Becoming More Active – Page 4 – newstasis :: a blog about improving wellness

Goal setting – Go To An Expert

Setting a goal is easy. Come up with something you want, set a date for when you will have it and then create a plan of the things you will need to do in order to achieve it. Do this and you will have done more than most people will do when it comes to changing their future.

But it doesn’t mean that you’ll achieve your goal, and it doesn’t mean that you will do anything different.There are a number of reasons why most people do not achieve their goals and a very good reason why some people ALWAYS achieve them. If you are looking to achieve something you have never achieved before, there is a chance that you are going to need a lot of help in making it a reality. This is common and it is the very reason why most people will never transform their life.

First off, those who always achieve their goals are good at it because they have practiced it. Many of them were taught how to do it – either through coaching or because of circumstance. Having a parent or role model show you how to behave in order to attain something new can be critical in learning how to make goals a reality.

Having to achieve something is another great way to learn how to achieve it; this tends to be a lot less effective and a lot more stressful but it can be a sure fire way to create the winning mind set needed to achieve almost anything. E.g. a lot of people mature very quickly once they have children or move out of their parents house.

Moving forward, those who constantly achieve goals have a clearer understanding of the world so they create goals that are inline with how their world operates. There is a congruency to what they are hoping to achieve so everything naturally lines-up. They identify themselves as someone who can and deserves to achieve the goal, they believe that they can act in the goal achieving way so therefore just need to put in the hard work.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about and seem to be having a tough time achieving your goals, it is likely time to enroll someone more qualified to help get things lined up.

The 6 layers of effective goal setting:

At the lowest level is your environment. This deals with the where and the when of your goal. It’s a time frame component and it primes the brain for something in the future. E.g. in Mississauga on July 1, 2013
Next is behavior. What is going to be the thing that is happening. E.g. I am weighing 25 pounds less.
Strategy is next and deals with how this goal is going to be achieved. E.g. By having eaten good quality whole food and exercising 5 hours per week.
Belief is above it and addresses the why of the goal. E.g. I have done this because I am a successful person.
Identity is next, and concerns itself with who the goal setter is. E.g. Someone who is unstoppable.
Finally, is community or spirituality – who else will be impacted by your having achieved your goal? It’s a reason bigger than ones self. E.g. Others are inspired by me for having achieved this goal, my children respect their bodies more and they are seeing appropriate exercise and eating behaviors coming from their father.

When setting goals, you need to have 6 things all line-up in order to ensure that the goal can happen with the only need being lots of hard work.

This contains a lot more information than the traditional “needs, goal and time frame” model but the level of granularity does illustrate a number of key underlying variables that will mean either success or stagnation. If someone doesn’t isn’t progressing towards the behavior (of weighing 25lbs less) it is likely because they don’t have the strategies. If they develop the strategies, they should begin to progress. If they have the strategies, but are not progressing, it could be because they don’t have the belief.

Effective goal setting has all of these items in alignment and the person putting the hard work into the endeavor. Doing this will make the impossible possible and spark new progress into unfamiliar avenues.

What Neuroscience Says About Over Eating

Doctor Daniel Amen does a lot of research with the brain. Along one of the paths, tracking brain injuries with football players, he uncovered some very interesting things about the human brain:

As weight goes up, brainpower goes down. The size and function of the brain diminishes as BMI goes up….the larger people were, the smaller their frontal lobes were, and that’s a disaster because the frontal lobes run your life! Not only are we finding that overeating and overweight cause changes in the brain, but we’re seeing that brain patterns can influence how we respond to food.
It goes both ways. If you have low frontal-lobe activity, as is common with attention deficit disorder (ADD), for example, you’re much more likely to be obese. The frontal lobes are critical to making decisions such as food choices…

Consider the ramifications of this two way street. We’re born magnificent, capable of developing to our full potential and living a long illness free life. Our prefrontal cortex doesn’t develop until we’re in late childhood / early teenage years and grows throughout puberty – if we make it through most of childhood, there is a very good chance that we can have it all.

