As I sit here with a heat patch on my lower back, I have to fess up:

I broke all three of my rules for avoiding injury while squatting today.

Like most squat days, I wasn’t feeling it this morning but I sucked it up and got under the bar. By the time my morning double espresso shot kicked in, I was feeling half decent.  

I was loading my plates for the work set when I broke the first rule for avoiding injury:

Rule #1: Focus on Your Lifts (i.e. Don’t Check Facebook!)

In my case I wasn’t on Facebook, but on Slack trying to finish up a conversation with a business partner overseas. I forgot that multitasking and squatting don’t mix.

Finishing that conversation took longer than expected, so I rushed through a useless warm-up.

Rather than close my laptop and warm up again, I decided to jump straight into my work set.

I’m a hacker, right? I’ve got this!

Big mistake.

On my third rep of my work set (I was aiming for five reps since I nailed four last week), I felt a slight twinge in my lower back on the right hand side.

Not wanting to risk it, I racked the bar after just three reps and lowered the weight.

I had good intentions when I sat back down to finish my Slack conversation and let my back rest, but looking back now, I realized I broke the second rule:

Rule #2: Stop Immediately

I was working through my second set when I realized something definitely wasn’t right.

Deep in the hole I felt a searing pain shoot up the right side of my lower back.

Well, shit.

I deloaded and contemplated repping out on front squats to “make up for” my shitty lift. Thankfully, I made the wise decision in that moment and pulled the ripcord.

You’re only going to add insult to injury if you insist on lifting when you hurt yourself. Nobody is handing out brownie points for pushing through until the end.

Make the smart decision to go home and begin the recovery process, and while you’re driving home (or walking out of your home gym), keep in mind our next rule:

Rule #3: Don’t Beat Yourself Up Over It

Look, I get it: Leaving the gym after an incomplete workout sucks.

Whether you were trying to be a hero under the bar and injured yourself, or the gym is too full to get your workout done in time, leaving the gym defeated can ruin your day.

But when you’re injured, you can’t let your mentality take a hit, too. The mind has a way of replaying our failures and making us feel ashamed, but you have to move on.

I’m sharing my experience from today so you don’t make the same mistake I did.

Recap of 3 Rules for Avoiding Injury

To recap, here are the three rules for avoiding injury in the gym:

1. When you’re at the gym, block out all distractions and focus 100% on your lifts.
2. If you do tweak something, stop immediately, go home and start the recovery process.
3. Don’t beat yourself up. Come back stronger and avoid that mistake in the future.

There exists a dark side to the technology we cherish for solving so many of our daily problems:

It’s making us lazy.

With a connected world at our fingertips, we’ve gotten drunk off instant gratification. Rather than looking for the worthwhile path forward, many of us opt for the easy way out.

It’s not all bad news, though. Born from our desire for shortcuts in this technological age is a trend called “hacking” – looking for ways to achieve optimal results with minimal effort.

I liked this notion so much I built my whole Hack Your Fitness program around it.

The difference between laziness and hacking is discipline. Without it, the results you want will remain out of reach no matter what system you use or how many cleanses you attempt.

Discipline can be tough to wrangle, however. In this piece, I’ll help you become more disciplined so you can hack your way to fitness success instead of sputtering out before the finish line.

Settle in for the Long Haul

Even with Hack Your Fitness being as streamlined as possible for someone who wants six pack abs and single digit body fat, I must reiterate that my program isn’t a magic pill.

In fact, no program can solve your fitness problems overnight.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is part of the fitness marketing monster that preys on your laziness and will sell you snake oil in exchange for misplaced hope (and money).

It makes me sad to hear about people hunting for the secret sauce that will transform their fitness with little to no effort. Don’t waste your time or your cash!

If you want the body of your dreams, you are going to have to work for it.

(The other option is liposuction, which I DO NOT recommend!)

There is no such thing as overnight success. Achieving your fitness goals, whatever they may be, takes a lot of hard work, persistence, and dedication. It takes discipline.

Knowing that you’re in for the long haul, let’s look at some ways you can learn to accept slow progress in a world that moves at the speed of now.

Fall in Love with the Climb

Instant gratification has made us lazy by stripping away our work ethic.

