Fab Fit Squad

My husband and I met 15 years ago at a Falmouth Road Race race party. A mutual friend invited us and who knew 15 years later I would be sitting here married to Philip and planning to run the Falmouth road race.  Philip and I are not sentimental l people at all, but every year we have talked about running this race when we hit a milestone in our relationship. On August 9th it will be 15 years that we have been together. Needless to say I am a little SHOCKED at how fast time goes by and he is still the first person that I want to talk to when I get up in the morning and the last person I want to talk to when I go to bed. Enough sentimental stuff… So, we have been training for the road race since mid June, slowly building up our mileage.  We have 2 weeks to go and today is a milestone run, 5.5 miles.  In 2000 I ran the Tufts 10K and that was the last time I ran for more than 20 minutes on a treadmill. So today is our first LONG run. (more…)

Source: About.com

I am in the process of completing my wellness coach certification and during this process you are to create your own wellness vision so that you can better understand what its like to create one and how to guide your clients in the process.

So you may be asking what is a wellness coach?  Wellness Coaches not only support your fitness efforts, they help you understand and take steps to embrace and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

The crux of understanding how to embrace and maintain a healthy lifestyle is painting a picture of what your life would look like and how would you feel when you achieved your healthy lifestyle.  While painting this picture you will also look at what is YOUR motivation, not someone’s for achieving this lifestyle and what steps are you willing to take to make this picture become a reality. The vision helps you think about how you are going to motivate yourself to achieve your wellness vision.

Here is my 3 month wellness vision.

• To fix my muscle imbalances so that I may stay active for a long time
  • What is motivating to achieve this goal. I’m (like it or lump) getting older and still want to be as active as possible
  • My main obstacle is finding the time to take care of myself– yes you read that correctly. I struggle with that life balance, taking care of myself versus the needs of my clients, business and family. Just like you I will and can find plenty excuses to do other things, like train my clients or work or things around the house. Yes, as much as I love working out I too struggle with this.
  • My strategy around this is to put my workouts in my calendar and make an appointment with myself, this isn’t an option.

The key to achieving my wellness vision is to break my vision into small digestible goals. I will break them in what I want to achieve in 3 months and the steps I will take weekly towards achieving my goals. If you notice my goals are SMART goals. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.

Specific = My goal is phrased in a way that answers these questions — Who, What, How, When, Which, Why and Where

Source: Beginner TriAthlete.com

Measurable = This is how you are going to measure progress and action towards your goals
Attainable = This is where I look to you want to challenge yourself, but if there set your goals too high you may lose interest in attaining them
Realistic = The goal needs to be realistic for where you are, as stated above it should challenge and motivate you to keep moving forward, but should not kill you to achieve your goal.
Timely = You need to set a timeline, a goal without a timeline is just a dream.

3 month goal

1. To compete in the Women’s TriFitness Competition on July 10th
   
   • I will focus on the areas of the competition that I am weakness
   • I will bench press 3x/week
   • I will do the box jump 3x/week
2. I will be able to complete 10 squats with weight in good form
   • I will begin doing corrective exercises 3/week
   • I will take a yoga class 2x week to increase my flexibility and stability
3. I will rid myself of sciatica pain
   • I will make an appointment for the week of July 12th to meet with Aaron Brooks, posture specialist
   • I will stretch for 30 minutes a day
4. In the off-season, I will not exceed 10 pounds above my contest weight.
   • I will stick to the 7 day sugar shutdown program devised by my coach. This will help me with my sugar cravings, yes I do CRAVE sugar
   • I will workout 5 day/week by doing a combination 30 minutes of cardio and 30 minutes of weight training

Weekly Goals:

• I will update my Falmouth Road Race training schedule
• I will review my Tri Fitness training and see how to improve
• I will read 1 chapter in my wellness coach manual
• I will make an appt with my training buddy to practice coaching
• I will update the Fab Fit Squad blog 3x/week
• I will take 1 yoga class/week

Each week, I will keep you up to date on how I progress on my wellness vision. Need help crafting yours. Let me know.

There is nothing like a dream to create the future. — Victor Hugo,  Les Miserables

Here are 5 ways to give you the kick in the butt to jump start your weight loss procrastination. The unofficial start to summer,  Memorial Day is just 4 short days away!

1. Understand your motivation: If you are planning to lose weight for someone other than yourself, it will never work. Get real around why you want to lose the weight! Do you have a summer event coming up and want to fit into that little black dress or have you signed up for a summer road race and need some motivation to get training. Step back and look yourself in the eye and ask WHY DO I WANT TO DO THIS!
2. Use your motivation to your advantage. Do you beat yourself up, each day that you don’t take steps to our goal. Use your goals as the push you need to keep going. I find that by hanging posters or motivational quotes really help give me the push in the right direction that I need.
3. Change your internal language! Instead of saying I HAVE TO or THERE IS NO WAY. Change your dialog. I want to lose 25 pounds so that I will be _____________ (insert what happens when you achieve your goals or how will you feel when you achieve goals.
4. Set goals fueled by your passion. You can’t go anyway without a road map, okay now a days GPS.  Here is where you take those goals and break them up. Your goal for this week is to lose 1 pound and develop a plan on how you are going to do that. Want to run a 10K, go to this site Need help more, shoot me an email.
5. Still not fired up to get moving on your goals, try this. Write a letter to your future self. Imagine that you have achieved your goals. What would you say to yourself, how would you feel, how would you look, what would you do. Now write a letter to yourself as if you didn’t meet your goals. Both letters will help you drive you forward.

Still need a kick in the pants, shoot me an email. Have any additional comments, just post them below.

Most of you work in a compnay that may have multiple floors. So, instead of using the elevators try using the stairs. (Provided for security measures haven’t closed them) You will burn about calories per trip up the stairs. Hold on.. before you say SO WHAT! If you took the elevator how many calories would you burn? If you had to go up and down the stairs 5 times you would burn 100 calories! Now image if you did this everyday Monday – Friday you’d burn 500 calories in 1 work week!  Now that’s something. Try this for a week and let me know how you make out.

We’ve all done it! You know look in the mirror and pick ourselves apart poking and prodding certain bodyparts and questioning why is (insert the body part) so flat or why  doesn’t my (insert the body part) look like the women I saw on the cover of the latest fitness magazines?

One simple answer, MOVE IT OR LOSE IT!!
If we don’t exercise on a regular basis, we will lose about ½ of pound of muscle/year.  You will lose on average 15 pounds of muscle and gain 45 pounds of fat, that’s a 60 pound change in your body from the age 20-60!

Holy (insert your expletive) !!!

So what can you do?

Step 1:  Strength Train at least 20 minutes 2-3x/week
 No ladies you will not bulk up, by strength training
Don’t know where to start?
Have a gym membership take a muscle sculpting class
Hire a personal trainer for a 30-minute session to show you the works
No gym membership, send me an email and we discuss some steps

Step 2:  Cardio at least 20 minutes 2-3xs/week
This doesn’t mean you are reading the latest chic lit book or celebrity gossip magazine you are moving it!  You should break a sweat!

Step 3:  Nutrition:  Eat Right
Just because you are working out, doesn’t give you a license to snap on the feedbag!  Sure, you will be a little more ravenous, but our goal is drop some pounds!  So please follow a sensible eating plan.  We will take more about that in another post.