressions.
The 3/4 or Kneeling Push Up :
Or the Incline Push Up:
Of the two I favour an Incline a lot lot more. The Incline Push Up demands that you engage your Core Muscles* a lot more than the Kneeling Push Up.
*I told you I would come back to it
By getting used to the movement pattern with your Core Muscles engaged you are going to find the transition of from Incline to Flat a lot easier.
The other part of a Push Up that gets wildly ignored is the arm and head position in the lower part of the movement.
Many people believe that a Push Up goes straight up and down.
This misconception leads you to overuse of your arm and shoulder muscles and underuses your Chest Muscles.
We want to get the Chest engaged as much as possible in this movement pattern so that you can progress it with a much larger muscle group engaged…hopefully making the whole thing easier.
In order to do this we need two things to occur:
You need to lower your body tracking to the shape of a quarter circle. This way your head and chest will finish in the lower position further forward than the starting position, and your hands should then end up next to your nipples on your chest.
2. If you get point 1 correct then that should allow your arms to form the much needed Arrow Position which will help you with the Push Up also. Many people allow their arms to head into the “T” position, which compromises the shoulder joint, combined with putting too much strain upon muscles which are too small for you to be able to lift 74.04% of your Bodyweight. Seriously, try doing a Tricep Extension with 50kg….(I was joking. Please do not attempt this idea).
If you want to build up your ability to be able to execute a Push Up I would suggest throwing in practice to your upper body day. Remember:
Practice Makes Permanent
A good Upper Body Workout to get towards a Push Up would be:
Barbell Bench Press | 3 Sets | RPE = 8–9
Incline Bench Press | 3 Sets | RPE = 7–8
Overhead Press | 3 Sets | RPE = 6–7
Super Set of Lateral Raise | Front Raise | 3 Sets | RPE= 6–7
Inverted Row | 3 Sets | RPE = 7
Paloff Press | 3 Sets | RPE = 7
Plank | 3 Sets | RPE = 7
Push Up Variation | 3 Sets | RPE = 6–7
To Conclude…
The Push Up is far harder than the world has told you, and your misgivings in being able to complete it are fully understandable.
Stop thinking that using regression is a sign of failure. It's not. Its a sign of knowledge and understanding of what it takes to reach your goal. Its a sign of rejecting what popular opinion is, and making sure that you are working on your own track, for your own goals, in your own way.
It took me 15 years to be able to write this article for you, with authority. That’s a long time.
I can’t say doing a Push Up was ever an “active” goal of mine, and I do think if I was able to shake off my negative experiences with the exercise quicker then I would have shortened this time frame. But I avoided it.
I avoided it because it reminded me of my weaknesses. But the only person that lost out was me.
You may have some mental blocks when it comes to your Health and Fitness, and you may need more help than just this article.
But work on your goals. Because you have a lot to gain from them. Yes they will take a long time to accomplish, but if you can open up your time frames and understand that the art of building muscle and losing weight takes a long long time.
The more you can engage with that…the easier it all becomes.
If you have any questions…please put them below or reach out to me on adam@thegymstarter.com
Tall, A., 2020. Are Push-Ups Harder For Tall People? — The Art Of Tall. [online] The Art of Tall. Available at: <http://artoftall.com/are-push-ups-harder-for-tall-people/> [Accessed 30 March 2020].
Cooperinstitute.org. 2020. How Much Weight Is Really Lifted During A Push-Up? — Cooper Institute. [online] Available at: <https://www.cooperinstitute.org/2011/03/how-much-weight-is-really-lifted-during-a-push-up/> [Accessed 30 March 2020].
Did you find this useful?
You can Join The Fitness Collective which is my Membership Group. In there I give Monthly Updates, Live Q and A’s, I provide you with new workouts each and every month, and write guidance on your fintess journey.
To find out more about The Fitness Collective you can click here: The Fitness Collective
Please share this with your friends and anyone else you may know who is worried about training in a gym, and feel free to follow me using the links below…
And if you want to get updates on when I publish new articles, publish new podcasts or anything else then please remember to sign up below
And above all remember this…for as long as you are trying your best no one can ask for more from you.
Coach Adam