Create More Success With Your Exercise Program

Create More Success With Your Exercise Program

Terrence Thomas

 

There are two goals that are so important to ANY and results oriented exercise program. Failure to meet these two objectives will result in the following happening 100% of the time.

 

1. Your efforts will be wasted and your results will be mediocre at best.

2. You are guaranteed to suffer an injury.

 

With that said if you DO address the following objectives in your exercise program, ANY result that you wish to achieve is almost guaranteed.

 

Fundamental Exercise Objective #1: Restore and Improve Body Mechanics (movement quality).

 

The health, strength and beauty of the human frame rely heavily on how it is used. Form follows function. Let me ask you this. What would happen to a Ferrari (a sports car) if you took it off road and drove it like a Jeep? It wouldn’t be a pretty site to say the least.  This example holds true with the human body. The more you move the body like it was designed to move, you will bring healing energy and strength into the body. Strength, body symmetry (i.e. the quality that makes for visually appealing and attractive physique), power, endurance and every other bio-motor ability can be developed when the body is trained to move correctly. One of the best ways to achieve this is to: 1. Know what your current physical capabilities are. Is your movement skill average, above average or below average? Knowing this will help you choose the ideal exercises for your physical training program.

 

Fundamental Exercise Objective #2: Improve Posture.

 

Paul Chek, founder of the CHEK Institute said the following in regards to posture;

 

“Posture is the position from which movement begins and ends. Ideal posture is that state of muscular and skeletal balance which protects the supporting structures of the body against injury or progressive deformity, irrespective of the attitude in which these structures are working or resting.”

 

This statement makes it crystal clear that if your exercise program is not improving posture then it is degrading posture. .  If your goal is to develop a strong and beautiful body, it’s important that you are training with proper exercise technique. Exercise technique and the improper use of the body is the #1 reason for most injuries associated with exercise.

 

The variable achieving the two foundational exercise goals is to have an assessment system that determines whether an exercise is going to be right for you.  Remember: technique first and intensity second.  Go ahead and practice. Consider your exercise program as a practice rather than a workout. If you approach it this way, your quality will improve and I guarantee you your results will come faster and you will have better health. There is less likelihood for injury and you will be able to stick with your program much longer because when you practice you’re achieving mastery and the subconscious mind likes to learn new things.  Bottom line: you will feel better about what you’re doing which will help you stick with your program longer. ###

Improve Your Endurance In As Little As Five Minutes

Improve Your Endurance In As Little As Five Minutes

By Terrence Thomas

 

     Here are the cold hard facts. Any training technique that you use to boost endurance will be useless if one critical element is not in place.  It is the easiest, most obvious and the most overlooked aspect of endurance training. This very powerful method for boosting endurance is to improve your breathing mechanics.

     By optimizing your breathing pattern, you maximize your ability to bring oxygen into the body with each breath. Strong and efficient breathing will reduce your lactic acid build-up and you’ll be able to go longer, harder, faster.

The first step in improving breathing is to bring attention to the primary respiratory muscles. Your diaphragm and deep abdominal muscles are your primary respiratory muscles. If you watch an infant breathe, you’ll see they breathe perfectly. The belly is expanding as they inhale and flattening out as they exhale. They are showing you the ideal breath with should be about 70-80% use of the diaphragm and 20-30% of the accessory respiratory muscles. It is only in the presence of stress that this pattern gets reversed or “inverted”. An inverted breathing pattern is when the dominant muscles of respiration become the neck, chest and shoulder muscles. These are your accessory respiratory muscles, and if they become the primary breathing muscles, you are guaranteed to have health challenges at some point. Some of them include;

 

*Chronic Headaches

*Chronic Neck pain

*Increased likelihood of shoulder injury

*Lower back pain

*Constipation

*Chronic fatigue

*Poor posture, which will lead to multiple orthopedic injuries.

 

It is my experience has been that once the breathing pattern has been inverted, it does take considerable effort to correct the pattern. It is not impossible but it does take consistency to retrain the body into a correct breathing pattern.

