goals

Your Health is your Wealth

/ bensfogel

With the COVID Delta variant completely taking over in the US, the people at the top seem to be ignoring one of the biggest variables in having a good or a poor outcome with this disease. 

That variable is our overall physical condition.  As a client of ours said recently, “My health is MY wealth!”

Why aren’t we being encouraged to pursue the improvement of our physical condition? ⁣ It’s been almost entirely ignored by all of the “experts” out there.  

Here are the facts on the rise of COVID cases and our risk factors associated with it: ⁣

  • The CDC reports obesity increases risk of hospitalization from covid-19 by OVER 700%⁣
  • Poor cardiovascular fitness is an increased risk factor⁣
  • A study from the University of Virginia found exercise reduces a person’s risk of even contracting covid-19⁣
  • Exercise is known to impact and improve the immune system⁣ in positive ways
  • Acute respiratory distress syndrome is a top cause of death from covid-19. Research has shown that there is an exercise-induced antioxidant that can protect against this⁣
  • There’s now an abundance of evidence that Vitamin D reduces covid-19 infection, severity, ICU admission and mortality⁣
  • Collectively, studies show vitamin D is a far more effective basal covid-19 treatment than any additive pharmaceutical available to date⁣

Maybe this is our fault.  The fault of the fitness professional.  

There’s an overwhelming attitude that we are just about looks or aesthetics.  Fitness has become a synonym to these things.  That we are just about “pecs, guns, butt and leg day⁣.”  

But the fitness profession is about so much more than this.  

It’s about strength, muscular endurance, aerobic capacity, mobility, mental health and much, much more.  ⁣

There’s an ABUNDANCE of scientific evidence showing the benefits of exercise on⁣ the following:

  • Cardiovascular disease
  • High blood pressure
  • Cancer
  • Obesity
  • Diabetes
  • Asthma
  • Heart disease
  • Stroke recovery
  • Osteoporosis
  • Sarcopenia 

And the mental health benefits of regular exercise?  There is more research in this area now more than ever.  

⁣I’m a cancer survivor who went through over 2 years of chemotherapy and treatment to go into “remission.”  If it wasn’t for fitness, I probably wouldn’t be here.⁣

⁣Yes we can help athletes perform better and people to look better⁣.  

⁣But I truly believe that we do so much more⁣.  We change lives.  We have the ability to reverse health conditions that otherwise destroy the body.   Nearly 40% of American adults aged 20 and over are obese. 71.6% of adults aged 20 and over are overweight, including those that are obese.  These numbers are really unacceptable.  We can do more.  

Exercise is medicine!⁣  But the problem is, it is not the doctor’s job to “prescribe” exercise.  We get it, this is not their “job.”  

This is our “job” – this is our “why.”  

We all have the ability to choose a better health outcome.  Once we realize that it starts with YOU, that is when change can occur.  

I will leave you with this powerful quote from F.M. Alexander:

“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and it’s their habits that decide their futures.”  

We all have the power to choose what to do next.  As fitness professionals, we will choose to continue to be the place where our clients improve their health outcomes 1% better than yesterday.  

Ready to decide to make fitness and health a part of your daily habits?  Check out our VIP Experience below to learn how to make your next month your best month of the entire year! 

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Stop Counting Calories – Part 1

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Why you should stop counting calories – Part 1 

This is a 2-part series on why we should stop counting calories.  In part one, we will talk more about the history of the calorie and where it came from, and in part two we will discuss why counting calories as the primary means to guide you towards your health goals is misleading you.  

“That [fill in the blank] has too many calories in it!  I can’t eat it, because it must be bad for me.”  

How often have you thought this, or worse yet, said it out loud?  

Our society has been on a kick lately around counting calories for fat loss.  Yes, it is the “socially acceptable” exchange tool that we use to tell us how much energy is in the food we eat, but to learn why we should all stop counting calories we need to learn how the heck (and why) we came up with a calorie as a unit of measure in the first place.  

Benjamin Franklin never said “please pass me those low calorie cookies so I can finish up with these bifocals!”  He never talked about calories, well, because they, like the bifocals were not even invented yet!  

