Healthy High Achiever Blog

First off…My hat is off to Chris Carmichael! I recommend this book to anyone as a good book to have in your library. You will learn something from every page that will help you live a performance lifestyle better.  I consider it a great start to defining what it means to live a performance lifestyle; although I agree with the others who wrote reviews on the book that this book starts out strong, but then descends into another "before and after" diet and exercise book that lacks clear distinction.

As founder of PerformanceLifestyle.com, a businessman, lifestyle coach and trainer, and also founder of NutrientRich.com, I sought out this book to get an even better grasp on what it means to live a lifestyle that yields better health and performance.

Here are my thoughts…

A book about performance living is not necessarily a book about body transformation, although body transformation is a likely result of a performance focused lifestyle. Relationships and improved sex are good subjects yet as Chris Carmichael says, I think they are components of a "winning life", not the central focus of a performance lifestyle which is really about managing your personal energy, food quality and activity levels and can confuse the subject a bit. Nonetheless I learned alot from this book.

Having spent years understanding performance "lifestyle" concepts and language, in the process of constructing the Performance Lifestyle System, which I’ve learned will always be in refinement, I can appreciate how hard it is to write a book on this subject and not get caught up in becoming a diet or exercise book. I did this early on but I knew in my gut that a performance lifestyle is about so much more. Diet and exercise alone don’t deal with the real problem for every day people and athletes alike, which is managing personal energy, time and space, food quality and activity levels…

Training and conditioning programs are a component of managing your activity levels and are relative to your goals, but they are not the central focus of a performance lifestyle.

I think it’s also harder to understand a performance lifestyle if you are coming from the angle of the elite athlete and trying to apply those insights to even the achievement oriented Joe and Jane. Elite Athletes have very different lifestyles that are set up to reinforce success in sport; their lifestyles are health and performance oriented, whereas the average achiever is living one way, and trying to solve it with another. 

The key is now helping other people set their lifestyles up to fast track their health and success and become healthy high achievers.

I am a raving fan of Chris Carmichael and read all of his books. I am promoting his book at the listmania list for the Performance
Lifestyle at Amazon.com, and here at www.PerformanceLifestyle.com.

Read the Performance Lifestyle Manifesto