In a few taps on your phone, you can have lunch delivered or book your next vacation. We live in an instantaneous world but fitness only hands out incremental results.

How do you reconcile that difference?

The answer is simple: You have to fall in love with the climb.

Mantras like “getting more for less” and “working smarter, not harder” don’t apply here.

Yes, we’re hackers, meaning we get results with minimal effort, but the effort you’ll be asked to give every day is tremendous. It will test your discipline on a daily basis.

Fat loss and new muscle growth won’t happen right away and you’ll be tempted to give up.

“I’m busting my ass,” you’ll tell yourself, “and not seeing any results. Why bother?”

Hang in there. Take little wins every day and stack them until the results start showing up.

The sooner you fall in love with the climb and start to enjoy the process, the sooner you will appreciate the hard work and rewards that come with it.  

Once you stop obsessing with the end result and instead prioritize your fitness journey every day, you’ll reach the finish line sooner than you think because you weren’t focused on it.

Here are some practical ways you can channel discipline to stay focused during the climb.

Be a Professional, Not an Amateur

We know discipline is difficult to master, but here’s two bits of good news:

• You can train to strengthen your discipline like you train to strengthen your muscles.
• Because discipline is a habit, it gets easier the longer you practice it.

Let’s look at one of my favorite quotes and how you can use it to become more disciplined:

“Never give up what you want the most for what you want today.”  – Neal Maxwell

If what you want the most is a shredded, six-pack look, don’t give that up for the short-term satisfaction you get from an extra hour of sleep, a slice of pizza, or drinks after work.

Temporary satisfaction is not worth the setbacks caused by indulgence.

Going to the gym, counting calories, tracking your macros, and intermittent fasting all require a high level of discipline and learning to block out distractions.

Indulging even once or twice can lead to a slippery slope of undisciplined behavior.

Look at it this way: How many Monday mornings have you woken up, taken a look at your to-do list, and considered all the excuses you could use to call in sick and stay in bed?

We all feel that way sometimes, but 99% of the time you suck it up and get your ass to work.

Why? Because you’re a professional.

Someone is paying you to show up every day and produce, and unlike the amateur, the professional shows up every day and puts in the work.

He doesn’t worry about how he’s feeling or wait to be inspired. He doesn’t always “feel like it.”

The professional knows there is no bargaining, that he has an obligation to his job and he doesn’t want to let his colleagues down.

If you approach fitness the same way – viewing yourself as a professional and not an amateur – I guarantee you’ll find a steady reserve of discipline and earn the results you seek.

The longer you’re on a diet, the more likely you are to see success in the form of fat loss. At the same time, it’s also harder to remain faithful to that diet the longer you’re on it.

Has anyone else experienced this paradox?

I think there are a couple factors working against you when you’re on a long-term diet:

• You start out fired up and motivated until program fatigue sets in around the 4-6 week mark, when sloppiness becomes the norm as your motivation dwindles.
• A lot of people experience a fat loss plateau about 6 weeks in that causes them to freak out and question everything, or even throw in the towel prematurely.

Before you let program fatigue or a temporary plateau derail your progress, you need to understand why you’re struggling at this point in your fat loss program.

As your weight drops and you recalculate your macros, your caloric intake will drop, making those rest days where you have fewer calories difficult to manage.

Not to mention, you’re still giving max effort at the gym on a lower calorie budget.

Getting over this initial speed bump in your fat loss program is tough because you’re just…

So. Damn. Hungry.

Keeping your hunger in check is a key to success with cuts like Hack Your Fitness.

To help you endure until the end and manage those cravings past the finish line, here are the top 5 hunger hacks for a fat loss program.

Hack #1: Protein Priority

The beautiful thing about protein is that you feel satiated after eating it.

A high protein diet reduces your overall appetite because protein makes you feel fuller for longer, especially compared to carbs, which provide a quick fix and then burn off.

Another rule tied into this hack is: Always chew your calories.

A protein shake isn’t going to quell your hunger the same way two chicken breasts will.

Hack #2: Drink Lots of Water

This one seems obvious, but I’m talking about way more water than you’re probably drinking.