The calorie didn’t even come into existence until the 1800’s, and apparently humans fared pretty well without it.  The calorie wasn’t even originally invented as a measurement tool for food.  Wait, what?!  Yep, that’s right.

Where the heck did the word “Calorie” come from anyway?! 

The calorie was originally used as a measurement tool in physics and engineering and had nothing at all to do with nutritional science.  Here’s the funny part: Nobody truly knows who came up with this unit of measurement, not even the historians of nutrition.  

Despite the confusion over who invented the unit, the calorie as a nutritional unit came to the U.S. by way of an American Chemist  named Wilbur Atwater in 1887. Shortly afterward, the science of nutrition began to take hold in the U.S.

US Popularized the calorie (1918)

A popular early nutrition text published in 1918 by Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters outlined the first methods of counting Calories. In her bestseller, “Diet and Health, with the Key to the Calories”, Peters outlined 100-Calorie portions of many foods and preached counting calories as a way to regulate weight.  This book was a huge hit back then, mainly to women, selling over 2 million copies and it triggered a massive change in societies beliefs about food.  It presented the concept of calorie reduction as the best form of weight loss/watching weight to American women, who were wanting to conform to the new-found body image “thin is in”.  

In her book, Dr. Peters wanted people to start thinking of food merely as calories, and nothing else.  For example, she wrote, “Hereafter you are going to eat calories of food.  Instead of saying one slice of bread, or a piece of pie, you will say 100 calories of bread, (or) 350 calories of pie.”  This shifted food to merely numbers and nothing else, and what a damaging shift it was.  

Even back then, there was no distinction made between the actual quality of the food – it was merely only all about the calories inside the food.  In her system outlined in her book, a person of the same height as her could eat whatever they wanted, as long as they ate a strict diet of 1,200 calories per day.  But how accurate is calorie counting, anyway?  We have to dig in a little deeper to truly understand how this measuring energy works in the first place.

Is a Calorie really a Calorie??

Ok.  Pretend you are alive in the early 1900’s.  This brand new way to measure what you eat is all the talk, so now you better start “watching what you eat!”  

The commonly accepted unit for measuring the energy in food is the calorie.  So how accurate is it, anyways?

Scientifically speaking, a calorie is a unit of energy, just like a foot is a unit of distance.  One calorie is the amount of energy you need to heat up 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius.  So to measure the amount of calories in food, manufacturers needed to use what is called a bomb calorimeter.  This device is used by placing the food source in a sealed container filled with water.  Then you burn the food with electrical energy until the food completely incenerates, and then they measure the water temperature to see how many degrees it was raised.  Based on how many degrees the water was raised, you can tell how many calories were supplied to do it.  

Now, if you are not too familiar with your body and how it works, it definitely does not incinerate food once it enters your body (as much as it feels this way when I am Hangry, apparently it does not burn up inside me!).  The way your body “burns” food is completely different from how the “bomb.com” calorimeter does it!  One of the other major issues with the calorimeter is that it measures ALL the calories inside each product, but most foods contain indigestible food components (like fiber) that are not burned in the human digestive tract.  But that’s not the only issue…There’s more…

The 1990 Nutritional Labeling and Education Act and the Atwater System

This bill passed in 1990 through congress because of the requirements the government wanted to have on food companies to label all of the nutrients and calories on foods.  So instead of using the bomb calorimeter, since this became a much too tedious way to measure calories for food manufacturers, they switched to a much easier method – The Atwater System – to measure calories.  This is the method that we are all super familiar with, and what I learned back in nutritional science courses back in college as the “end all, be all” for measuring calories in food.  It was the Atwater System that allowed us to do some simple math, and wallah, your calorie count appeared!  

Here are the calculations:

1 gram of protein = 4 calories

1 gram of carbohydrates  = 4 calories

1 gram of fat = 9 calories

There you go, apparently that is all that matters!  So, for example if you have one of those yummy bottled “Naked” fruit drinks (great marketing, by the way!) and it has 10 grams of protein, 40 grams of carbohydrates, and 6 grams of fat.  Here is our calorie totals – 

Protein- 10 grams x4 = 40 calories

Carbohydrates – 40 grams x4 = 160 calories

Fat – 6 grams x9 = 54 calories

Total Calories for your Naked drink = 254 calories, and that is what goes on the nutritional label.  The calorie and nutritional label on ALL your foods is based on that and that alone.  Now, if only your body was a machine and it took in all of these calories, utilized and “burned” them all, and you continued to eat a perfect balance of “calories in and calories out” and stayed at that ideal weight.  But that is not what happens in the human body, and that is something we will be discussing WHY next.  