 

Here are some quick tips to help you optimize breathing;

1. Do stretching exercises for the neck and chest muscles: This will allow the body to use the diaphragm easier.

2. Practice breathing through your diaphragm lying down. Doing this makes it easier to activate the diaphragm.

If you apply these techniques 10 to 15 minutes a day, set little reminders to focus on your breath during the day and do specific exercises to enhance breathing mechanics, you will be half-way home in terms of being able to boost your endurance. ###

Why Eating Clean Sucks

Why “Eating Clean” Sucks

by Terrence Thomas

 

Let’s discuss a mental construct that I believe is one of the major causes of yo-yo dieting. The idea that I’m talking is the “eating clean” and I believe has infected the entire health and fitness industry.  Here are three concepts about eating clean that explain how this mindset can sabotage your health, fitness, weight loss, and physique goals and what you can do to make sure you are not doing this to yourself.

 

1. Stop using the term “eating clean”.

The very idea that you are eating clean means that at some point you are not eating clean.  In other words you’re eating in a way that supports health and performance during a certain time and then the other times you are eating like crap. I don’t know about you but that sounds very much like an eating disorder. The mindset behind eating clean is that you are in some way depriving yourself. When the mind is in a dynamic of deprivation, it is relying on willpower to resist temptation. Eventually you will run out of willpower and the natural tendency is to either quit eating clean or go to the other extreme, which is to eat garbage or binge eat. Having “cheat” days are supposed to help deal with the deprivation aspect of “eating clean” but the mental dynamic of resisting or succumbing to temptation is still in play.

 

If you are constantly bouncing from eating “clean” to not eating clean you are on a yo-yo diet. On average, when you ask someone what eating clean means, they say eating in a way that helps them lose fat or get healthy. Why not eat like this all the time or at least consistent enough that when you do choose not to “eat clean” that it won’t totally derail your efforts.  Follow the 80/20 rule. In other words, if your are eating, living and managing yourself in a way that promotes health, fitness and vitality 80 percent of the time then when you should be able to tolerate the occasional culinary, or recreational vice without irreparable damage to your body.

 

2. Send the idea of Bulking up back to the 1970’s. If you want to gain quality muscle that lasts for a lifetime, eat quality whole food all the time. Eating garbage foods and supplements that only make you look swollen and puffy will give you the illusion that you are BIG.  If you want to have a real, bona fide brick shit house of a body, you must feed your body real whole food, train intelligently and consistently. Training intelligently means knowing when to crank it up and push it to the limit but also knowing when to back off.

 

3. Stop playing Tug Of War with our mind.

If you want achieve your health and fitness goals with zero resistance and a feeling of peace, stop creating extremes in behavior. Think lifestyle instead of dieting. Eat real food all the time and sprinkle in some treats instead of eating pathologically strict and then totally flying off the handle and single handedly keeping a local ice cream shop in business.

 

Disclaimer: With that said, I am fully aware of what it takes to achieve extreme levels of fitness, leanness and muscularity. For example if you are a physique competitor and are in pre contest training, you are asking the body to do something that by nature it does not want to do. This takes some specific training, diet, and supplementation strategies to achieve this and when done with a relative degree in intelligence can be done safely and at a high level. The key here is intelligence.  #BeBeautiful #BeStrong  #BeHealthy

The Physical Excellence Workout

The Physical Excellence Workout

by Terrence Thomas

 

Let’s discuss the five key principles that I use to design all of my exercise fitness sports performance weight loss and stress management exercise programs. The five principles of the Physical Excellence Workout are:

 

1. Infant development

There are certain skills that must be developed in the human body between the ages of zero and one years of age.  If these skills, reflexes and processes are not developed, it can predispose the body to injury, hormonal imbalances, neurodevelopmental and even emotional problems.  The Physical Excellence Workout uses infant development training to clear the runway to a fully functional strong, healthy and beautiful body. Infant development exercise can be used as a stand alone workout or in combination with other forms of training. Either way it will help build a balanced strong and healthy body.

 

2. Corrective stretching

The goal of corrective stretching in the Physical Excellence Workout is to balance the musculoskeletal system. It is similar to a guitarist tunes their strings.  Stretching is not about how limber you are but how balanced your body is. A balanced body is a beautiful, strong, and healthy body and the physical excellence workout will help you accomplish this.

 

3. Core conditioning

Proper core conditioning will teach the body to dissipate forces away from the spine. Real core training involves more than just training the abdominal muscles or putting the body under a balance challenge. The Physical excellence Workout core conditioning program involves training the entire musculoskeletal system to function as a unit in order to dissipate forces, stabilize joints, reduce wear and tear,  improve performance and  overall health and vitality.Anti-aging and the ability to stay youthful, beautiful and vital is directly dependent on the body’s ability to maintain a strong and functional postural system.  The Physical Excellence Workout strengthens the postural system to preserve longevity and vitality in the body.