But along the way we get fat. It could be that our folks are too busy to cook healthy dinners, they didn’t know what to buy and cook, you were a picky SOB, whatever, you ended-up fat. As a result, your prefrontal cortex does not develop optimally and your brain in general is smaller than it would have been had you remained lean and optimal.

Moving through life, with a smaller brain, you suffer the consequences of having reduced executive functioning. Your working memory isn’t as good, your will power is compromised and your ability to anticipate the consequences and deal with the future just doesn’t hit on all cylinders.

Staying fat is easier because you don’t have the tools needed to think your way out of it, or at least, control your behavior out of it. You may never see a healthy weight again.

I don’t mean to scare you because you do have options here, but if you are over weight or have a tendency to over eat, you may need to consider enrolling an expert in helping you gain the skills needed to reverse the path of destruction you are on. Let them be your proxy until your brain repairs itself and can anticipate and plan for a better future.

Why I Challenge My Friends And Clients

It turns out that the brain needs to be challenged in order to operate more effectively; not just the consciousness parts of the brain but the entire thing. If stimulated correctly, repeatedly and for a period of time, it will begin to adjust its functioning to improve the quality of operating and this will have a dramatic impact on all parts of the body.

For the last number of years I have been engaging my clients and friends in a particular fashion which helps to facilitate these changes. I have done this not because I knew it was helping them but because I personally find it to be a better way to engage the world. The goal is to feel better, think more effectively, and feel more connected to others. By boosting resilience in 4 areas, you will not only improve these things but you will actual live longer.

The four key areas are:

Physical resilience – you need to move. It doesn’t need to be intense physical activity, but sitting or lying around without moving do nothing positive for the body or brain. Exercise teaches you brain that you behaviors matter. Moving will increase your ability to handle stress and recover from illness.
Mental resilience – you need to think about problems and increase your ability to concentrate and focus your attention. Doing this will alter the physical make-up of your brain – increasing the complexity of the interconnection between the neurons – and it will allow you to solve problems more effectively which will boost productivity and potentially lower stress.
Emotional resilience – you need to be able to find reasons to be happy or grateful. Happy people are sick less frequently, they have lower rates for illness and their stress response is shorter lived than their bitter or sad counter parts. Finding reasons to be happy is self reinforcing – it is rewarding from a chemical point of view – feel good neurotransmitters are released – and once it becomes a habit, you’ll find more and more reason to feel happy. This alone is well worth the effort taken to get good at it.
Social resilience – you need to be able to see yourself as part of something bigger than just your own body. Those who feel connected to other people tend to be happier and experience stress less severely. A sense of gratitude is a perfect way to increase social resilience, physical touch is even better. Those who shake hands or hug others have an enhanced chemical response that increases feelings of openness and trust.

What does this all mean?

Well, on the simplest level, a better life is fairly easy to achieve but it may require some new behaviors and the creation of some new habits. If you are the type of person who doesn’t feel comfortable touching others or being open about gratitude, the social resilience aspect of having a better life may present a challenge to you, but in my experience, people don’t mind being thanked or hearing genuine expressions of positive emotion.

Realize that all of these are well within your grasp. You have been moving all of your life, so why not add in a little more if you notice you have been sluggish recently. Solving problems and challenging yourself mentally will cause the release of reward neurotransmitters which will feel good; the brain does this automatically if you just focus on a problem.

The tough one is the emotional resilience. We’re programmed to be fearful, so finding reason to NOT be scared doesn’t come naturally. But it’s a problem to be solved, and if you use this as one of the tasks to improve mental resilience your brain will be clearing off two items at once!

10 Things That Will Boost Your Progress

Intelligent people want to be living a life that is moving forward, growing towards something greater than that which already is. It could be a part of human nature, part of how we were raised or part of our specific genetic code, but intelligent people are on the move, forward and upward. Progress is the unit of measurement, the currency of driven people, and we like to fill our banks with lot of it!

Below are ten things that will speed-up your progress; not just your body transformation or your athletic pursuits, but in all areas of your life.