I drink water first thing when I wake up and last thing before I go to sleep. All told, I probably drink about a gallon of water a day because it really makes a difference.

If your stomach is growling, pound a couple glasses of water. I promise, it will help.

Hack #3: Black Coffee, Sparkling Water, or Sugar-Free Gum

There are ways to deal with hunger while keeping your body in a fasted state.

If you’re struggling during the morning to finish off your 16-hour fast, Martin Berkhan argues that you can have 10-15 calories and not move out of the fasted state.

Black coffee, sparkling water, and sugar-free gum are a few zero calorie options that can blunt your appetite and help you survive until lunch.

I drink black coffee like an addict to wake myself up and curb my hunger.

Hack #4: Eat Slowly

When you’re hungry, it can be easy to eat like an inmate getting out of prison.

My wife and I are guilty of this, as we hold the record for fastest “date night” on record – 27 minutes from the time we sat down to when we signed the check.

(In our defense, the food was amazing.)

The problem is that eating quickly can easily lead to overeating. Your brain lags behind in alerting you to how full you are, so before you know it, you’ve stuffed yourself.

Chew your foods slowly and you’ll be satisfied long before you finish your meal.    

Hack #5: Brush Your Teeth After Each Meal

Ever have the “munchies” after a huge meal and wonder why the hell you’re still hungry?

It all comes back to mindless eating and the invisible scripts we follow in our diet.

For example, I have a sweet tooth, so the invisible script I used to follow was that every meal felt incomplete unless I had something sweet to finish it off.

The solution I found was to brush my teeth right after I finished eating.

The sweet taste of fluoride on my tongue discouraged me from doubling back to the snack drawer, plus I eliminated the pain in the ass of having to brush my teeth before bed.

If there was one thing you could change about your body, what would it be?

Most of us have some degree of insecurity when it comes to our physiques.

A lot of guys struggle with perceived deficiencies like chicken legs or narrow shoulders. Many women will tell you they wish they had toned arms, a flat stomach, or a firm butt.

Although I only started squatting recently, I’m blessed with muscular calves due to my genetics and the fact I trained relentlessly when I was young to be able dunk a basketball.

I never quite got there–my best was dunking a tennis ball–but the work I put in went a long way to building up a good baseline of calf muscle that I’m thankful for today.

On the flip side, I’ve always struggled with a small upper body.

I can maintain my arms, but shoulders and chest have always been my weak points.

Why do we have weak points in our physique, and what can be done to fix it? That’s what we’re going to explore in this post, and by the end, you’ll have a plan to fix those chicken legs.

Why Weak Points Develop in Our Physique

Part of my problem, and I know this is true of many people, is that I failed to address my weak points (chest and shoulders) during my early days in the gym.

When we fail to train each part of our body effectively, we end up with disproportionate physiques with obvious weak points that require special attention.

It’s not really our fault when we choose to skip leg day, though.

Human beings want the best parts of their physique to shine, and for guys, that’s usually their chest and biceps. We wear muscle tees to show off our upper bodies.

That was my mentality when I was younger. I’d spend hours in the gym doing isolation exercises thinking that was the best way to get a certain muscle to “pop.”

My legs were usually covered up, so nobody would notice if I skipped leg day.

Boy, was I wrong. If only I’d known about compound lifts 20 years ago.

But the good news is that it wasn’t too late for me to address my shoulders and chest, and it’s not too late for you to remedy your weak points, either.

How to Fix Weak Points in Your Physique

No matter your weakness, you can fix it simply by repurposing your efforts in that area.

The key with repurposing is simplicity. Instead of confusing yourself with a crazy tactic like 6-day splits, you’re simply going to add a second workout each week to address your weak point.

A second workout is that sweet spot between undertraining and overtraining.

With Hack Your Fitness, you’re performing compound lifts at max effort three times a week, so you can’t afford to hamper your recovery with anything beyond one additional workout.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to address the following weak points:

Upper Body Workout

With my small upper body, I split my upper body workout into two sessions:

• Bench press, incline press, or flies on Monday
• Overhead press, dips, or shrugs on Friday

I squat on Sunday and deadlift on Wednesday to keep my physique well-rounded.

