I’ve said it before and I will say it again, and again and again. Steady state cardio is for suckers. That’s right -  SUCKERS. Ok, so that is a bit of an overstatement but stick with me. First let’s back up a bit before I tell you what a sucker you have been.

As I tell my clients, your training program should be determined by your goal. Not the other way around. So first let’s define your goal. If your goal is being a distance runner of some kind, then steady state cardio work like elongated bouts on a treadmill would have some benefit to you. Have at it, be my guest, better you than me. But let’s be clear- if you are reading this, distance running is not your goal. Fat loss is (at least for most of you).

May years ago I had a discussion with a personal trainer colleague of mine. I was young and hungry, and he was definitely more established than I at the time. He had some really nice training programs that yielded some decent results. He was also good looking, which helps when you are a trainer, and he was exceptionally personable. The thing was he didn’t know squat when it came to nutrition. His basic philosophy was “calories in , calories out.” That is the basic methodology of many trainers and nutrition centers like Weight Watchers etc. It can work, to a point, but back to my story. He was saying that basically his clients can eat whatever they want, so long as the they burned more calories than they took in. He did not care what the macronutrient ratios were, just the caloric total. Ok…. So I gave him a challenge. Pick any 2 clients, put them on a 2000 calorie diet. One client can only eat Frosted Flakes. The other client could only eat chicken breasts and broccoli (not nutritionally balanced, but you get the point). Put them on the same training program and see who loses the most fat after 4 weeks. Not surprisingly he did not take the challenge. He insisted that it was all math, and that so long as the calories coming in were less than the calories being expended, the client would lose weight. I knew I would never change his mind, so I left it at that.

Too many trainees I see miss the forest for the trees. They are approaching their training programs all wrong, and stagnating as a result. If the goal is fat loss, then metabolic optimization should be our primary focus.  Let me explain.  Your metabolic rate, or “metabolism” is the rate at which you burn calories in a given day.  From a fat loss perspective, the more calories we expend per day, the better.  Far too many people I see in my gym look the absolute same as the day the walked in the door (the same cannot be said of ANY of my clients). If they were to follow some basic principles, all that could change.

Below is a list of various things that have changed my life for the better (not counting the birth of my children, meeting my wife, blah blah blah). Not all are fitness related, but each has impacted my life in a positive way, and maybe yours too. So here they are in no particular order.

People must think I am magic. I wish. If I could wave a magic fitness wand and make people in perfect shape I certainly would, and I would charge a ton to do it.  Sadly, this is just not the case.  One of the biggest misconceptions I encounter when training new clients is that they believe by purchasing my services they will automatically becoming fitter (fitness by osmosis).  Sounds great, but it doesn’t work.  Just hiring a trainer – even a great one like me – will not automatically and immediately change the shape you’re in –
You have to be willing to put in some effort.  With that in mind I have put together a few tenants of training for body transformation.

Hey all, I have a couple of heat related stories for you, and at the end the moral to the stories.  I know you hate stories with morals – just shut up and read.  They are short and I will use small words

Free Fat Loss Workout:
Because summer is synonymous with beaches, pool parties and other events that require little or no clothes I have created some amazingly effective fat incinerating full body circuits for my in person and online clients to get them lean fast.  If you have been splitting your body into sections for your workout (Chest one day, back one day, legs one day etc.) consider making the switch to full body workouts 2-3 times per week. You do not have to make it crazy complicated, just take the exercises you know, and arrange them  in a way that makes sense.  An example would be something like this:

This is a test .

Yippee.