Fitness 'N' Oklahoma City

Posts Tagged ‘oklahoma city bootcamp’

With the Holidays almost here a New Year is soon to follow. I have to admit this is one of my favorite times of year for many reasons. I see a lot of determined souls who are ready to get fit and about 20% make it happen. This is exciting because it brings Oklahoma closer to becoming healthier.

Now it is true that I would like to take the entire state of Oklahoma under my wing and help them with their weight loss goals but this is impossible.

I am going to layout the important steps to finding a world class fitness professional in your area. So if you or someone you know is going to be putting their weight loss in the hands of someone else please read this carefully.

I will try to keep this short but it is my passion and i do not want to see anyone set up for failure when it comes to their health and fitness.

ENJOY!

Where Do I Find a Personal Trainer:

There are many different ways to come up with a list of Personal Trainers in your area. Obviously the easiest would be to Google personal trainer and your zip. But this may leave you with a list of crap.

If you know someone who has used a personal trainer,  get more info from them about contacting them.  If you are a member of a gym you are probably surrounded by more than one trainer.

OK! Now you have a list of possible Trainers.  What to look for next—->

Personal Trainer Certifications:

Guess what? You can go online and get a trainer certification for about sixty bucks.   You think that is bad.  Some states don’t even require a certification.

Don’t take the certification lightly, you are trusting someone with your life.

A personal trainer should hold a current NCCA-accredited certification. This will give you the assurance that you are working with a professional who has the knowledge and skills to provide you with a safe and effective workout.

The National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA) has 26-years of experience accrediting allied health professions such as registered dietitians, nurses, athletic trainers, and occupational therapists. Currently, only 10 of nearly 70 certification agencies have achieved this recognition. Here are the most common in Oklahoma.

National Strength and Conditioning Association
American Council on Exercise
The American College of Sports Medicine

Never be afraid to ask to see a copy of a personal trainer’s certification to ensure that it is current.

Ask For References:

Ask the personal trainer for names, phone numbers, and even testimonials of other clients he/she has worked with, particularly those who share similar traits and goals. Trainers may be more likely to empathize and understand your unique challenges and needs if they’ve worked with similar clients. If available, call previous clients to see if they were satisfied with their training experience and results. Inquire whether the personal trainer was professional, punctual, and prepared, and whether the client’s individual needs were addressed. Talk to fellow members of your health club or friends who are currently working with trainers for their recommendations.

Talk  To The Trainer: (this one is important)

Developing a personal, yet professional relationship with your trainer is very important. Trust your instincts. Ask yourself if you think you could get along well with the trainer and whether you think the trainer is genuinely interested in helping you. The personal trainer you select should motivate you using positive, not negative, reinforcement. Most importantly, that trainer should be someone you like.

Get off the beaten path when it comes to your first conversation. If you base the entire conversation around fitness you may be in for a real surprise when your trainer starts to tell you about his wild weekend of partying. I have seen this happen many times and it sucks if you and your trainer have nothing in common.

$$$.$$:

Personal training fees vary based on a trainer’s experience and reputation, facility prices and geographic area, but they are well worth the investment. Although you may meet with your trainer more frequently at first, your financial investment should decrease as you become more independent, knowledgeable, and fit.

If you aren’t comfortable shelling out 400+ a month on personal training you might look into finding a Boot Camp in your area. These are usually run by very respected fitness professionals. You still get the same expertise as a one-on-one session and amazing results but at a more affordable price.

Professional Liability Insurance and Business Policies:

Many personal trainers operate as independent contractors and are not employees of a fitness facility. Find out if the trainer you want to hire carries professional liability insurance. A reputable personal trainer should make sure you understand the cancellation policy and billing procedures. The best way to avoid confusion and to protect your rights is to have those policies in writing.

Is This Someone You Can Work With:

Do you like to exercise in the morning, or in the evening. Can a personal trainer accommodate your schedule? What about the trainer’s gender? Some people do better working with a trainer of the same sex; others prefer the opposite sex. The knowledgeable and experienced personal trainer who fits your style is the one to hire — because that is the professional who will help you achieve the best results.

