In this call you’ll hear Darin explain how he gets results like this from his clients (regardless of their age).  He also talks about his favorite 2 exercises, how to use your mind to maximize your results, and some motivation tricks for staying on track. 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.

In this call you’ll hear Scott explain how he handles setbacks and failures, how to become passionate about your goals, and the secrets to continually getting amazing results. You can listen to this amazing seminar for a limited time by clicking here.

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.

Jim: Let me ask you this. What are some of the biggest misconceptions people have when it comes to burning fat and losing weight?

Shawn:    I think one of them and I mentioned part of it, but I’ll take it a little deeper which is that it’s kind of like we have this conditioned time and effort response.  It’s the same thing we get in our working.  We think sometimes that I need to put in more hours and work harder and more time and effort.  We live in a results economy today.  If you want to make more money; create more wealth; be in a more abundant life, it’s more focused results you need, not more time and effort.

Same thing stands true for your fitness.  You don’t need to be in the time and effort all the time.  You need to be more focused results which means being clear about what you want; being intentional about it; bringing your mind integrating it and doing the specific steps A, B, C with purpose and clarity and effectiveness.  That means (a) having a plan; (b) bringing your mind to the party.

Jim:    And you see that pretty regularly that people aren’t . . . it becomes just a physical thing where they kind of separate it.

Shawn:    I think they separate it.  I think that a lot of people take up fitness out of at least a subconscious resistance.  It’s an obligation and their obligation manifests them into doing it with reluctance not with passion.

Jim:    Great point.  I always make that point about dieting.  Most of the time when you hear someone talk about dieting and weight loss; they’ll talk about it like someone has a gun to their head.  They’ll be like “Oh I have to go on a diet.  I have to go to the gym.”  It’s true. It’s funny because willpower has been so attached to weightloss and exercise. But, willpower is too hard to maintain.

Shawn:    I always say that willpower and discipline are failing strategies.

Jim:    They really are and I think for a lot of people this is new.  So many people say “Well how come I can start off in the first week and I’m great but then I lose it?”  Well it’s because you’re relying solely on willpower to make the weight loss happen. But willpower isn’t going to work once you get tired; once you get bored; once you get sick or depressed or whatever.  It falls away.

Shawn:    That’s the power of something else I want to bring which is a problem which is that people use a negative motivation to get rolling.  There’s nothing wrong with fear and negative motivation.  I’ll take any kind of catalyst that gets action.  But “I hate my before picture” or “I hate myself forward” has a short lived energy.  It will carry you so far, but it’s not going to carry you the distance.

Jim:    Great point.  Everyone listen and take that one to heart.  So much in this culture is unconscious.  We don’t recognize a lot of the things that motivate us and drive us forward with our behaviors.  The hating ourselves – that’s usually what happens is that people look in the mirror; their clothes don’t fit; they step on a scale and then they get really depressed and sad. That’s where they get their motivation from.

So what would you suggest?  How do you develop that kind of drive that pulls you forward in a better way without hating yourself?  How do you do it?

Shawn:    I break it down in Chapter 14 of my book where I take you through the path which I call “Path to Mastery.”  Most people start from an obligation or an “I should” conversation; the gun to the head.

Motivation – I take people through this and I say “Okay, look.  Whatever it takes to get moving; but if the hating yourself forward is your primary driver, take that” and I give you this practice of really creating a powerful vision.  I think vision is long term.  Vision is inspiring.  Vision is mountaintop.  Then a goal – goals are real and measurable right?

So you have to have both of those because I think we can set great big visions and they’re like Jupiter.  They’re huge, but they’re too far away to have any gravitational pull on us here.  You have to have something that may not have as big a mass, but has a good distance where it creates tension to pull you forward in life.

If you can go from “I should”  and “I have to” into the conversation to “I want to” and start bringing some joy into it; that’s where the presence and mindfulness practice and doing something that gives you feedback.  I start to feel better.  I do yoga when I’m carrying my tray.  There are specific steps to take you from “I should,” “I have to” to “I want to.”  “I want to” is your first step one step away from the ultimate freedom which is “It’s who I am.”  I now am not doing fitness.  I’m expressing who I am.

People don’t look at me or know me or talk to my wife and go “Are you on or off a diet?  Are you going to go and train?”  They know I train.  They know I eat well.  That’s who I am.

