Healthy High Achiever Blog

There is a big difference between the two.

Lifestyle coaching deals with the reality of your life situation and the causes of why you are living in such a way that promotes the overweight condition (the most obvious symptom), and a weight loss program see’s the consequences as "the cause" and attempts to solve the symptom without getting to the root of the problem.

Food and fitness are NOT the root of the problem! 

In many respects, overeating nutrient poor foods, and lack of physical activity are themselves symptoms of the real problem, which is overwhelm and exhaustion. Even overwhelm and exhaustion are symptoms of an deeper problem. That’s what you need to discover and that’s what Life / Lifestyle coaching and training is all about and Performance Lifestyle Training and Group Coaching get’s to this level.

In today’s day and age, we all need lifestyle coaching and lifestyle training, not weight loss programs. Permanent fat loss is a direct result of life style, not a diet program, which is not a lifestyle, even though living with that mindset is becoming a lifestyle for many people; an unsuccessful one. It’s all about your mindset.

This is a big distinction to make.

Do you think it’s hard dealing with the real problem? No, it’s simply, not always easy but powerful and effective. Any other solution is a temporary and lingering band aid. You need to coordinate all aspects of your lifestyle to get the outcomes that you want, including but not limited to, food and fitness.

This is Performance Lifestyle…

Do you want to lose the need to lose weight?

Are you aware that your lifestyle is either working for you or against you every minute of the day?

Most people are not aware of this, content to know that they worked out or made a better food choice (both are which are great) but don’t begin to touch the surface of what’s possible for you. Don’t feel bad if this is you, most of us, don’t have a broad enough concept beyond eating better (not Less) and exercising more, associated to lifestyle, to take full advantage of the power they really have.

Healthy high achievers do.

Becuase they do, they are able to unleash the full potential of their lifestyle to look, feel and perform better, meanwhile most other people sit and wonder, "how the heck do they do it?" It’s what you don’t see that makes the difference.

Unleashing the full potential of your Lifestyle is the missing link that makes the difference between suffering from the diet, weight and the long term health issues that so many people struggle with, and looking feeling and performing the way you want to.

Get ready to lose the need to lose weight. It’s not that you’ll never want to take off a few pounds here and there… weight fluctuates, it’s a fact of life and it’s easy to do in a healthy way. I’m talking about not having to lose significant amounts of weight and go through body transformation programs over and over again.

This can become a thing of the past when you understand Performance Lifestyle.  

I want to completely shift your paradigm here, not just a little bit, but a lot a bit! Read Unleash the Full Potential of Your Lifestyle then leave a comment.

What does all this mean to you?

What’s the difference between Lifestyle Training, Lifestyle Coaching, Lifestyle Fitness Coaching and traditional weight loss programs, diet programs and fitness training? 

I’ve been in and around the health and fitness industry, for over 20 years and I can tell you this… there’s a big difference. Moreover, that difference represents a fundamental mindset shift for both an industry and countless millions of people.

Finally, the subject of lifestyle is center stage. It’s no longer just about losing weight, it’s about what’s going to help you get truly well, healthy and able, to perform at the level you want and need to succeed. It’s about quality of life. It’s also, about what you want to accomplish in your life and business without having to sacrifice your health and fitness in the process.

Expansive to say the least, the reason why is simple. Like an amateur or professional athlete where health and fitness is a big part of their ability to perform well in their competitive sport which is a central part of their life and business, being well, staying healthy (energetic and fit) and being able to perform at a high level is the same for you. You may not be a competitive athlete, or even a fitness enthusiast, but still it’s all about what you’re up to in life and your quality of life. It’s the same for you as it is for athletes. We all need to take care of ourselves at high levels if we’re going to thrive today.

Health and fitness is not the goal! Neither is weight loss which is neither normal nor natural, but the effect of a lifestyle gone awry, off-course and downhill.