Realize that effort alone doesn’t work. Many business owners perform all the roles of their company and their business say small because of this. The 20 hour days don’t yield the same results as a well thought out 10 hour day at enrolls other people in doing some of the work. Effort is kind, up until a certain point, then it becomes a joker.
Know your motivation. Be moving towards something very important or leave something behind that needs to be left behind. Or both! There needs to be a compelling reason for WHY you are trying to progress. Progress for its own sake is good, progress for a higher purpose is GREAT. Focus on this purpose and enjoy the boost in efficiency. Most people do not know their motivation for doing things and this is a huge limiting factor with their progress. Have a compelling MUST have reason and notice what happens in your life to help you get it.
Learn from EVERYTHING and EVERYONE. We learn from experiences, not from sitting around. Be open and wise to the fact that you don’t know everything. Progressing forward is about acquiring new knowledge and converting it into wisdom, and this will only happen when stuff goes in. This applies to both the things to do and the things to NOT do – there is a reason why someone lost their job which is usually not the inverse reason why someone keeps their job. Learn from both and maximize your progress.
Choose proof over theory. Some things look great on paper but don’t pan out as predicted while other things seem doomed from the beginning but turnout to be not just the best way to accomplish a task but the ONLY way to accomplish it. When you are looking for progress, go with what works. When you are looking to innovate, go with theory.
Take a few small actions each day. Success is made-up of 1000’s of small things. Progress is about attrition against the odds. While it is unlikely that the small thing you do today will lead you to the victory you are looking for, not doing the small things is usually the reason for a lack of progress. If it takes a few minutes and you have a few minutes, just do it. It will get it out of the way and make action your method of operating.
Set many small and achievable tasks. 10’s or 100’s of these tasks will make-up a goal. Setting-up goals as being the combination of many small things makes achieving them more likely as they won’t overwhelm or discourage you. This way you will always be making progress, everyday and with almost every action.
Find someone to be accountable to who you WILL be accountable to. Sadly, many people get into the habit of not being accountable to themselves as there is a temporal processing issue with it – how do you be accountable to the you of the past? The finest way to overcome this is to enroll someone else to help you stay on track. Engage someone who will be dogmatic about your objectives and who will press you hard when you present excuse as reason.
Track your results to make sure you are staying on track. Consider enrolling someone else as the tracker of your progress – ideally your accountability person. When you do not achieve your results, you need to uncover the cause of your breakdown and eliminate the offending behavior. The objective opinion of an outsider can be the difference between a slow or light speed progress. They only have a vested interest in your results, not your emotional reasons for not acting in a goal achieving way.
Focus on behaviors, not outcomes. Being progressive is about acting in a progressive way, not about achieving a progressive thing. If you do the right things for long enough, the outcome is an inevitability.
Become part of a success orientated group. Successful people need to be surrounded by other successful people and there can be a magnificent synergy between group members. It is usually true that many minds are better than one when it comes to seeing solutions so engage others and enroll them in your journey. This will boost your accountability and it can dramatically increase the intellectual resources that work on an issue, problem or task. You never know what or who other people know, so connect with others and share unconditionally; both your quest and your wisdom.

What Your Doctor Won’t Be Doing About Your Possible Heart Disease

We are not doctors. Doctors have gone to school for many years and are well educated about many of the pathologies that can impact human beings. Most are very good at their job and although overworked sometimes they are well intentioned with their actions. The problem with doctors is that they are part of a reactive model when it comes to addressing disease; they’ll encourage you to do certain things, but by in large they are more useful when you become sick. Dealing with sick people is their scope of practice.

We, as coaches, take a preventative approach when it comes to disease. We look for visual and behavioral markers that trend towards disease or ill health and set out to engage and enroll others in the possibility of eliminating these behaviors to ensure a higher quality of life. We do not prescribe anything other than exercise and good quality nutrition plan.