This split allows me to hit my upper body twice each week with space for ample rest. Whatever your weak point, make sure you allow 3-4 days rest before you work that muscle again.

Lower Body Workout

If you have chicken legs, consider adding a calf raise workout during the week.

Since you’re squatting and deadlifting once a week each (the deadlift is both a back/pull exercise and a leg exercise), you don’t want to add another squat session.

Arm Workout

The arms are the apple of most people’s eye when it comes to physique. Most women want toned arms and most men want bulging biceps.

The problem is that for all the love it receives, your bicep/tricep is a single muscle that does little for your body (comparatively speaking) and doesn’t warrant isolation exercises.

But what if you want biceps like Arnold Schwarzenegger?

I don’t recommend it, but if you have time, you can add a bicep curl workout to your weekly routine. Just make sure you keep yourself fresh for the core lifts.

You don’t want to sabotage your gains and revert back to having chicken legs.

The explosion of CrossFit onto the fitness scene in recent years has pushed one particular diet into the mainstream consciousness that was unheard of a few years ago.

This diet has several monikers – Caveman, Stone Age, Hunter Gatherer – but its most common name echoes back to the era of our ancient ancestors: Paleo.

Like many healthy eaters, I’ve been burned by fad diets before, be it Atkins, Slow-Carb, or (embarrassingly enough), the lemon cayenne cleanse.

So when I heard about Paleo, I was skeptical.

I investigated the diet to see if the science checked out, and in this (brief) article, I’ll give you an overview and weigh in on whether Paleo gets the Hack Your Fitness stamp of approval.

Paleo 101

According to Wikipedia, the Paleo (short for Paleolithic) diet is comprised of, “foods presumed to have been available to Paleolithic humans” as far back as 2.6 million years ago.

The premise is that back in the caveman days, human beings were hunter-gatherers and primarily ate meat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts because that’s all they had available.

Cavemen weren’t chowing down on bread, chips, Oreos, or processed food.

Other foods not included in the Paleo diet are:

• Grains
• Legumes
• Dairy products
• Potatoes
• Processed oils (natural oils are fine)

As memorized and chanted verbatim by its loyal followers, here’s CrossFit’s take on Paleo:

“Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar.”

The Alleged Benefits

Proponents of the Paleo diet claim the following benefits:

• Rapid weight loss (without having to count calories)
• Protection against cardiovascular disease and diabetes
• Reduced allergies
• Improved sleep
• Better workouts

Sounds amazing, doesn’t it? Well, not all scientists agree.

The Debate Over Paleo

Arguments exist about what humans actually ate millions of years ago, and if early humans did follow the Paleo diet (what trendsetters!), some scientists point to another issue:

Our genetic makeup is different than that of our ancient ancestors.

Human beings have evolved since the Paleolithic era, meaning our bodies have adapted to the new circumstances and advancements in food technology over the years.

The benefits and reasons for this diet may not apply today like they did back then.

In a Nutshell

Regardless of the evolution or history behind the Paleo movement (it might just be one large marketing gimmick for all we know), the macros of this diet look like this:

1. Higher protein
2. Lower carbohydrate
3. Higher fat

Paleo also cuts out all processed food and most sugars, thereby eliminating the culprits being blamed for many of the health problems society is experiencing.

Now that you know the basics, let’s examine Paleo through the Hack Your Fitness lens and figure out the good and bad parts of this trendy diet.

The Good

1. Advocates a high protein diet, which we like.
2. Emphasizes lean meats and excludes processed meats.
3. Includes complex carbohydrates (fruits and veggies), which pair great with protein.
4. Excludes added trans fat, sugars, and simple carbs (mind that insulin spike).

The Bad

1. Contributes to an inadequate calcium intake due to the exclusion of dairy.
2. Leaves out legumes, which are part of a balanced diet for the benefits they provide.
3. Misses out on the health benefit of whole grains, including reduced inflammation and a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.  
4. Relies on the incorrect notion that you don’t have to count calories to lose weight. We at Hack Your Fitness know better, though – it’s about calories in vs. calories out.

The Verdict

Seeing as how the positives outweigh the negatives, the Paleo diet gets the Hack Your Fitness stamp of approval, with the caveat that you must count your calories to lose weight.