Today, we are realizing that we need lifestyle training, lifestyle fitness training and lifestyle coaching to help us live better at every age. If we don’t, the pace of modern day society and all the confusing, overwhelming, and exhausting influences we face, can easily wear us down. It’s about setting your lifestyle up for success, so you can thrive despite the relentless demand on your time and energy.

When you have wellness, which requires that you address your life situation, along with all of the core essential elements of taking care of your body, now we’re talking "solution". When you have the right perspective on taking care of yourself and it’s no longer "about" weight loss and lowering cholesterol and reducing the risk for disease, it becomes "about" your health AND success. When it’s about your health AND success, you’ll find you’ll want to to improve your lifestyle to look, feel and perform better and succeed at a much higher level.

Now that’s exciting. That’s Performance Lifestyle. 

Weight loss, while important for many people for a variety of reasons, is not exciting. I mean, do you wake up excited to lose weight? Do you wake up excited to exercise to lose weight? Probably no on both accounts. The reason why is simple, this is not what it’s about!! The diet, weight and fitness industries have turned it into this, but this is not what it’s about.

I doesn’t matter how overweight you are right now… weight loss is not your goal. It’s not even a real goal it’s an objective you have in your life so that you can accomplish something else, and it’s not going to happen healthfully and successfully or dissipate as something you even have to focus your attention on in your life until you get lifestyle training and coaching to deal with the real causes of your problem.

We all need lifestyle training and coaching today because we’re no longer living with natural influences in our lives. We’re required to thrive today in modern day environment that that is overwhelming and exhausting and promotes the overweight condition predictably.  The shift to lifestyle Fitness Training and Lifestyle Coaching is essential because it helps you avoid the causes and deal with the real situation not merely the symptoms and enjoy your life.

$60 billion dollars spend on diet and exercise programs is only making a small dent in the problem. Check out www.PerformanceLifestyle.com/obesitytrends. Statistics don’t like. This shift is long over due. It’s time for a real solution. It’s why I created Performance Lifestyle Solutions. To finally deal with the real situation of our modern day lives. It’s no longer about body transformation on it’s own. Body transformation is the result of a succesful lifestyle.

What you may not know though is that few traditional fitness trainers truly understand lifestyle, how to train and coach around it. There’s allot of old methodology today, wrapped up in new terminology. In other words, the same ole’ eat less and exercise more diet and workout routines are passing off as lifestyle coaching and this is far from lifestyle coaching.

Lifestyle is about how you live (work etc). At the core it’s about how you manage, spend and recuperate your energy, the quality of the food you eat and your activity levels to look, feel and perform better and achieve your goals in life and business. If you want to focus on the real deal, keep reading the blog at www.PerformanceLifestyle.com.

It will change your life and body forever.  

You know when I promote the Performance Lifestyle; some people think that you have to be an athlete an elite athlete or some other type of high achiever to benefit.

Let me ask you a question.

If you wanted to learn, self defense, who would you want to learn from, a green belt or a black belt? I think the answer is obvious.
Why is that? Because even though you may not intend to be a black belt, the black belt has lots of experience and knows how to teach you right. He or she knows technical application, practical application, and reality!

It’s the same with the Performance Lifestyle. There are those people who are healthy high achievers in sport or in various other occupations they are like the black belts. Like black belts there aren’t that many, but they are the people you want to seek out to learn how to unleash the full potential of your lifestyle to look, feel and perform better and achieve your goals in a healthy way. Who better to learn from than those who are achieving what you want and are healthy, energetic and fit at the same time.

You certainly don’t want to learn about resolving weight issues, from someone who is significantly overweight, or how to manage your energy from a manically exhausted person. You want to learn from those who know the game.

And even though you may have no intention of being at the top of your game, have little existing interest or experience in athletics, and may not even be a fitness enthusiast, mastering your lifestyle from people who are getting the results you want is the way to go.

Of course, if you do want to be at the top of your game and you want to stay healthy at the same time, there is no other solution than the Perforamance Lifestyle Solution.

I learned this over many years. Performance Lifestyle "brought it all together" for me and it will do the same for you.