Now that we have gone over the history of the calorie, in part 2 of this blog we will go over why using this gross estimate is one of the most misguided and inaccurate measurements you can use.  There is so much more to the story of the calorie and how your body utilizes food for fuel.  Keep an eye out for part two very soon!

Want to learn more about the way we help our Rockstar members with nutrition, with the emphasis on the quality of food over counting calories?  Check out our 30 Day VIP Experience below!  

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References:



How to tackle change

/ bensfogel

What’s the first thing that happens when we go to start a new routine or habit?  We want to make all the changes overnight!  We want to start that new fitness and exercise routine, start the new diet, get on that new sleep routine – all at once!  Our advice – Shrink the change.  We often bite off more than we can chew when getting started.  You’ll increase your chances of success when you merely focus on less.  How do you know what to focus on first though?  

We love to use this analogy.  Think to yourself:

 What is the ONE thing that if you change would make everything else that you want to change easier or even unnecessary?  

What if you started with drinking just ONE extra glass of water each day?  That would not only help with your hydration, but also your recovery, your sleep, and most likely your satiety.  So often, when we feel hungry, we are actually dehydrated and don’t even realize it until it is too late.  

As another example, say you want to start a new fitness routine.  Would you jump right into 6 days a week training, or would you be ok starting by scheduling 2-3 days a week that you know you could commit to and have live in your calendar as an appointment with yourself (and your coach, ideally!)   

Looking back into the past can give you a lot of insight on how you may have dealt with making bigger changes in your life.  Can you remember as far back to January 1st, 2021? This may have been the day you were going to make that massive shift in your life and start doing (fill in the blank!). 

How is that going for you now? 

In reality, only 7% of people actually stick with their resolutions over the year. The other 93% of us may have bit off more than we could chew. 

By focusing on smaller, more bite size changes over a longer period of time, you will actually see better results! 

Ask yourself, what is the ONE thing I can do successfully over the next 7 days that will get me closer to my goals? 

Can I drink ONE extra glass of water and track it?

Can I cut and slice my vegetables for the week?

Can I schedule my workouts 3 days this week?

Don’t do it all at once, just commit to ONE thing, and see how it goes.

We hope this little bite size tip helps you tackle change by shrinking it down just a little bit.  Want to learn more about how we incorporate these daily habits into a total routine for your mind and body?!  Check out our upcoming 30 day VIP Experience below, where you can get a kickstart to your fitness and your health.

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6 Techniques for a Growth Mindset

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6 Techniques for a Growth Mindset

By: Ben S. Fogel

There has been so much talk lately about the “growth mindset.”  A lot of this has been due to a landmark book on the subject “Mindset” by Carol Dweck.  The author does an amazing job describing the growth mindset, the fixed mindset, and how you can re-train your brain out of one mindset and into another.  But before we start talking all about the “growth mindset” I feel it is important to define both the growth mindset and the fixed mindset.  

In the fixed mindset, you believe that your traits are “fixed.”  Therefore, no matter how hard you work at something or how much effort you give, your traits (intelligence, athleticism, fill in the blank) will not change.  

The growth mindset is believing that you can grow your abilities – that’s really the best way to put it, and the way Carol Dweck, Author of “Mindset” defines the growth mindset.  You can grow your abilities and change, adapt and get better.  Your intelligence is not fixed, and neither is your ability to learn and improve in any part of your life. 

John Wooden, long time UCLA basketball coach was known to have very much a growth mindset.  He actually came up with the idea of the “holy grail” of the growth mindset being the culmination of these 2 things: 

Full preparation and full effort  

As John Wooden once famously said:

”You have to apply yourself each day to becoming a little better.  By applying yourself to the task of being a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better.”  