Jim:    I love that.  One of the metaphors I use sometime to describe the type of motivation I think you’re talking about – and you understand this as a parent, is beyond willpower, like if your kid when they’re a baby is crying and it’s 3:00 in the morning and you’re sleeping.  It’s not willpower.  There’s something way deeper there.  It’s who you are.  You are a parent and you’re going to get up and you’re going to do it.  It sounds like when you’re training; when you eat the way you are; I love that.  That’s who you are.  That’s who you’ve become.

Shawn:    I tell this story in the book.  Just like that it’s people stand there and they look at what I’m eating and they think there’s willpower.  How do you do that and how do I do what?  How do you brush your teeth every day?  Is it because you willpower yourself to brush your teeth every day?  No, it’s just what you do.”

Jim: I’m always talking about the mind and how to redefine things to gain a new perspective.  How does Strength for Life and your definition of health differ from the generally accepted definitions?

Shawn:    What you’re talking about Jim too and I think you’re really picking up on is I’m big into distinctions and distinctions offer a new way to see something that you may . . . it’s like to see through something.  A lot of us have this vague idea of fitness or this general or specific yada yada where we know about diets; we know about this.  I like to take and look deeper in there and find the radical distinction; the differentiating point which allows people to really see something for the first time; a fresh perspective.  Is that what you’re talking about when you say I’ve got a way of seeing things?

Jim:    Yeah, absolutely and it is this fresh perspective.  So go into it.  The idea of strength and health – you define that differently than most people do.  I think it’s valuable.

Shawn:    What I do is this – and I looked at this deeply – I believe adamantly that most people in America’s  definition of health is from the  Webster’s Dictionary – which I happen to be looking at right now.  Webster’s Dictionary defines it as the absence of disease or the absence of illness.  It really is that.  We talk about it; we slam down a little Jamba Juice; maybe a little wheatgrass and we hop over to yoga class, but we don’t take it much more seriously than that.

I think health is a wonderful thing, but the idea that I’m going to wait for my doctor to tell me I have to do something before I get really serious about caring about it; before it means as much as it should mean – because if you’ve ever seen somebody lose their health – you’ve been sick.  Even to get the flu, you have this whole understanding of how important health is when you don’t have it.  When you have it, it’s kind of like a bird in the hand “Okay, whatever.  I’ve got my health.  I could be in better shape.”

To me, strength is the new health.  It’s the new definition of health.  I define strength as not just the presence of health, but the abundance of energy, vitality and the capacity to make a contribution in the world.  I believe ultimately our lives are to be in service and it’s what we can do.  People will gain more, be more and do more in the service of others.  So strength is to be more than enough for me; it’s an abundance.  It’s kind of going back to the scarcity abundance mentality of something like The Secret.  I live in scarcity and I say I’m healthy or good enough or I live in abundance and I accept strength which is physical, mental, spiritual, etc.  It’s all strength as abundance on all levels.

Jim:    What are some general food nutrition guidelines that you recommend to live a life of strength?

Shawn:    I’m going to be frank as I tend to be.  I think Body for Life is the first book really to take what was learned through body building.  It’s a little like what we learned by going to the moon – bring the science back.  You go to the edge and you come back.   What we learned is that balanced protein rich meals and frequent feedings work.  We learned them.  We practiced them.  We brought them to the mainstream through Body for Life.  Now ten years later those things are becoming more and more true and more and more accepted.  Every single day you see more protein value; the importance of protein; the satiating factors of protein arising every single day.  Those have become truer.  That said Body for Life called for six small meals a day.  I never could quite do the six meals a day.  How about you?
Jim:    No, I can’t do that.
Shawn:    I struggle with it.  Honestly, I’m a five meal a day guy, but I take it down to the strength level.  I like to go down to the simple.  Let’s be real.  We’re a social society and we structure our days around breakfast, lunch and dinner.  I like to go what I call the three plus two method.  I eat three main meals and as long as those meals are balanced, healthy and I mean having – I start with protein job one.  Every one of those meals should have a good solid source of protein which buffers your carbohydrate release; get some vegetables in there; get some fruits.
Do not skip breakfast.  Breakfast is A Job #1 of food nutrition guidelines.  Please, eat breakfast and then in between there I call it mini-meals.  I don’t like the word “snacks.”  I say they can be a little bit smaller, but still.  You can use your nutrition shakes in between there.  Full Strength is such a meal.  I use Full Strength to start my day as my primary kicker for the day and then as an afternoon meal.  You can have your egg whites and oatmeal which I did for 20 years in the mornings.  Have consistent meals.
One of the other tips I want to give people is to get out of the mindset that every single meal needs to be some sort of diner smorgasbord – all you can eat buffet deal.  Food is a wonderfully enjoyable activity.  We love to eat.  Let’s save our love for eating for the meals that are really truly sociable and where we’re really expressing that love for food.  Don’t make every meal – so I call it repeat performances.  For literally 18 years of my life I had the exact same breakfast 90% of the time.  I love it because I felt great; not because it was so darn delicious.  That’s pretty simple.
I have 10 simple strategies in there, but I like to show you how to end dieting together and some tips there – really that inside out awareness practice.  Basically, my food nutrition guidelines are that I really believe in basic balanced meals; the frequent feedings; the simple approach; lots of water; protein stable carbohydrates; vegetables; healthy fats.