Can you imagine everything just making sense? Well when it comes to lifestyle, an otherwise fluffy subject for most people, nothing will enable you to understand lifestyle, to get healthy fit and free than learn the Performance Lifestyle Formula.

John Allen Mollenhauer, Founder of PerformanceLifestyle.com for Your Health and Success.

By Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS

Turbulance Training

I’ve been meaning to write this email for a long time. Today I’m going to give you the story of how I solved the problem of getting an efficient and effective fat loss program finished in 45 minutes. Essentially, how I invented Turbulence Training. And then I’ll end with a sample TT workout for you…

But first, let’s take a trip down memory lane to the winter of 98-99. I was but a lowly grad student, studying the effects of androstenedione (the supplement taken by the might Mark McGwire during his record-breaking home run quest in ‘98).

In my study (which was published in the Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology for any science nerds like myself out there), we had guys use the supplement and go through a couple of weight training sessions. By February of ‘99 I was stuck in the lab, analyzing the blood samples using some fancy radio-active isotopes.

And when I say stuck in the lab, I mean STUCK. I’d get there at 7am, and record my last data point at 11pm. Sixteen hours of mad science. And if I wasn’t there, I was downstairs in themedical library, studying papers on testosterone and training.

Now coming from a very athletic background, this sedentary lifestyle didn’t sit well with me. But there I was, studing for a degree in Exercise Physiology and left with no time for exercise. Or so I thought. Fortunately, I actually had a 50 minute window once per day of "down-time" while the lab’s gamma-counter analyzed blood samples.

That left me 50 minutes to get to the gym (5 minutes across campus) and get a workout in the remaining 40 or so minutes. I knew that if I applied my studies to the workout, I could get maximum results in minimum time.

As a former athlete, I knew that I had to find a way to stay fit and to avoid the fat gain that comes with working long hours in a sedentary environment. And I also had to stay true to the high-school bodybuilder I once was, so there was no way I was willing to sacrifice my muscle to one of those long-cardio, low protein fat-loss plans that were popular at the time.

Instead, I had to draw on my academic studies and my experiences working with athletes as the school’s Strength & Conditioning Coach. I knew that sprint intervals were associated with more fat loss than slow cardio, and I knew that you could also increase aerobic fitness by doing sprints (but you can’t increase sprint performance by doing aerobic training).

So clearly, intervals were (and ARE!) superior to long slow cardio. I had seen first hand the incredible results of sprint intervals in the summer and fall, as the athletes made huge fitness improvements and shed winter fat in a short time using myT interval programs. I knew that intervals had to be the next step in the evolution of cardio.

The biggest benefit of intervals? A lot of results in a short amount of time. I knew that I only had 40 minutes to train, and therefore I could only spend 15-20 minutes doing intervals.

Now onto the strength training portion of the workouts. I knew that a high-volume bodybuilding program wasn’t going to cut it - I just didn’t have time. But in the past year I had read so many lifting studies, that I knew exactly what exercises I needed to do to maximize my lifting time in the gym.

Those exercises were standing, multi-muscle, movements such as squats, presses, rows, power cleans, and plenty of other standing single-leg exercises. I knew that those exercises would bring me far more results than those people sitting on machines would ever achieve. And I also knew that I had to lift heavier than the average Joe or Jane Gym-goer lifts. I just knew that doing lighter weights and high-reps wasn’t going to cut it. And a research study from 2001 later showed that I was right - when women did 8 reps per set, they had a significantly greater increase in post-workout metabolism than if they did 15 reps per set.

So I had my plan. Bust my tail over to the gym, through the cold, dreary Canadian winter afternoon, and do a quick but thorough warmup (specific to my lifts - none of that 5 minutes on the treadmill waste of time).

Turbulance Training

Once I got through the warm-up, I did as many sets as I could in the remainder of the 20 minutes for strength training.
At that point, I knew that supersets were the only way to go if I wanted to maximize the number of sets I could do…so the non-competing superset of Turbulence Training was put in place.

