A Birthday List: 32 Lessons in Fitness and Nutrition

Normally I’m not a birthday guy. However, since the birth of my daughter, I now have a 2 and a half year old cheerleader who hypes me up for any and every holiday or event that happens.

Shout out to Sauce… it’s nice having a cheerleader…

So NOW I’m a birthday guy. In honor of turning the big 3-2, I wanted to create a list of 32 thoughts geared towards fitness and nutrition. Some are short, some are long. Some are factual with real science behind them, and some are anecdotal n=1 from 32 years of life.

Without further adieu…

New Years Resolutions Are AWESOME. Let Me Tell You Why

In my 10 years as a Personal Trainer, I’ve never understood why those in my industry knock New Year's Resolutions and the Resolutioners that come with them.

Change is fickle S.O.B. in that some days you want it, and others, you want to beat it away with a stick (probably when you want to change most).

The five stages of change are precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.They’re important to know, even more important to understand, but for the purpose of this newsletter, and from what I gather about the audience that reads this, you're probably either at the contemplation or preparation stage.

Let's take a quick sidebar to see what those two stages look like...

Getting Started with a Fitness Program? Read this.

Growing up, my Dad, a General Contractor by trade, always told me “Bud, there is more than one way to skin a cat”. Always referring that there is more than one way to get to an end result.

Fast forward a few decades and I am knee deep into this lovely world of fitness and my Dad’s classic quote has never been more true. Sure, the choices you make along the way dramatically speed up or slow down the path to get there, but all in all, there is more than one way to skin a cat.

The missing link in your fitness program

I spent some time last night hanging out with Google.

I do this on occasion, probably once a quarter. I just sit down with my laptop and start searching for various key terms and phrases related to health, wellness, fitness, and nutrition. Sometimes it’s the buzzwords I’ve been hearing from clients and other times it’s just me typing in the classics to see what shows up on the first results page.

Last night I tried the phrase “Fitness for beginners”, just curious to see what would show up.

A casual 291,000,000 answers popped up.

Client Conversations Worth Sharing

Colleagues who write publicly have always told me the best writing topics are right under your nose.

Your own struggles and/or successes.

Interests you may have within the scope of your writing.

And the one that brings the best gems, the questions the people you work with ask.

I had a couple conversations last week that were 1) amazing questions from my clients and 2) questions that often get asked and I think a lot of people who read this newsletter would like the answers to.

So without much more, here we go…

Nutrition Strategies That Stick

I came into the fitness industry as a Coach who worked exclusively with kids ages 7-12. This age group isn’t immune to many of the same requests as their adult counterparts...the number one request was ‘can you talk to my kid about nutritional choices’.

Yes, this request was made for 7-12 year olds.

Day in and day out my sessions were filled with more fun than science and more loose strategies than black and white direction.As my time in fitness has grown, surprisingly, not much has changed- specifically on the ‘loose strategies’ section.