With this idea in mind of getting just “a little bit better” each and every day, if you take this into action and get 1% better each day on anything in your life, by the end of the year you will become 37 times better!  There are 6 techniques to cultivating a growth mindset I want to share below that I truly feel will help you get 1% better every day! 

1. Stop Failing and Start Learning – You didn’t “fail”, you merely figured out a path that did not work this time around.  Instead of looking at failure as a dead end, look at it as a clue that will lead you to a different path on how to do something.  

As an inventor, Thomas Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”  When you start to look at failure as another step into the right direction, you will start to make some positive progress.  

2. You don’t need others’ approval, you need their criticism – Don’t put praise ahead of the ability for you to learn from criticism.  One of the best ways to do this is to actually ask for feedback.  This is a skill we never learned in school, but that is so valuable in the workplace, or in your relationship.  An example I will give as a business owner is after a meeting, I will often ask my employees, “what could I have done better in this meeting?”  If you are not asking for feedback, it is really hard to cultivate an environment of learning and growth.  

3. Track your progress with a journal – Vividly describing your goals on paper is one of the best ways to really know if you are making any progress at all.  A Harvard Business Study found that the 3% of graduates from their MBA who had their goals written down, ended up earning ten times as much as the other 97% put together, just ten years after graduation.  

In fact, you’re 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down on a regular basis. It has to do with how our brains work. When you write things down, you’re activating both parts of your brain, the imaginative right hemisphere, and the logic-based left hemisphere.  When is the last time you wrote your goals down?  If the evidence says you are almost 50% more likely to achieve your goals by merely writing them down, I would start there!  

4. Focus Inwardly and not on your image – The last thing you need is other peoples validation to achieve your goals.  Don’t wait for others to validate your success, just start taking one step at a time on all the things you can control.  Albert Einstein himself insisted that, “he had not been born with any special gift.” All children are “gifted” for nothing in particular; they are gifted for “everything.” Children who believe that talent and intelligence are made, not born, get better results in every part of life, and this starts at a young age realizing that your traits are not “fixed.”  

5. Learn from the mistakes of others – There is an old saying that “success leaves clues” – it is also true that mistakes leave clues as well!  These mistakes are what kept the successful to continue to learn and grow.  Learning from the mistakes that other people make before you will fast track your success by not making the same mistakes.  Oftentimes though, we sometimes only look at the success of people, and not the mistakes or failures.  Remember, mistakes leave clues, too!  

6. Practice Gratitude – I know this may be one of the most cliche terms over the past few years, but practicing gratitude daily can give you some of the most rewarding, positive energy for a very small investment of your time and energy.  By merely writing down one thing you are grateful for each day, you are delivering a positive thought into your mind and starting your day with positivity, not negativity.  Negativity leads to the fixed mindset, while positivity leads to the growth mindset.  Here is a little something I started to write every day:

Today can be better than yesterday.  I have the power to make it so.  From positivity and attitude grows perseverance.  Perseverance by definition makes me unstoppable!

Start with just one of these 6 techniques that will help you cultivate a growth mindset.  Want to join us for the next 3 weeks to cultivate a growth mindset in all the things you can control with your health, wellness and happiness?  Check out our next round of our Epic 21 Day Experience here:

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TIME – How to make the most of it

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By: Ben S. Fogel

Time is our most valuable non-renewable resource.  Why does it feel like time melts away most days? 

Most people fail with time management because they don’t know or frankly realize how much time they waste.  

A typical smartphone user checks his or her phone 2,617 times every day, according to a study by the research firm D Scout.  

Yes, you heard that right!  That eats up 90 minutes per day wasted on your phone, or 23 days per year.  

What about Television usage?  The average American watches an average of 33 hours per week watching TV!  According to Neilsen, the average American spends 11 hours per day watching or interacting with media.  If you are wasting a majority of your waking hours on external media, and you are having a hard time “finding time” for other things, like taking time to take care of yourself – it may be time to audit your day.  

Bill Gates is never late to a meeting.  When asked, he said:

“Because time is THE ONE finite resource I can’t buy more of.”

The old proverb “time is money” isn’t really true.  Time is worth so much more than money.  Time is, literally your life.  What you do with your time directly correlates with your quality of life.  

