In this call you’ll hear Mike reveal some of the most common mistakes that people make when it comes to getting a six pack and how you can the best results in the shortest time possible. You can listen to this seminar for a limited time by clicking here.

Jim: What are some rules people should follow for an effective workout?

Tom:    One of course would be form.  You have to learn the proper technique for the exercise.  That’s important because bad form can cause an injury.  If you’re injured, you can’t work out.  Second would be that poor form robs you of results.  For example, if you’re heaving a weight up and using momentum to lift the weight, the muscle’s not working.  Momentum is working.  If you’re dropping the weight, it is gravity working; not your muscle resisting.  Form is number one.

Number two, proper resistance – for weight training that means choosing the right amount of weight to give you the exact stimulus you need to get the response you want – strength and muscle growth.  If you don’t use enough weight, you don’t get the stimulus you wanted.  Outside of some calories you burn, your workout was ineffective.

What I’ve noticed is the advanced trainee gets a real instinct for this.  If you watch a pro in a gym, they might put the pin in the machine, do a couple of reps.  Immediately they stop and they pull the pin out and they adjust it.  They know instantly or they’ve been keeping a training journal and they’re tracking the exact poundages they used for the previous workout.  They’ve walked into the gym knowing exactly how much weight to use.

If you are a beginner, you need to work on this.  You need to develop a sense of the right load to use as early as possible in your training career.  One what that I like to help people do that is by instead of giving a fixed number of sets and reps, I use two things – a rep range and a rep max.  Now I’m sure you’ve heard a training program with a prescription “I want you to do three sets of ten; four sets of eight; five sets of five” and there’s nothing wrong with that provided you have load selection down to a “T”.  If you do that, you need to know how to pick the right weight.

I would prefer to figure out what your goal is, choose the right repetition range for that goal – for example muscle growth is typically a range of 8-12 reps – and instead of saying three sets of ten, I’m going to say “I want you to do three sets of 8-12.”  I’m going to give you a repetition max number of 12.  Your cue is that if you can do 12 reps in good form, that’s your signal to increase the weight.

If you’re training with the right weight, the last rep or two is very difficult.  You are working to get the last rep or two.  You may even hit failure on that last rep on some of your sets.  It happens between 8-12 – no brainer way to figure out how much weight to use and it’s really important because I see a lot of people using light weights and they’re doing three sets of 12, but it was a 25 rep max.  They’ve selected absolutely the wrong weights.  You’ve got to nail down the poundages.

Number three would be progressive overload or some kind of overload or some kind of progression.  That’s the fundamental principle of making progress.  Here’s a rule to remember – do what you’ve always done; get what you’ve always got.  I have that on a little poster.  I’m looking at it right now up on my bulletin board.  That’s one that you should always remember.  To get something that you never got before like more muscle or a leaner body than you’ve ever had before or more strength than you’ve ever had before, you are going to have to do some work that’s above and beyond what you’ve ever done before.  Makes sense, right?

You have to work out of your comfort zone.  Safely but steadily you push a little bit past your previous workout.  A little more weight, another rep or two, the same workout completed in less time which is called density; a new exercise you have never done before; a new combination of exercises; a new workout program – something – anything you’ve never done before.

I could go on and on, but one more I think is really important is recovery because the growth takes place outside of the gym, not while you’re in the gym.  This one is so important.  It influences all the others.  Your volume, your frequency, your resistance, everything – if you’re not recovering between workouts you may have to change your frequency.  If you were training four or five days a week, you may have to come back to three days a week or you may need to put more rest days in between.  If you were doing 12 sets per body part and you’re feeling overtrained and you’re not recovering, you may have to cut back to 8 or 6 or 3.

The idea is that you have to overload your body and make it do work that it hasn’t done before, but you have to be able to recover from that.  The idea here is that training is a stress.  People have this idea that stress is bad.  Stress is not bad.  Stress is your stimulus for growth.  No stress, no growth.  You rot away and die.  What you need is stress, recovery, stress, recovery, stress, recovery and that would be a good thing to remember in terms of life stress as well with people’s work and with people’s career.
I mention this because your lifestyle is going to influence the results that you get out of the gym too.  If you have a high stress psychological level and you’re not sleeping well and your boss is driving you crazy and you’re overworked, it’s going to affect physical recovery.  You have to take the time to balance all kinds of work with stress and that’s what’s going to keep the progress coming.

Jim: You personally have shifted the way that you eat; the way that you look at things; how do you keep yourself motivated and how do others create motivation for fat loss?