Craig Ballantyne, creator of Turbulence Training: “I came up with this in the late 90s.  I was finishing graduate school, and  was doing a lot of research in the cardiovascular area.  We were actually looking at . . . in my Master’s degree study, we were looking at what happens to power and performance in young men when they do a lot of endurance training.  So, we expected to see a decrease in their power and performance.

So I was taking a look at a lot of cardiovascular research; a lot of internal training research; this in addition to me working with a lot of athletes and in addition to me working with people to lose body fat.  At the time, I was training a lot of athletes with interval training.  I’ve been using this for quite a long time now for performance, and, you know, we noticed that some of the research is also showing that fat loss would be increased by the interval training.  It’s really come out in a lot of recent studies.  Well, not a lot of recent studies, but a few recent studies in the past couple of year, so we were a little bit ahead of the curve.

When I was doing all that studying, you know, that fun lab work, I was really, really busy.  I mean I was in there 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. some nights where I just, you know, running this blood through these fancy schmancy machines and, you know, this was in the hospital at my university.  So I’m halfway across campus to the gym, and I didn’t want to not work out during this time.

I had about 45 minutes while this one what’s called a gamma counter; so we’re talking about radioactive isotopes going on counting; so, it had 45 minutes for this machine to do its thing on some blood work that I had put together.  I had time to zip over to the gym, do my work out and get back.  That’s all the time I had for it, and, you know, I’ve been body building since I was 16; then moved into a bit more – I wouldn’t say power lifting, but more like athlete strength training type stuff – my own personal work outs.

Again, with the athletes I was working with, I basically I just put it all together.  I like to use the phrase, “I put all this information together in my mental blender” and came up with what I call Turbulence Training which was simply the supersets that I stole from the body building world combined with the interval training which I stole from the athletic world and together if you take a look at . . . if somebody; a body builder and athlete used that type of training, they would be very lean, very fit, very Men’s Health/Women’s Health type body.

That was in 1999 I was doing that.  In 2000, I started working with Men’s Health, so I kept getting more and more into the fast workout – the dumbbell – the stuff you can do at home in your basement sort of thing, not have to go to a fancy gym.  Then over the years, it’s evolved into a lot more body weight training as well, because that’s just been what people have wanted.

That’s the evolution of it.  The philosophy behind it is simply to work the way you were used to and work less as frequently your sets – well, fewer repetitions per set, generally fewer exercises than the body building stuff I grew up with; and, obviously, cutting back on the cardio volume and just doing interval training.  It’s an increased quality of training, decreased quantity of training.

Our whole purpose is to put the body into what I call turbulence.  That just means putting it outside its comfort zone like a plane going through turbulence in air.  I came up with that actually on a flight, I think if my memory serves me correctly.  That’s the whole philosophy.  That’s the mindset, the imagery I want people to do.  It’s getting outside their comfort zone, you know, training hard but of course training safe.  We’re not doing anything unsafe here, so there’s definitely a progression in building up to this stuff.  That is how it goes down.”

If you’d like to hear more of Craig’s interview, sign up for the F*ree Elite Body Expert Series.