Your tomorrow actually starts the night before.  Instead of staying up late worrying about your never ending “to-do” list, putting together a plan for how you will win the day tomorrow helps you close all the open tabs in your brain.  

Here are 3 tips I have to help you shape your best tomorrow.

1. Write out your “to-do” list the night before

But instead of just writing down all the things, capture them as either “primary” projects or tasks that absolutely need to get done tomorrow, or as “secondary” tasks – these are all your things you can quickly go through and “check off” your list when done, like grabbing the groceries, dry cleaning, or sending that email.  

2. Place your primary and secondary items in your calendar

Remember, the project or task will NOT get done unless it lives in space and time.  Make sure to actually schedule a time for it to get completed during your next day.  This is SO important.  This is often overlooked and you think, “I will just get it done tomorrow at some point” then it gets missed, forgotten or overlooked.  

Make sure to place it in your schedule just like it is an important meeting with a co-worker or client.  

3. Always overestimate the amount of time you think it will get something done.  

As humans, we are horrible at estimating how much time it takes to do things.  What I like to do is overestimate the amount of time a project takes.  Then, if I finish it early, I can give myself a big pat on the back and feel good that I have completed something early!  Also, if you have a project you know that will take more than one sitting (more than 1 hr) make sure you block out that time over the course of the week or month. 

Controlling your time will lead to so much more positive things in your life.  One being having the time to take care of yourself!  Are you ready to take the time for you, and control your health?!  We would love to be in your corner.  We have 3 more spots for our May 21 Day Challenge!  Learn more and sign up below:

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Your Thoughts Shape YOU

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Your Thoughts Shape YOU

By: Kourtney Cannell

Our thoughts are important!  How we talk to ourselves and how we think about things impacts how we feel. Have you ever looked in the mirror and said, “I look fat in this shirt.” How did that thought influence your mood?  I’ll bet the rest of the day you might be placing negative thoughts towards yourself based on how you talked to yourself in the mirror.  

We often will remind our members when they make a negative comment to themselves with this question:

“Would you talk to your best friend the way you are talking to yourself right now?” 

The answer is always no.  

Our thoughts play a huge role in how we feel, interact with others, and perceive the world around us.  Our thoughts are literally the seeds that form our actions and behaviors every single day.  If you start your day with negative thoughts, it is often very hard to turn that thought patterning around to positive ones.  

Oftentimes, we might focus our thoughts on what is wrong or negative. Inaccurate thinking patterns lead us to see the worst possible outcomes to a situation. These distorted thoughts cause us to feel bad about ourselves and/or others. We all experience negative thoughts, but sometimes we get stuck in them and don’t see the pattern and how it hurts our emotional health and well-being. 

This is a list of common inaccurate thinking patterns. Can you identify any of these patterns in yourself? 

Common Inaccurate Thinking Patterns:

Inaccurate Thinking Pattern

Description

All Or Nothing

Thinking only in absolutes.  Seeing someone or something as all good or all bad (Binary Thinking) or looking for “always” or “never”

Labeling

Labeling yourself or others in terms such as “lazy”, “fat”, “stupid”.  Stating these labels as facts. 

The Comparison Game

Comparing yourself to others and needing to keep up with others to feel good or better about yourself. 

“Should” Statements

Have pre-conditions on how you or others “should” be.  

My challenge for you is to recognize the pattern you use the most.  Then from there, when you catch yourself in that inaccurate thinking pattern, pause for a moment and reflect on your feelings.  Ask yourself “Does this make me feel worse or better in this moment?”  Then, say something positive to yourself (this is the MOST important part!).  

It could be as simple as you caught yourself labeling yourself as “fat” in the mirror.  Instead, you look in the mirror and say, “look at my strong body. I can do things now that I couldn’t do before I started working out.”  Try to be specific as possible on that positive attribute you want to highlight.  

One of the hardest things to do is to actually NAME the pattern you are doing.  Once you are able to identify, name and flip the switch to the positive you will feel and see the difference it will make on your day!  

Give it a try, and let us know how it goes! 