Holly:    This is a great question and it’s so funny that you ask me this because I just held a coaching call last night for my Fit Yummy Mummies.  It was all about motivation because a lot of women are like “Ah how do I keep this motivation?  I’m so excited.  I don’t want it to go away.”
For them, I mentioned four strategies that they need to do up front right away when they begin to help their motivation; keep them going strong.  The number one step is absolutely goal setting.  You have to know what you want and most importantly why you want it.  Then of course put your goals in a place where you can see them on a daily basis so you keep focused.

The second strategy is daily affirmations.  Watch your . . . putting positive phrases and words in front of you and watching your self talk.  Women are notorious for beating themselves up and filling their minds with negative things.  It’s important to switch that around to a more positive outlook.

The third strategy is creating a vision board which is taking the goal setting to another step.  It’s actually a collage of your goals.  It’s a very fun project, but it really puts meaning into what you’re doing.  I told the ladies “Bring the belief you have in yourself to life by creating a vision board.”

Of course, recruit assistance and with my community – my Fit Yummy Mummy club – it’s all about staying connected and blogging and ask for help when you need it.  Because they have access to each and every one of the members, they can also read through the successes of others and feel inspired to be able to do the same.  Staying connected is very important.

For me to stay motivated, like I shared with them the healthy habits that I practice day in and day out are just that. They’re habits for me at this point because I’ve been practicing them for so long.  It just becomes something that I do.  I don’t really think twice about it.  Of course we associate habits with brushing your teeth.  You don’t think about it.  But unlike the mindless monotony of this habit, there are so many immediate rewards attached to the healthy habits of eating right and exercising.  I absolutely look forward to eating my supportive meals and I crave my workouts.

Yes, I’m human.  I have days where I have to talk myself into it; however, I stay motivated because I remind myself of how good I will soon feel.  I do it also by considering from the inside out.  I always focus on the positive outcomes physically and emotionally.

First and foremost my energy levels – I love the energy I get from my workouts and from my meals.  A lot of clients that I work with — one of their major obstacles is later in the afternoon when they feel they want to take a nap or they’re craving those high sugar processed carbs to give them a quick pick me up.
When if you – this is the coolest thing I’ve noticed since I’ve lived this healthy lifestyle is that I don’t have those any more.  Yes, my exercise plays a role in it, but it’s also because I’m choosing to eat different types of foods.  I don’t get that drop in energy in the second half of the day.  I’m more productive the second half of the day.

I also love how empowered I feel after I get my workout in.  It helps me to make better choices for the rest of the day.  I love how my mood has improved.  I love how I’m less stressed.  Improved mood and reduction in stress together these two outcomes are what allow me to truly enjoy the time I spend with my husband and my son.  That improves the quality of my relationships.  Physically it feels good to feel lean and toned.  Your posture changes.  You feel strong from the inside out.  This is what truly motivates me.

Jim:    That’s my favorite part of any of these calls is because you’re so congruent in the way that you’re saying it.  So many people are surrounded by people that maybe don’t have the health or body that they want and so they’re constantly hearing those beliefs and those perceptions.  To hear you describe it so congruently, we know you live it.  It’s so great for you to be explicit about it.

One of the things I’d like to point out is that because you didn’t bring out the physicality of it until the end.  Sometimes people go into it and they’re just focused on the weight.  They are focused on the size clothes.  They wonder why they can’t maintain the motivation.  The things you just described that really kind of jazz you up continuously are so much deeper than that it sounds like.

Holly:     That’s where the lasting power is.  People are like “How do you stay motivated?  Where do you get it from?”  This is where it is.  You can have this too.

Jim:    It sounds like it depends on how you look at it.  That goes hand in hand with what you started off with – those four steps.  That makes a lot of sense.  Again, anyone who is looking to jump into something and really get going with something, start by right off the bat doing something different.  Re-describe why you want to do it, not just the size clothes or the weight loss, but the emotional reasons; the energy levels and the things that are really going to affect the quality of your life.

Tom really put on a master class. He reveals which exercises are the best for boosting up your metabolism, his 10 rules for nutrition that keeps you lean, and the most common limiting beliefs that people have when it comes to transforming their bodies. This call is so good, that I’m going to keep the replay up througout the weekend for free.  You can listen to this amazing seminar for a limited time by clicking here.

I interviewed Shawn Phillips this week and he explained this idea in such clear and profound ways that it could change the way that you think about strength for the rest of your life. He became famous for having world class abs, and since then he has continued to go deeper into teaching how you can create the body of your dreams, from the inside out. You can listen to a replay of this powerful seminar for a limited time by clicking here.