Our approach to disease prevention in terms of heart disease is superior to that of a traditional methods because we address no fewer than 10 of the top 20 markers for heart disease:

Endothelial dysfunction (hardening of blood vessels)
Increased oxidative stress and/or lack of oxidative defenses
Dyslipidemia (increase in lipid levels of the blood)
Increased HS-CRP and inflammation
Elevated homocysteine
Hypertension
Age
Genetics
Calcification seen on heart scans
Hormonal deficiencies in men and women
Diabetes mellitus, hyperglycemia and increased insulin levels
Hypothyroidism
Heavy-metal toxicity
Lack of exercise
Lack of sleep
Low levels of vitamins K and D
Left ventricular hypertrophy
Microalbuminuria and/or kidney disease
Obesity
Smoking

Let’s compare the potential actions of your doctor to what we will do to help you avoid heart disease.

Doctors will give you advice, medication or a referral to a specialist. In general, they’ll tell you to stop smoking, eat better quality foods, exercise more and lower you stress. If you have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or hormonal imbalances, they’ll likely give you medication for these. If you have become sick, they’ll get you to see a specialist who will look after the specifics and likely have a tough conversation with you about death and how your actions are going to end with you in an early grave. Most of what occurs is good and it can be helpful, but very little time will be spend on the uncovering the reasons why you choose actions that aren’t working for you and how you are going to tread into the unfamiliar and start new behaviors.

What we as coaches will give you is advice, coaching, and will refer you to a specialist if that is what is needed. We’ll help you to stop smoking, make better food choices, exercise more to help lower your stress. We won’t give you any medication to lower your cholesterol, high blood pressure or correct hormonal imbalances. And we will have the tough conversation with you about your behavior and how the whole journey ends. All of this is good because you can do everything we recommend without having to involve a doctor, pharmacist and a slew of chemical engineers and researchers. We offer one thing that the doctors don’t, ongoing external accountability and you will see us 2-5 times a week and may have 100’s of interactions with us in a few months.

Something special happens when you enroll other people in your transformation journey, the chances of it being effective increase dramatically because you will actually perform the needed actions over and over and over again. Somehow appropriate eating of healthy food and the participation in planned and spontaneous exercise becomes normalized and when something becomes normal it becomes your habit.

What does this have to do with heart disease and what the doctor may not be telling you?

Well, exercise improves the quality of the blood vessels, it improves insulin sensitivity which can lower lipid levels in the blood. It can help to lower cholesterol, reduce high blood pressure, lower stress, improve sleep and it can make the continuation of smoking challenging.

Improving your nutritional habit will reduce oxidative stress and improve your ability to recover from all types of stress, it will stabilize insulin levels, decrease fatty acid levels in the blood (lower cholesterol), improve vitamin K and D levels, reduce the risk of kidney disease and promote thyroid functioning.

The doctor my tell you to eat better and exercise more, and take some pills. They won’t be there to help you ramp-up the exercise and manage the changes in eating because they have sick patients to see. And the pills they are prescribing treat the symptom of disease and not the underlying issue. In almost all cases, heart disease is a lifestyle disease so it is prevented by good quality food and appropriate exercise. The food and exercise do something the pills cannot, they change the internal environment profoundly such that disease creation becomes almost impossible.

Keep in mind that we are not doctors, we are nutrition and exercise coaches who are dedicated to helping our clients enjoy the full experience of a long life. Our solutions are hard work, fundamental shifts in eating behaviors and ongoing accountability to someone outside of yourself. If you are sick, go and see a doctor, if you want to avoid getting sick, come and see us.

The Opportunity Cost Of Not Trying To Be Healthy

Opportunity cost is defined as the cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. For example, the opportunity cost of spending all of your money on a nice car having no money for food, a house, entertainment, gas for the car, etc…. It’s a fairly straight forward concept and can be used in many areas to describe the costs of making a particular decision.

Ill-health is usually measured in relation to disease such that the opportunity cost of getting sick is measured as lost years of life. We cannot disagree with this measurement as something like a terminal diagnosis of cancer does shorten ones life expectancy but it doesn’t capture the full opportunity cost of ill-health which is that of lost quality of life.