Come join us for our next round of the Epic 21 Day Challenge where we can help guide you with positive thoughts and actions and help you gain more confidence in yourself in the next 21 days than you ever have in the past!  You can get all sorts of BONUSES for signing up now!  Check it all out here:

Start Your First 30 Days HERE!



Stop Setting “Weight” Goals

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By: Kourtney Cannell

Have you ever seen a previous picture of yourself  and thought  “I looked great back then! What I would give to look like that again!” or weighed yourself and said “Awe, there was a time when I was “X” weight, what I would do to get there again!” 

I have a question for you. At the time of that picture or when you were at that weight, were you happy with your body? 

Hey Epic Rockstars.  Coach Kourtney here.  I just wanted to get real with you all for a few minutes here about “The goal number.” The goal weight, the goal body fat percentage, the goal pant size.  Most of us have these types of goals.  But where do they come from? 

My experience has been that they come from a place of comparison, a comparison to someone else, to how I used to be, or how I think I should be. 

My thought process would kind of go like this – and thus, the goal number is born:

“Maybe if I lose 20lbs, I’ll like what I see.” 

“She’s a size 4, maybe I’ll look like her if I’m a size 4 too, then I’ll be happy.”

“I won’t have any insecurities about my body if I have “X” body fat %.”

The “I’ll be happy/happier when I reach this number” kind of goal. 

There is nothing wrong with having and pursuing goals. The problem comes when we put our happiness and excitement on hold until we reach that goal.

Here’s my personal experience with these kinds of number goals and the two things that always happen:  

  1. The “weigh-in” doesn’t go well which leads to a  terrible mood, then I start picking apart my body. 

  2. The weigh-in does go well, but not as well as I wanted.  I find something negative about it and I am not as happy as I thought I would be. 

I have thought, and maybe so have you, that as soon as I reach this magic number, it will be like a switch is flipped and I, all of the sudden, exude confidence, have no insecurities, and am thrilled with this “new” body of mine. But does that really happen? My experience has been that it does not.

I am not saying that we should not have goals, but should we really be putting our happiness on hold because we aren’t at that “goal number” yet? 

As some of you know, I have struggled with eating disorders since I was 13. I was anorexic for a time, bulimic for a time, a binger for a time, even now I still struggle with emotional binge eating. With this comes a negative body image and toxic thinking patterns.  

We have this illusion that we will only feel better once we hit that goal. 

I would do whatever I could to get to that number, even if it meant starving myself, or working out until I burned off as many calories as I just ate. 

I would argue to myself, “But Kourtney, the whole reason I exercise is to get to that number.”

I used to think that the only way I could be happy with my body is to hit that goal number, but over the last 2 years I have learned that I can be happy in my body now. Being grateful for what my body can do right now!  

Here is what I have learned that I think can help you along your journey to reach your health and wellness goals:

  1. Do not put your happiness on hold until you reach a goal.  As the saying goes, it is about the journey and not the destination.  This is so true when it comes to health and wellness.  The journey of becoming a better version of yourself, and 1% better every day is what will bring you lasting change to your mind and body. 

  2. Don’t associate your health and wellness goal to a goal “number.”  Instead, focus on what your body will be able to DO as a result of your progress you make over time.  Focusing on outcomes that that occur as a result of your hard work that are not directly tied to a goal number is a healthy place to start.  Being able to get up and down the stairs without feeling out of breath, getting up and down off the ground to play with your kids – these are much more than merely side effects of losing weight.  These are the “why” behind what you are doing.  They are the reason you keep pushing towards improving yourself. 

  3. Reward yourself for your accomplishments.  Your health and wellness journey should be a lifelong one, and when you start to see progress it can be very motivating.  It can also be a long, sometimes boring road of eating the same (or similar) meals filled with protein, veggies and water.  Reward yourself often – go out to dinner and order the dessert –  give yourself a built-in reward for accomplishing a milestone.  It can be something as simple as buying those new clothes with the changing of the seasons.  Rewarding yourself often for your accomplishments is something that will keep you motivated as well.  