 

4.  Scientific strength training

Strength training when done correctly provides a therapeutic response in the body. Yes, the Physical Excellence Workout strength training method is about increasing force and lifting heavy weights, but it is done in a way that promotes health, balances the system as well as strengthening the body. Choosing the right movement at the right time for the right person is how clients get  amazing results and lifelong success with the Physical Excellence Workout.

 

5.  Primal pattern development

Primal pattern development is a functional training technique that develops all of the body’s natural movement patterns that would be used in a primal or primitive environment. There are seven basic primal patterns and they are squats, lunges, bend, push, pull, and twist. The seventh pattern is gate, Which consists of walking jogging and sprinting. In the Physical Excellence Workout, clients are evaluated and then a program is designed according to their current level of skill and fitness levels. This aspect of the Physical Excellence Workout allows us to transform a couch potato to a well conditioned athlete.

 

Whether you were a couch potato, a professional athlete, a stay-at-home mom or someone just trying to look and feel their best, the physical excellence workout will help you reach your goal methodically professionally and efficiently. Give us a call and let us show you how we can help you get results like these satisfied clients!

 

—————->Success stories!

“Changing my energy level from an all time low to the highest its ever been..Changing my time spent training from inefficient to incredibly effective..Changing weak link aspects of my physique to the high levels of core strength..Terrence Thomas is the coach who has helped me get into the best shape of my life! Beyond teaching me to master exercise techniques specifically tailored to address my fitness challenges, Terrence suggested a diet suited for my metabolic type and advocated eliminating depleting cardio sessions. Thanks to his expertise and devotion to helping me reach my goal, Terrence has vastly helped me improve my quality of life -a priceless reward I’ll surely appreciate for the rest of my life.”

-Bari A.

 

“Terrence is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. Besides looking like a real life Super-Hero, he lives by the very high standards he preaches. He is relentless about results and will not stop until any willing person around him has reached their full potential. In other words, he cares very well for himself and also for everyone around him (that is, if you are fortunate enough to be around him).

I met Terrence through my wife (they went to school together) and since then he has not stopped impressing me. So much so that I decided to engage him as my health and fitness coach. The results have been outstanding… inside and out.

To expand on that, one of Terrence’s “Super Powers” is the ability to understand the human body from a level I have never seen anyone be able to do. I call him “The Body Doctor” because he has this interesting talent to derive what a person’s needs are and to easily guide them to overcome their limitations (present and future). In my case, I sure had many… suffering from all sorts of muscle constrains and joint pain, it was hard for me to get around to do the things I loved in life. It was as though I had aged prematurely, and Terrence has been instrumental at taking me from that point of limitation to where I am now. Today, I feel so incredibly better and much more able to do the things I like.

Furthermore, Terrence possesses many other skills, not limited to the workings of the mind as-well-as potentiating one’s metabolism and biochemistry for optimal digestion and healing. Terrence ensures a complete and holistic physical and mental state of excellence for anyone that is fortunate enough to partner with him in their pursuit of happiness.

At this time, I invite you to make a strong determination and decision in your mind to contact Terrence and go over any limitation or goals you may have.”

-Marcello.

 

For a FREE consultation today call, 954-454-5305!

 

Working In Vs Working Out

I would like to share with you a very unique concept that is probably exclusive to C.H.E.K. practitioners and Chek trained holistic lifestyle coaches. This is the concept of “working in” versus “working out.”  Here’s what I mean.

When the average person begins an exercise program, their primary goal is to get back into shape. They have not done physical exercise in a long time. Their diet is poor, their vitality slipping and energy levels are low. In other words, their stress levels are high.

Consider that exercise is inherently stressful.  When highly stressed people begin an exercise (workout plan), they are adding stress on top of stress.  This approach may work short-term, but the reality is that in most cases their body ultimately rejects the exercise.  Rejection  means they get injured, get sick or become so tired and sore they just lose the desire to stick with their workout program.

Inflicting high intensity exercise “workout” program to a stressed out body causes one’s stress level to rise to a destructive tipping point. Stress overflow equals physical and metabolic shutdown. It’s a natural survival mechanism. The body is saying “Ok, if you don’t have the common sense to shut it down, let me do it for you in the form of an injury, illness or pulling the plug on your energy levels”.