When considering the opportunity cost of obesity, we need to consider a multitude of factors. Obese people tend to spend more money on food, fuel, and clothing, so there is a financial cost. They also tend to have fewer options when it comes to clothing and fashion, so there is a style and creative expression cost. Many obese people report a sense of alienation, ostracization and general anxiety when in public, so there is a psychological cost.

The psychological cost can have a wide scope – some people report a loss of confidence that causes them to limit their risk exposure so they don’t take the chances that may lead them towards a more complete experience of life. They may limit their dating options, job opportunities, vacation experiences and their general sense of being in control of their own life. Compounding these are the obese behaviors that one may display such as emotional eating, eating disorders and escapist actions such as substance abuse, abusive relationships and compulsiveness in other areas.

One does not have to be obese to experience the negative opportunity cost. Many people experience a boost in confidence when they lower their body fat, increase their level of lean muscle mass or increase their strength. This confidence can be leveraged in many ways to expose the individual to a variety of new stimuli or situations that improve the quality of life – participation in sports, seeking out different companionship partners, visiting new places, etc…

When viewed in this light, the opportunity cost of not being as healthy and fit as possible is very expensive. At best it comes down to living a life that isn’t of as high a quality as it could be and at worst it comes down to living a life of isolation and fear. When positioned against the amount of nutrition and exercise effort needed to improve ones health to a confidence inspiring level it doesn’t make much sense to avoid the putting in the work.

When making the decision about enrolling yourself in a life transformation program, consider both the cost of NOT doing it and benefit OF doing it.

Are You Coachable?

Successful people behave in successful ways. The role of any great coach is to help their clients modify their behavior. When we build upon the assumption that people are born perfect, removing the patterns or behaviors that don’t work is the fastest way to restore a clients life to a state of full potential. For this reason, clients MUST be coachable. Below it a list of 5 characteristics that make someone coachable.

Willingness to accept that they need guidance. People need the help from other people and those who are humble are open to the idea that they can’t do everything on their on. They are clear to the fact that their limitations ARE the reason why they have sat down with a coach. This isn’t the thought “I’m going to hear what they can do for me” it’s the belief “I’m going to find out what isn’t working for me and change it.”

Being open and willing to doing something, and lots of it. Those looking for big changes KNOW that they need to do things. What needs to be done isn’t going to be the same for everyone, but doing new things, and doing them a lot, IS a criteria for change. Those who are committed to unfamiliar or unreasonable actions are coachable because coaches ask people to do things that their clients are not doing. They have to because their clients either don’t know what to do or don’t do what they need to.

Having clear goals in mind. Today is the starting point, call it point “A”. Your goals are the end point, point “B”. The area between A and B represent the work and behaviors that need to occur. Without knowing too much about someone, a coach has a clear understanding of point A. But point B is personal to the client and it is impossible to achieve unless they create it. It is the top of the mountain, the finish line, the destination, and it must be clearly defined by the client to the coach in-order for the coaching partnership to be effective and transformative.

A willingness to let someone else control their behavior. Giving-up control can be scary, but when you are looking to achieve that which is impossible for you to achieve on your own, you NEED to let someone else drive your body / mind. There is a leap of faith involved with this, but if you could have done it yourself you would have done it already. Engage and hire the best people you can afford and do what they tell you to do.

Confidence in yourself that you can start and maintain the behaviors needed to move you towards your goals. If knowledge or wisdom was all that was needed, everyone would have the life they wanted, but these things are just pieces of the puzzle. What is most important is an understanding that your life will only change if you know that it is possible to change. Any belief that things can only be as they are will render the coaching relationship ineffective as it helps keep someone stuck in their current way of being. Knowing that things can and will change when the effort is put in will empower the client and coach and create the transformation in behaviors that are needed to create success.

Good and great coaches are only as good as their clients; it all comes down to the client and their ability to be coachable.

Do Your Thoughts Match Your Goals?