Paleo is a much healthier alternative than the processed foods diet of many people.

I’m less stringent on following the hardcore tenants of Paleo – I eat grains and I’ve got to have my Quest Bar – but all things considered, it’s about 80% the right way to eat.

Speaking of 80%, I agree with Paleo guru and 80/20 advocate Mark Sisson, who teaches that consistency is more important than commitment, so pick a diet you can stick with.

If you think Paleo might work for you, by all means, pick it and stick it.

The timing couldn’t be worse — after months of a strict diet and exercise regimen, your long-dormant upper abs have finally emerged… only for a work trip to upend your routine.

How are you supposed to eat right and work out away from your home gym and go-to meals?

Will your nascent abs disappear under an onslaught of fatty foods? This is a nightmare!

You could curse your boss for saddling you with jetlag, shitty hotel gyms, and fast food on your trip, or you could follow these 6 steps to surviving your trip with little to no fat gain.

1. Don’t Wave the White Flag

First things first: Your business trip is a challenge, not a vacation.

Vacations play an important role in your fitness journey, but this is not the time to kick back and relax. Instead, you need to gear up for the opportunity to test your mettle.

You’re on a business trip, which means you need to handle your business with fitness, too.

Don’t make the mistake of tossing in the towel early and writing off the trip as a vacation.

You’ll get the chance to celebrate your fitness progress, but this is not it.

2. Re-frame Your Mind

The most powerful strategy I’ve found for dealing with fitness during travel comes from one of my personal inspirations: natural bodybuilder Tom Venuto.

Venuto says that he approaches travel with an “counter defeatist” point of view.

So instead of worrying about how much fat he could possibly gain, Tom views his business trips as opportunities to get EVEN LEANER than he is before departing.

He challenges himself to push his discipline and determination to new levels.

I love this aggressive attitude because it sets you up for success as opposed to failure.

Worst case scenario — if you don’t get leaner, you’ll at least maintain your level of fitness.

In the grand scheme of things, that’s a victory!

3. Scout the Local Gyms

Planning ahead is a core tenant of Hack Your Fitness, and when you’re venturing out into the unknown, planning becomes even more important.

Take some time to research the hotels you’re staying at before you hit the road.

I’ve never seen a hotel gym with a proper squat rack, but that hasn’t stopped me from finding a CrossFit Box or Gold’s Gym nearby that offered day passes.

Unless your work trip is in the African jungle, there should be a viable gym option close to where you’re staying. You just have to make the effort to find it.

If you really are stranded, use the substitution matrix below to cobble together a workout in your hotel gym. I recommend this only if you insist on exercising without a proper gym nearby:

Free weights (barbells/dumbbells) are always preferred over machines.

Use machines only if there’s no other option, and as soon as your trip is over, get back to the gym and resume your compound lifts with barbells as soon as you can.

4. Find Healthy Eating Options

While you’re searching for gyms, look for grocery stores near your hotel where you can find some clean sources of protein and complex carbs.

Make sure the hotel has a mini fridge where you can store those foods once you find them.

If they don’t, you can always buy a styrofoam cooler and fill it up with ice from the hotel ice machine. Hey, nobody said hacking your fitness on the road would be glamorous!

When you go to buy foods, make sure to adhere to the next step religiously.

5. Mind Your Calorie Budget

Stay within your caloric budget no matter what.

Abiding by the law of energy balance has saved me time and again on the road when gyms are suboptimal and quality food choices are nowhere to be found.

Intermittent fasting (IF) is a great tool for travel, and if you’ve done Hack Your Fitness for a while, you can easily adapt it for your travel needs.

Even if you’ve never done IF, it’s simple: if you don’t like your food options, just fast.

Don’t let months of progress go down the tubes because you feel like you need to eat the shitty airplane food they serve you during your flight.

A “Hacker Pack” can also save you when your food options are lacking.

On my last trip, I packed a handful of Quest bars and Epic meat bars for the flight.

Clean sources of protein are always the hardest to get your hands on while traveling, so do yourself a favor and have an emergency Hacker Pack of protein ready.

One Quest bar can tide you over until you find a source of lean protein.  

6. Avoid Alcohol If Possible

This one is hard for me, too.