The concept of working in means that when you’re beginning an exercise program, your initial goal is to train in a way that brings energy back into the body rather than making withdrawals on an energy account that’s already in the red. Working in involves paying attention to your exercise volume and intensity. In other words controlling the number of sets, reps, and training frequency. The goal here is to achieve successful fatigue, and not feeling like you’ve been run over by a truck after your exercise training session.  Any good training session will have the ability to be duplicated.  If you can’t duplicate a training session–because it was too intense, it was not a training session but a maximal effort or a competition level event.  If you’re working in properly, you’re creating successful fatigue, which will bring energy back into the body, reduce stress levels and build energy reserves. #workoutworkin

How The Body Thinks Part 1: Death By Gym

What you are about to learn could save your life.

To truly understand how exercise affects the body, there must be an understanding of human biology, physiology, and psychology.

All of these factors are affected by an exercise program.

Stay with me please…This is going to get a little deep.

Evolutionary biology tells us that ANY threat to the organism will create a stress response in the body.

Let’s define what threat means in a bit more detail.

A threat is anything that compromises human survival. ANYTHING..

We are hardwired to detect any and all stressors that can kill us. This  can be at the conscious level (i.e. what we are aware of) or at the subconscious level (i.e. what we are not aware of.)

Ok.. let’s now define both conscious and unconscious stressors.

First the conscious..

* being trapped in a burning car.
* falling off a motorcycle
*getting mauled by a hungry grizzly bear.
*being diagnosed with a terminal illness
etc…

Now here are some of the possible subconscious stressors

* poor breathing pattern; if your breathing is compromised in any way.. your body thinks you are going to die.. And there are 8 ways to Sunday that breathing can be disrupted, so this threat is real and quite prevalent.

*poor posture: if your physical frame is out of alignment, your body thinks it will not be able to effectively run from predators or hunt effectively and therefore thinks it will die. Consider that 90+% of society has some type of postural disorder.

*suboptimal food choices: if you are eating a food that your DNA sees as incompatible with life… your body thinks it will die. In other words any time you eat a meal that is not according to your metabolic type, your body thinks it a poison and goes into a state of stress.

I don’t think I need to give you a statistic for this one. Just look around.. Has anyone close to you to been diagnosed with cancer? How about heart dis-ease? diabetes? anybody obese? how about just a little overweight? How about can get pregnant? Etc….

It is the subconscious forms of stress that eventually produce conscious forms of stress (i.e. sickness and dis-ease).

Finally here lies the lesson..

Many people have a desire to improve their health, fitness and body image.

They are willing to put in the time and effort to exercise and “diet”.

A fundamental principle of Physical Excellence is that any exercise program will serve to do three things:

1. Improve the structure of the body: This goes beyond biceps, triceps and abs and emphasizes the development of the physical qualities needed to develop, restore and maintain a healthy, functional and vital human frame. If this happens, the fitness, fat loss and the aesthetic results will be all but guaranteed.

2. Improve movement skills. Your exercise program will promote the ideal expression of human movement. In other words, your body will move and function the way it was designed to.

The best way to describe this principle is with the following analogy:

What if you took your car to a mechanic to get a full service on it (i.e. brakes, tire rotation, alignment, tune up etc.). And the mechanic also threw in a free car wash and wax.

Now imagine as you drove the car home that it drove and performed worse than it did before you took it in to get fixed? Would you focus on the fact that your car is shinny or would you have a problem with the fact that the car is running like crap?

Yet I have consulted with THOUSANDS of people over the last 20 years that have been “working out” and they come to me with poor posture, dysfunctional movement patterns, and are “fit but sick”.

This phenomenon was unheard of 30 years ago.

It is only since the advent of diet pills, cheap garbage supplements that we now have people with six pack abs like a world class athlete and toxic livers and polluted intestines.  I digress for a moment but I think you get the point.

In summary: If your exercise and nutrition program is not in line with your specific needs, and are not accomplishing the above, then your body thinks it will die and produce a stress response.

Prolonged stress responses are detrimental to your health and that is not Physical Excellence.

Listen.. with the new changes in “health care (i.e. disease management)” in the United States, more of the onus will be on us to take personal responsibility for our health and well being, as it ought to be in my opinion.

We have more people getting terminal illnesses at younger ages than ever.

We as a society must approach our health and vitality from a different perspective.

A perspective that will serve to promote Physical Excellence to the next generation.

Will you help me do it?

Your tip for today,

Much.. Chi..

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