Dissonance is defined as tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements. It looks, sounds and feels like many things, but in the realm of training and performance coaching it is simply unattained potential; which itself sounds like self-doubt and low confidence, feels like failure and looks like sadness, obesity and a lack of life optimization that leaves a human being in a depressed like state.

The solution is very simple, eliminate the unsuitable elements as quickly as possible to restore the harmonious synchronous actions, thoughts and feelings. Doing this will get someone moving forward again in a hurry. This is a skill and it may take time to cultivate, but it is very easy to do and just requires effort and sacrifice.

But why is does this seem like a challenge to so many people? Well, because most have never been taught how to match thoughts to goals and instead allow their goals to become matched to their thoughts.

Make no mistake about it, those two statements are not the same. Linguistically and mathematically they look very similar in to each other, but when the direction of causation is considered it is evident that goals that are based on thoughts and feelings have more to do with recreating the past or keeping things as they are than anything else while thoughts and feelings that are based on goals are about creating a future that is based on something unreasonable and completely new.

Think about it for a minute – if you let your thoughts and therefore your feelings dictate your goals how are they going to be extraordinary? How are they going to be anything other than based on your past or the present moment given that you think what you think and this causes you to feel what you feel? It just doesn’t work like that. If, on the other hand, you take the time to clear your mind and let your emotional state settle, you will create a blank stillness from which to create goals. This affords you the freedom from self-doubt, low confidence, a sense of failure, sadness, obesity and depression. Avoidance or escape will NOT be the primary objective for your goals so you will be free to create ANYTHING you want as a future possibility.

We do a lot of goal setting with our clients and one of the key things we do is try to get our clients to free their minds before we begin to shape things. Without clearing away the existing thoughts (the ones that got them to be sitting down in front of us) we cannot establish the groundwork for the powerful collaborative partnership that yields the highest level of success. Put another way, an average mind creates average goals and average goals create an average life.

During a goal setting session, we encourage the client to create the impossible dream by getting them to let go of the past and the present and project themselves into the future, to a time when ANYTHING is possible. Once we get them into a peak emotional state, what they want for their best life starts to flow out of them and the goals quickly create themselves. There will be some further refinement to establish dates and action items but the tough part of becoming the possibility is over. We anchor the peak emotional state to their goals through the mental linking of success action items to ensure that they are able to return to this place of possibilities at will, but rarely do they ever need more than a few coaching words to keep them on track. When you create goals without referencing that which already is, your brain is free to create thoughts that bring forth a new reality.

You Are Building Adults – Modeling Success For Successful Children

We talk to a lot of parents because we’re curious about the experience of being one. They tell us their hopes and fears, their concerns about the future and the things that bring them optimism. Over the years, their stories have helped us developed an appreciation of what it means to be a parent. One of the striking facts that seems to jump out is related to the observational learning and the normalization that children do when they seeing their parents doing ANYTHING. This is something that we see in our coaching clients everyday – most of them are doing what their parents did when they were growing up.

Things that parents pass along to their children that don’t serve to optimize development:

Teaching ineffective exercise habits. Active parents tend to have active children. When a parent teaches a child that there is joy in moving, we rarely need to work with them in any way other than to help them achieve peak performance. With a well-established baseline, young people tend to continue to move. They may decide to go as far as they can in a sport or simply become a recreational participant, but the activity habit is sticky and most enjoy the lifelong benefits associated with maintaining an active life. We do however work with a lot of individuals who didn’t have the exercise habit modeled when they were younger and there is a host of issue associated with this lack of movement. It is fair to say that teaching an adult how to love moving is one of the bigger challenges primarily because they have already learned how to love NOT moving.

Teaching children poor eating habits. A serving size is a different thing for every family but it tends to be the same size for everyone in the same family. Lean parents tend to raise children who are closer to their ideal body weight and composition than obese parents, who tend to raise children who are heavier. Families who sit down and eat meals together tend to continue to sit down and eat meals together. Parents who help children view food as the source of nutrition, building material and the occasional treat establish a repeatable and reasonable relationship with food. Those who teach their children that food a reward and that every meal should consist of foods that are enjoyable and easy tend to raise children who are lazy when it comes to their attitudes towards food preparation.