I hope this helps clear up some of your questions about finding the perfect fitness professional. If you have more questions about finding a personal trainer or local boot camp you can send me an email here.

If you are in the Oklahoma City Metro area and would like to come check out my boot camp click here to find out more or check us out on facebook.

Cant wait to bring you more healthy articles to help you with your journey forward. If you would like to see an article about something please drop me a line.

Trainer Ben

I wanted to drop you a quick blog post to encourage you to not become another holiday weight gain statistic.  I have heard that the average American gains between 4-9 lbs from Thanksgiving to Jan 1st.  Even though Jan 1st is great for my business, I get TIRED of hearing everyone complaining and moaning about being heavier after the holidays!

It is OK to binge ONCE in awhile.  Use it as your 1-3 cheat meals/week.  By limiting the over indulgences to a couple times a week, your body won’t be overwhelmed and should be able to recover and burn those extra calories off.

Believe me, I love Sweet Potato Pie and Apple Pie, but I love be physically fit more.

So the questions is “How do I enjoy Thanksgiving and avoid gaining 5 – 10lbs in one day?”

”By making wise food choices. Cooking the stuffing outside of the turkey reduces its fat content, as does
baking sweet potatoes, instead of loading them with butter, sugar and marshmallows in a casserole. More Healthy Recipes

Pumpkin, an excellent source of beta carotene and vitamin A, is much healthier served as a custard, instead of a pie in a fat-laden crust. However, we have to be realistic,  ”For one holiday meal, people should be allowed to eat their favorite foods.” So, if you can’t do without
Aunt Martha’s candied yams, have some —but wisely. ”Eat small amounts of your favorites, and don’t eat until you’re stuffed, only until you’re satisfied.”

Also, keep up your exercise program. ”Many people stop working out  when they get busy around the holidays, but that’s just when they should be going”. ”Exercise keeps weight down, suppresses the appetite and relieves holiday stress.”

A few things you can do to avoid gaining an extra 10-15 pounds this season is: Mentally be prepared to say “No Thanks, Ive had enough”. Find smaller plates or a small saucer,so you don’t want to over-eat? Also remember, you don’t have to eat at everyone’s house you visit. Or you don’t have to eat everything they bring to your house.

Now, what happens if you do over-eat and you don’t follow any of my suggestions. WELL – I guess I will see you “Black Friday” at 5:30am in Boot Camp, which is where you should be anyway.

Boot Camp will stay right on schedule for the Holidays, don’t worry i wouldn’t let you get away from burpees for more than a day. I have posted the schedule Below and remember to bring a friend.

“Wednesday 25th” Morning 5:30am-6:30am Evening 6:00pm-7:00pm

“Thursday 26th Thanks Giving Day” OFF

Friday 27th “Black Friday” Morning 5:30am-6:30am Evening 6:00pm-7:00pm

Trainer Ben

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Let’s begin by defining the word “diet”. A “diet” is any severe restriction of food or calories that’s temporary. Most conventional diet programs call for extremely low calories: 800-1200 or less. Any time you restrict calories drastically like this, you will lose weight. So if your only criteria for success is weight loss, and you don’t care where the weight comes from, or how long it stays off, then you could say that “all diets work”.

There are two major problems with this approach: First, the weight loss from very low calorie dieting almost never lasts; 95% of the people who lose weight on conventional diet programs can’t keep it off. The second problem is that most of the weight you lose from low calorie dieting is muscle, not fat. If permanent fat loss without losing muscle is your goal (it should be), then it would be closer to the truth to say “diets never work”.

Statistics prove that diets never work in the long term. If they did work, then how do you explain the huge obesity problem today? An why is it getting worse? According to the National Institute of Health, there are over 100 million overweight people in the United States. That’s 55% of the adult population! Over 20% of the U.S. adults are clinically obese, which means they are at risk for one or more of over 30 health problems that are associated with excess body fat.

Despite the fact that there are more diet programs and weight loss products available than ever before, obesity has continued to rise. The Center for Disease Control recently announced that the number of people in the United States who are clinically obese (at least 30% over their ideal body weight) increased from one in eight in 1991 to nearly one in five in 1999.