Whether I’m there for work or vacation, airport bars always tempt me to come and have a drink. (I also have a fear of flying that makes a cocktail even harder to resist.)

Nonetheless, as we’ve covered before, alcohol is detrimental to your fitness.

Try to drink sparingly and if you must, only do so after you’ve eaten so you don’t risk binging on late night room service or local food trucks on your walk back to the hotel.

As we get older our lives seem to just get busier and busier.  Between work, family obligations, and social events the first thing that always gets tossed by the wayside is exercise.

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, it’s in times like these when busy high achievers must take a step back and review the oxygen mask analogy.

Put on your own oxygen mask first before assisting others, or in other words, take care of yourself first before going out there and trying to change the world.

The first step to taking care of yourself begins with your health. It’s no secret that science has clearly proven the health benefits of exercise but it wasn’t until I met Dr. John Ratey, a world-renowned psychiatrist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, that I fully understood just how powerful the mind body connection actually is and how exercise can literally make you better at your job.

Most high achievers have some degree of ADHD

Ratey’s early work centered around Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) where he discovered that exercise was a way to balance out patients who had difficulty maintaining focus for extended periods of time.

By definition, ADHD describes an individual whose brain activity is marked by an ongoing pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity that interferes with daily function or development.

As it turns out, most high achievers are in fact slightly ADHD in the way that their brains are hyper-focused when coming up with brilliant ideas, exploring uncharted territories or solving difficult problems.

After discovering the power of exercise in his ADHD patients, Ratey continued researching and unpacking all the benefits that exercise has on the brain.

Even when factoring out the obvious positive effects of lowering blood pressure, stroke risk and improving blood flow to the brain, there seemed to be an extra magical property of exercise above and beyond that.

Exercise is great for the brain

Ratey’s continued studying exercise and the brain and noticed a number of other benefits to exercise including helping with moods, stress, anxiety, attention and aging.

His next book called Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain continues this study and in this book he distinctly draws a connection between a person’s physicality and their cognitive function.

Ratey scientifically proves in the book that when you exercise, you work more nerve cells in your brain than any other human activity. Basically his point is that exercise is great for the brain.

That’s not all, exercise slows cognitive decline too

If all of the above isn’t enough to convince entrepreneurs to start exercising right away, then maybe this will.

Ratey’s final conclusion is that exercise is essentially a prevention to cognitive decline and ultimately Alzheimer’s disease. As he kept learning about the brain as a muscle, he realized that the more we exercise the smarter we become.

Exercise makes your brain tougher just like a muscle and when we fire nerve cells in the brain our brain cells stay young and grow.

The only way we learn is when our brain cells grow and the most effective way to make them grow is through exercise.

So before you think about doubling down on your evening espresso to pull yet another all nighter, try getting under the bar for some heavy squats instead.

You’ll be surprised at how much just a little bit of exercise can improve your productivity.

We all know that regular exercise helps with aging, fighting depression, and warding off cognitive decline. Knowing the proven benefits of exercise isn’t the problem.

It’s in the execution of exercise where most of us get tripped up.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur managing multiple businesses or a stay-at-home mom raising multiple kids, the never-ending to-do list called “life” usually leaves little time for yourself.

Knowing that exercise and a proper diet are crucial to healthy living, how do you avoid tossing fitness aside when life gets too busy for you to keep up?

The key to sticking with fitness is to harness with power of habits.

In order to harness that power, you must first adopt a mindset that prioritizes your health.

You Have to Put Your Health First    

It sounds counterintuitive, but when life gets crazy, you need to slow down and consider the oxygen mask analogy. If you ignore the safety spiel on flights, let me remind you:

You should put your oxygen mask on before assisting others.

For our purposes, that means taking care of yourself and your fitness before you go out and change the world. After all, you can give your best only when you’re at your best physically.

This mindset might seem selfish, but when you harness the power of habits, you can stick to your exercise and diet regimen without sacrificing in other areas of your life.

Let’s look at why habits work, then examine how to apply them to fitness.

Automate Your Life With Habits

In his book Habit Stacking, S.J. Scott discusses a concept called “cognitive load” that essentially says we humans have a finite limit on our short-term memories.