Not teaching children how to not win. Learning how to handle defeat or not being the best appropriately will go a long way in giving a child an advantage when it comes to life. Human beings do most of their learning by making mistakes – trial and error is how each of us learned how to walk, talk, move, etc…. However, at some point we are taught to feel shame for being wrong and this causes us to close-up and avoid the experiences that will produce useful lessons. There is a trend towards eliminating failing grades in schools to ensure that no child endures the lesson of accountability and responsibility until they graduate high school. The impact of missing these lessons can be devastating given that failing in school opens a person up to improved coaching / teaching while failing in the work force eliminates their employment. There is an equally damaging trend toward sports tournaments becoming festivals in which everyone participates and is regarded as a winner. The stigmatization of everyone being the same is likely more damaging to motivation than the consequences of not being the best.

Passing long a tendency to give-up before success or goals are achieved – phrased another way, allowing a child to rely too much on talent or innate qualities to garner attention or positive reinforcement vs. reinforcing their effort. Trying is a skill that will last a lifetime. Looks will fade, other people will come along who naturally better at something, talent burn itself out over time as one ages. If a child never learns the value of putting in enormous effort in order to increase the likelihood of success, they will tend to give-up very quickly before achieving anything in terms of transformation, success or problem solving. Those individuals who are taught to work hard regardless of the outcome will be at a distinct advantage when it comes to achieving ANYTHING.

Now each of these things can be taught to a young person through direct intervention and teaching or they can be taught passively through modeling. Teaching is not the same as doing, so when you try to teach a child these skills, you do not reap the benefits associated with BEING those skills. Modeling tenacity will guide a child towards persistence alone with generating greater success for a parent. The same applies to being an active parent who takes a direct role in food choices; not only will their children learn how to eat more effectively and develop a love of movement, but the adult will enjoy an improved quality of life a boost in vitality that can only come from participating in a health choices.

Ab Recruitment, Women And Cuing

Rachel once said to me “if you really want to do your female clients a favor teach them how to set their properly and get them to be able to do it at any time.” She explained what was involved with it and I imagined a can of beans with Kegels setting the pelvic floor at the bottom, drawing the stomach in to set the obliques, tightening the front and then push out against them with the transverse abdominis to set the diaphragm, and letting the lower back contract as needed to make a strong and stable cylinder.

It takes practice to gain control of each step but it’s doable. My female clients did comment that it felt better, that they liked the tightness in the ab area and that they felt more stable doing whatever movement. I came up with cues to help keep the thought present in their mind so they would always has their core set or be a few seconds away from it. It works great. Well, it works great when people hear what I am saying.

Sometimes people hear something else. I’m not sure what it was they were hearing but it was something that didn’t come across well. With my cycling classes, I throw out a lot of general coaching cues to no one in particular – chest up, shoulders back – it’s just there to remind people that these things are important and to keep doing them or get back to doing them. With personal training any general cue can be taken to be a specific cue, as it should be under most circumstances. If I say chest up it means the chest is down or it is beginning to drop. I can see that it is dropping. The issue with the “keep the abs tight” or “are your abs on?” cues is that they are reminder cues only because I can’t tell most of the time if someone is doing a Kegel when they do DB press.

The break down occurs when I don’t accurately explain and continue to remind the client that I can’t see what is happening inside their bodies and can only see the breakdowns. If they believe that I am saying they are not engaging the core when I cue generally about it, and they are engaging it, their is a shift in focus over to something completely unrelated; which is “why is he saying it then, what could does he mean?”

This occurs more with intelligent female clients than any other group with the only exception being intelligent female athletes who try to fix everything and seek out specific clarification when they are not clear on what I have said. Males tend not to say “but I am contracting my core” and just keep doing it. To avoid this pitfall, I must explain that I am giving general coaching to keep their mind on the goal and not specific coaching given that I cannot experience what is going on in their insides.