There’s a valid scientific reason why most diets fail dismally. Most people make the classic mistake of trying to “starve” the fat with strict diets. However, because the human body has a complex and infallible series of defense mechanisms to protect you from starvation, it is physiologically impossible to lose fat with very low calorie diets. As soon as your body senses a food shortage, these defense mechanisms start to kick in. The human body is simply too “smart” for the restrictive very low calorie diet approach to ever work.

Why Eating Less Doesn’t Always Work

If you eat more calories than you burn, you will store the excess as body fat. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, then you will lose fat. Simple mathematics, right? Well, not exactly.

If fat loss were as black and white as calories in vs. calories out, then how do you explain why some overweight people eat less than lean people, yet they still can’t lose an ounce? And how is it possible for someone with a 2200-calorie maintenance level to eat only 800 to 1000 calories a day without losing any weight?

Using the strictly mathematical model, if you cut out 1000 calories per day from your maintenance level, that will add up to a 7000-calorie deficit in one week. There are 3500 calories in a pound of stored body fat, so cutting out 1000 calories a day should- in theory-produce a weight loss of two pounds per week. Actual real world fat loss rarely works out with such mathematical precision.

Rob Faigin, writing the  book “National Hormonal Enhancement”, makes a humorous, but true observation about calorie balance and weight loss. Faigin says, “If there existed an airtight mathematical relationship between caloric intake and weight loss, cutting caloric intake from 3000 to 1000 would result in a 60,000 calorie per year deficit- and would result in a 200 pound weight loss after a year. What if the person began the diet weighing 200 pounds, would he disappear?”

When a calorie deficit is first introduced, weight loss generally occurs rapidly, just as the numbers would dictate, but it never takes long before weight loss slows, and then eventually stops completely. Why does this happen? Why is it that you don’t lose 50 pounds in 25 weeks or 100 pounds in 50 weeks with a 1000-calorie deficit?

The explanation is quite simple: Over thousands of year, human have developed a weight-regulating mechanism that recognizes when there’s a food shortage and decreases energy expenditure to “protect you”. This survival mechanism is known as the “starvation response”.

The Starvation Response

You can survive for months without food. You’ve probably heard stories about people getting lose in the mountains or wilderness for months with no food at all (only water), or being confined in a prisoner of war camp for years with only tiny amounts of food. What makes surviving under these conditions possible is your body’s remarkable ability to slow down its rate of calorie burning.

When your body senses deprivation it says to itself, “It looks like this is all the food we’re going to be getting for a while, so we’d better stop burning so many calories and start saving our energy. This way we’ll be able to survive longer on the little amount of food we have.”

The starvation response developed largely from exposure to adverse environmental conditions like droughts, natural disasters and food shortages. Furthermore, there were no supermarkets ten thousand years ago- if people wanted to eat, they had to either grow their food or kill it. It’s likely that at times, ancient man didn’t know when the next meal was coming and may have only eaten once or twice a week. The starvation response evolved in humans to ensure the survival of the species.

Your Body Can’t Tell The Difference Between Dieting and Starvation

This wonderful feature of human evolution is a blessing if you’re stranded out in the wilderness with no food. During periods of starvation, the body slowly begins to feed off itself, burning fat stores, muscle and even internal organs for energy. If you continued to burn calories at your normal rate, you limited reserves of store energy would be exhausted quickly and you would die very soon after your food supply was cut off. The starvation response keeps you alive longer.

Unfortunately, this same life-preserving mechanism can work against you when you’re trying to lose weight because your body can’t tell the difference between dieting and starvation!

Sever calorie cutting always sends your body into “starvation mode”. There’s nothing you can do to stop this from happening other than to avoid sever calorie shortages!

Like I always tell my friends and family, if you want to burn more calories and melt fat as quickly as possible, you must eat small  meals regularly throughout the day and start exercising.

For more ways to lose weight and slash the fat check out my Oklahoma City Boot Camp www.trainerben.com

What Are Your Favorite Quotes?

I love quotes!  I like to have many quotes that I have in my head when I need some inspiration to not skip a workout, or say no to seconds at the dinner table, or to succeed when I feel all the odds are stacked against me.

My goal of this post is to create a huge list of quotes that are related to success, health, exercise, nutrition, mindset, energy… whatever you can think of.  Please share as many as you would like.