By non-competing, I mean that the 2 exercises in the superset don’t interfere with one another. So you can use upper and lower body exercises together, or pushing and pulling exercises. Just be careful not to use two grip-intensive exercises together in a superset - otherwise, one exercise will suffer, if not both.

And then I followed up the strength training with intervals, as I knew these had to follow the lifting, otherwise it would not be the correct exercise order. Remember, intervals first leads to premature fatigue. Lift first, cardio later. Forget that old wives tale about doing cardio first to burn more fat. That’s junk.

You know, I remember the exact day and exact workout that this all came together into the Turbulence Training program. It hit me as I was finishing my intervals. I knew I had found something that was like fat loss magic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to put it in a pill. But I’ve been able to put it down on paper in all of the TT manuals.

The exact workout I used that day went like this…

Warm-up
1 set of Bodyweight Squats
1 set of pushups
1 set of Squats with the empty bar
1 set of light dumbbell chest presses
1 set of moderate weight barbell squats
1 set of moderate weight dumbbell chest presses

Strength Training Superset #1
Barbell Squats paired with Dumbbell Chest Presses
3 supersets, aiming for 8 reps per side per set

Strength Training Superset #2
DB Rows paired with Barbell Forward Lunges
3 supersets, aiming for 8 reps per set

Stationary Bike Intervals
After a warmup, I did 6 intervals of 45 seconds work and 45 seconds rest, finishing with a cool-down.

And from that point in time, I’ve tried to share this and all the other Turbulence Training workouts with as many men and women as possible. The same men and women that I would see day-in and day-out performing the same ineffective slow-cardio fat loss programs, and not making a darn change month after month. And every day they would see me, soaked in sweat, feeling great and looking lean, and finishing another TT workout.

Eventually I noticed these other men and women weren’t around as consistently as before, and then soon enough they would drop out completely - after all, they weren’t getting results with their slow cardio and aerobics classes (yep, those were still around in ‘99!).

And so here we are today…thousands of TT users later, with national fitness magazines like Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, and Shape spreading the good word about Turbulence Training.

Thousands of TT users, dozens of personal trainers, and even several national fitness magazines all agree with me,

Turbulence Training is the #1 way to fast fat loss.

Thanks for being a part of the TT Lifestyle Revolution, and for sharing this new and improved fat loss training and cardio system with the world. So when you see someone frustrated with their ineffective fat loss program, tell them there is a better way. It’s
research-based, efficient, and most of all, effective. And yes, it goes against the crowd. But it works.

And it’s now better than ever,

Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
Author, Turbulance Training

PS - Don’t know where to start?

If you are a beginner, start by reading Dr. Mohr’s nutrition guidelines…eating properly will be the biggest factor in your early success. Beginners should also start with the Introductory TT workouts to prepare their muscles for the upcoming intense
training.

For others, it’s best to start with the Intermediate Level TT workouts. If those aren’t enough of a challenge, you can move onto the Original TT workout and follow the 16-week advanced program right through.

If at any time you need a break, try the TT Bodyweight 4-week plan. And then finish off with the bonus programs to cap off a full 24 weeks of Advanced TT fat loss workouts.

Turbulance Training

About the Author

Craig Ballantyne is a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist and writes for Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Maximum Fitness, Muscle and Fitness Hers, and Oxygen magazines. His trademarked Turbulence Training fat loss workouts have been featured multiple times in Men’s Fitness and Maximum Fitness magazines, and have helped thousands of men and women around the world lose fat, gain muscle, and get lean in less than 45 minutes three times per week.

For more information on the Turbulence Training workouts that will help you burn fat without long, slow cardio sessions or fancy equipment, visit Turbulance Training

By Rob Poulos
Fat Burning Furnace

I was puttering around on the internet this morning and I saw something that caught my eye.  It was the latest data
regarding our current life expectancy as humans from the World Health Organization, along with a history of how that’s changed over the years.

This info went all the way back to the Neanderthal period (the guys from the Geico commercials) u.p to present day humans.Those poor Geico guys only lived to be 20 years old on average, while today’s humans can expect about 75 years of life.