Therefore, we must rely on long-term memories and habits to do pretty much anything.

Scott says 40% of the daily actions we perform aren’t actually decisions, but habits.

Consider brushing your teeth. It’s not a chore to complete this task because it’s an automatic behavior with no emotional attachment. You brush your teeth without thinking about it.

Your brain, always eager to save effort, will turn a routine into a habit if it’s practiced enough.

Making diet and exercise part of your daily routine not only creates new habits, thereby reducing your brain’s cognitive load, but also removes decision making from the equation.

Much like brushing your teeth, fitness can become something you do without thinking twice.

What a powerful notion if you’re struggling to make time for workouts or resist bad foods!

If 40% of our life is automated, we should strive to make fitness part of that 40% by adding it to our daily routine. The easiest way to start that process is to wake up an hour earlier.   

Transform Your Fitness with Early Morning Workouts

I know – waking up early sucks.

I’m definitely not a morning person (if such a thing exists), yet I started working out in the morning in 2003, years before I got serious with fitness.

I did it long enough that my brain created a new habit and I stopped dreading those wake-up calls. Early workouts are now part of my daily routine just like brushing my teeth.

In fact, missing a workout throws off my day like if I forgot to brush my teeth.

If you need more convincing, here are two huge benefits of early morning workouts:

1. No Room for Excuses

It’s not laziness or a lack of motivation that derails fitness plans – it’s life getting in the way.

We’ve all been there when the happy hour drink becomes 10 or your best friend arrives in town unexpectedly and wants to hang out. When life happens, your fitness tends to suffer.

Not to mention, your willpower to work out diminishes as your day drags along.

By the time you clock out, you might not have the motivation left to hit the gym.

You can’t always control how stressful your work day will be, or how your evenings will be spent, but you can always wake up an hour earlier to work out in the morning.

2. Source of Motivation and Energy

When I made the switch, I found early workouts gave me motivation the rest of the day.

If I accomplished nothing else the rest of the day, I told myself, at least I worked out.

Working out early also helped me roll into work charged up and firing on all cylinders. If you’re used to dragging into work on your third cup of coffee, there’s a better way to start your day!

I know early workouts can change your life the same way they changed mine.

Start a New Habit Today

A commitment to fitness begins by developing strong habits.

Early wake-up calls are terrible at first, but morning workouts get easier every time you wake up because your brain is working hard to automate that habit.

Commit to starting this new habit tomorrow morning.

I promise, the day after won’t be any harder.

Before long, you’ll be harnessing the power of habits to keep your commitment to fitness.

If I had to list the reasons people (including myself) miss workouts, almost none of them would have to do with how hard the workout is, or a lack of motivation.

The #1 reason people miss workouts, in my experience, is because the gym sucks.

Just getting to the gym is a task that makes working out harder. Even when you are on your way to the gym, a number of situations routinely pop-up to ruin your workout:

• I didn’t bring my gym clothes to work today.
• Traffic is backed up and I’m short on time.
• The thought of showering at the gym makes me shudder.

If our gym isn’t convenient and we’re not feeling it that day, we’ll use any of the above excuses (and many more) to skip the workout entirely.

To eliminate these possible excuses, I set up a home gym.

Knowing all I have to do is stumble out of bed, walk down a flight of stairs, and turn on the lights to my home gym removes a lot of pain from the process.

If you’ve never considered setting up a home gym, read on – I’m going to explain why home gyms are awesome and show you the budget-friendly equipment you need.· Continue

When I was a kid, I distinctly remember the dread attached to “report card day” in school.

What if my grades weren’t good? Would I be grounded? What if I got… a B? (I know…I know…I blame my Asian parents)

The report card was never as bad as I made it out to be, but still, the fear was real. I’m sure most of you shared my sentiment that report card day was the worst.

As an adult, I can begrudgingly admit that report cards weren’t all bad. They showed my progress and helped me identify areas where I needed improvement.

Since I started my fitness journey, I’ve actually done a complete 180 on report cards.

I now use a Mid-Year Report Card to assess my fitness for the first half of the year, and in this post, I’ll walk you through how to create one for yourself.

(I also do a Year-End Report Card which I’ll share in December.)· Continue