  4. Be grateful for what your body can do RIGHT NOW.  This is one of the most powerful things you can do on a daily basis.  Something as simple as writing down ONE thing you are grateful that your body can do today can change your mindset into the positive.  For example, writing “I am grateful to be able to play with my kids at the park today, and slide up and down the slide” can bring positive affirmations of what your body CAN do!  

Remember, there is so much more to be proud of than just reaching that “number” on the scale.  Once I realized I could create my happiness by being grateful for what my body can do right now, that changed my mindset for the long term progress I like to call “life”.  

Come join us for our next round of the Epic 21 Day Challenge where we can help guide you with creating your “perfect day” and help you gain more confidence in yourself in the next 21 days than you ever have in the past!  You can get all sorts of BONUSES for signing up now!  Check it all out here:

Start Your First 30 Days HERE!

Harnessing the Habit of Awareness

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Harnessing the “Habit of Awareness”

What’s up, Rockstars! Ben here sharing a question that we got from one of our members in the first week of our New Year New You Challenge. Here was the question:
 
“What percentage of my diet should be protein, carbs and fat to lose fat and to gain muscle?”
 
This was a great question, and one we wanted to break down a little bit.
 

 
Instead of being hyperfocused on the macronutrients – grams of protein, carbs and fat – or even the amount of calories coming from those foods – we challenge our members to becoming more “aware” of what they are eating by merely tracking it daily in a journal or on a tracking app.
 
We call this “The Habit of Awareness.” This habit is a simple one, but not always easy to start. What we recommend is to start with one meal a day. You could even start with the time of day where you feel like you don’t have the most consistency or structure, and then by using the habit of writing down what you are eating, it will gently nudge you into having a little more structure in your day. Then, it will push you into the direction of being more aware of what you are eating during that time of day.
 
Come join us for our next round of the Epic 21 Day Challenge where we will help you harness the habit of awareness, and gain more strength in the next 21 days than you ever have in the past!
 

3 Tips for a pain free Deadlift

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3 Tips for a pain free Deadlift!

What’s up Epic Rockstars, Ben here. Today I wanted to go through 3 very simple and quick tips you can use right away to perfect your deadlift.
 

 
**TIP #1** Elevate your toes. By simply elevating your toes 1-2″, it forces you to automatically shift your weight back more, and allows you to maximally bend your hips and minimally bend your knees (the exact pattern of a hinge or a deadlift!).
 
**TIP #2** Use a dowel to ensure your back is not flexing (lower back or upper back) – Placing a dowel on your back will give you some great feedback as to whether you are keeping a nice, neutral spine during your deadlift pattern, or if you are indeed flexing your back. It will give you instant feedback, and is a great drill to use.
 
**TIP #3** Front Loaded Deadlifts. By grabbing a backpack, sandbag, or anything you can hug and squeeze, it teaches you to keep great posture during your deadlifts and to get your core muscles to actively stabilize your back and the rest of your body.
 
Give these 3 tips a try, and let us know how it goes!
 
Also, come join us for our next round of the Epic 21 Day Challenge where we will help you deadlift pain free, and get stronger in the next 21 days than you ever have been in the past!
 

Making Front Planks Harder!

/ bensfogel

How to make your Front Plank “Harder!” 

What’s up! Ben here with 3 easy cues you can use today to make your planks turn into what we call “Hardstyle” front planks!

1. Squeeze your heels together – Narrowing your base of suppurt and actually focusing on “squeezing” inwards with your heels will promote more muscle activation, and make your planks a little more active

2. Squeeze your knees together – By squeezing your knees together, you are doing a lot of similar things as squeezing your heels together. You are also putting your pelvis and lower back in a great “tucked” position. We don’t want your back excessively arched or extented, and this one cue will help promote more of a neutral spine.

3. Pull your elbows towards your ribcage – This ONE cue is a gamechanger! It invites your upper body to the plank, and also invites more muscles to activate and “join the party!” Your whole body should actually move forward – if your head was 2-3″ away from a wall, then your head would bump into that wall when you performed this cue and when you pull yourself forward.

** A quick disclaimer – since we are now making your plank more challenging, the goal here is to hold these “hardstyle front planks” for a shorter period of time. Start with a goal of 3 holds for up to 10 seconds. That is one set. Try for 2-3 sets like that!

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