I would highly recommend you read through them and find the ones that really touch you.  Either print them out or grab some index cards and write the quotes and post them around your house, your refrigerator, in your wallet, in your car, in your bathroom, and in your gym bag.

“You give up on what you need to be doing because you forget that you’re worth it. This is why most people aren’t leading exemplary lives… You have to believe in yourself so much that you’re willing to do what’s uncomfortable, time-consuming, inconvenient, and on occasion seemingly impossible. When you don’t believe in yourself this much, pretend.”
-Victoria Moran in her book, Fat Broke & Lonely No More

I chose to start with this one because so many people give up on life and on themselves, which is one of the saddest things I see.  We only have one life to live on earth and to live in a state of existence rather than creating the life that you want is very hard to see someone go through.  The ones who transform their bodies have the ah ha… moment that they are so special and worth it, that they deserve to put their body through temporary pain and sacrifice to once again begin living!

“The difference between great people and everyone else is that
great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is
created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes
them next. The difference between the two is the difference
between living fully and just existing.”
- Michael E. Gerber

Michael Gerber is one of my favorite authors and this is somewhat similar to the first quote.  In order to get what you want in your life you have to pursue it with reckless abandonment.  If you are looking to create a physical transformation, you have to create many new habits that will cause change.  You aren’t going to wake up one morning with a toned stomach, shapely shoulders, and lean legs, without hard work and determination.

“Those that have abandoned their dreams, will discourage yours; give them a hug they need it.” ~ aristotle…i think? yes, i know I added the hug part:)

This goes back to the choose who you hang out with wisely montra.  Basically  “Do Your Friends Make You Fat?”  It is amazing how friends have such a role in success or failure of another person’s goals and dreams.  At the end of this quote I would add, give them a hug, love on them, and then walk away and find someone else who is going 100% for their dreams.  If you don’t do this, chances are you will soon lose your dreams as well.  Remember, it is easier to pull a person down than pull a person up!

Here are some more quotes that really hit me hard!

“The habit is the problem. All you need to do it be conscious about your choices and responsible for your actions.”

“Instead of eating that package of Soft Batch cookies, why don’t you just glue it to your butt? That’s where its going anyways!”

“The reason most people fail instead of succeed is because they sacrifice what they want most for what they want at the moment”

“Watch your thoughts, they become words
Watch your words, they become actions
Watch your actions, they become habits
Watch your habits, they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes…your destiny.”
-unknown

“And the day came . . . when the desire to remain the same, was more painful than the risk . . . to grow.” -Anaïs Nin

Success is the sum of small efforts – repeated day in and day out. ~ Robert Collier

“Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.” -Carl Bard

“A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.”

“If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you are probably right.”

“Definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Fitness – If it came in a bottle, everybody would have a great body.
- Cher

Those who do not find time for exercise will have to find time for illness.
- Earl of Derby

A man’s health can be judged by which he takes two at a time – pills or stairs.
- Joan Welsh

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
- William James

Bad excuses are worse than none.
- Thomas Fuller

Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.
- Jim Ryun

Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.
- George Herman “Babe” Ruth

Hope you enjoyed it and if you are ready to make a change today for a better healthier lifestyle sign up for my rocking boot camp here… or call me at 405.205.6001

Music has been shown to help many people workout harder and enjoy it more.  There is nothing like putting on your headphones and going to the gym, or outside for a run!  Music has the ability to change our state of mind and change the mood we are in.

I think one of the most difficult things as an instructor is finding music that people like.  There will always be someone who hates that music that is playing or is tired of hearing the same stuff.

I must admit I have about 20-30 songs on my I-Pod at the moment and when I teach 8 boot camp classes/week, the music does get repetitive!

So I came up with an awesome idea!  I need your help by telling me your favorite songs by title and artist (if you know it).

The key to a good I-Pod mix, is having a variety of music from different genres and decades.  So please list as many as you can in the comments section below.  Then I will have my assistant (Sara find the music and load them on to the I-Pod for myself and my future trainers.  So new music will be on the way soon!

This will also give everyone a great playlist that they can download to the Ipod or MP3 players!