But did you know that today’s people have an average healthy life expectancy of just 67 years?  In other words, this is saying that you can expect 8 years of your life in poor health.  8 years!  That’s 2900+ days of poor health.  I don’t know about you, but that’s not something I’m looking forward to.

I sure think we can do better than 67 years of good health on this planet.  And you know what?  We can.  This number is an average.  Like anything else, you don’t have to be average if you don’t want to be.  The average person doesn’t exercise properly, if at all.  The average person doesn’t know how to make the right foods selections and maintain a healthy diet. The average person doesn’t apply themselves mentally and emotionally to maintain relatively stress f.ree living.

If this sounds a little bit too much like you, the good news is you don’t have to be this person any longer.  While it is a shame that today’s health, fitness, and diet industry is simply confusing more people than it’s helping, there are a few people and organizations out there that can provide a realistic, effective and efficient approach to breaking past the average healthy life span and living those years full of energy, strength, and vitality.

I get questions from my Fat Burning Furnace students all the time, after going through the FBF materials, about how they can’t believe how little exercise I recommend.  And even though I’ve told them up front that they can let go of the aerobics or traditional cardio, many still have trouble doing that.  And what I tell them is directly related to the subject of life expectancy and just how much time we really have in our lives.

I tell them that having a lean, strong, and healthy body is great.  It’s one of the most important things we can attain. Period.  But, how much time is it worth to you?  That’s the question I asked myself over and over when seeking out my own methods and developing the FBF system.

Most people, after years and years of trial and error, come to realize that spending several days and hours a week working out is just not worth the trouble.  And carefully measuring your food, counting calories, and depriving yourself of nutrient rich foods like whole grain carbohydrates is also something that shouldn’t be necessary to enjoy a healthy and energy filled life.  And it isn’t.

What we really should be focusing on is how much time and effort is minimally required to get the results we’re looking for. Think about that.  Not how much, but how much is minimally required.  Remember, we’ve got just 67 healthy years as a starting point…If I valued my time on this planet, this is what I would be searching for.

If it really took hours and hours a week and all of that crazy nutrition manipulation to burn fat, build muscle, strength, and cardiovascular health, I’m not sure I’d do it.  Not for very long anyway.  I’ve tried that approach, for years, and if you have you know it’s no fun.  And it’s just not realistic given the demands our lives place on us in today’s world.

But as I’ve mentioned before, you don’t have to worry about that kind of stuff anymore.  The principles in my FBF system allow you to approach your genetic potential for a lean, strong, and healthy body in just minutes each week and with very simple lifestyle changes.

I’ve been using the FBF principles for a while now.  I work out twice each week.  I even take a week off entirely every few weeks or so.  I don’t count calories.  I don’t deprive myself of the foods I love.  If it’s my daughter’s birthday, I eat a piece of cake.  I just work the FBF principles and continue to stay in great shape day after day, week after week, year after year.

I work out so little because of the way the workouts are performed and created, and I eat with such flexibility because I stick with the FBF lifestyle, which gives you the power of flexibility and variation that is lacking in most programs.

What I’m saying is that I’ve discovered what is minimally required to give me the health and body that I wanted.  And many of my FBF students are doing it as well.  Sure I could add another day a week to my workouts, but at this point it would actually be detrimental to my results.  I could also start messing with my diet in all sorts of crazy ways, but that would just make my body angry and cause me unneeded stress.

So, I ask you, are you trying to find what’s minimally required to get you the results you want?  If you truly value your time and the other worthy pursuits in your life, I’m suggesting that this is exactly what you should be doing.  

If you don’t, you may just end up being an average 67 year old with 8 years of poor health to look forward to.
Here’s to getting lean, strong, and healthy for life,

Rob Poulos Zero to Hero Fitness

P.S. If you want to find out more about what’s minimally required for a lean, strong, and healthy body, tap on the
link below:

Fat Burning Furnace