In my past post I was answering the questions “what is a healthy lifestyle anyway” and providing some insight into how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully, which is what you learn when you get into a PerformanceLifestyle and learn the 12 fundamental skills of healthy and successful living.

I am familiar with the study that was done at the University of Michigan back in 2005, that came to the conclusion that only 3% of the population lives a healthy lifestyle successfully and have referred much to becoming part of the 3% club for some time.

I have called these people in the 3% Healthy High Achievers, for one reason. The very reason why they are in the 3 percent is that they know how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully and they do so, YES, so they can live a disease free, high quality of life, but mainly so that they can function and perform well and achieve their life, business and sporting goals.

That’s why they are so motivated and put out the effort to live as healthy as they do.

They are not nuts, they are smart!

Today, I came across across an old friend of mine Chip Eichelberger. We worked together for Tony Robbins, almost 17 years ago. He publishes a site a site called the 3percentchoice.com and today I realize that the idea is spreading. I invite you to join the 3% club too.

I love one of the posts on his site.

Too Late for Baby Steps!

Unfortunately the advice we often receive when facing adversity is “don’t do anything too drastic!” Does that sound familiar? Here are the brutal facts – if you have not been living the lifestyle of a 3%’er, more like a 50% lifestyle (overweight, out of shape, stressed out….) – you need to make some extreme changes now to get you motivated by quick results.

Starting to work out twice a week if you have been doing nothing is a start, but will not yield the quick results you are looking for. Download the Winner’s Workout Schedule on this site and commit to 4 days a week, ideally in the morning, and hire a personal trainer for 6 months. You are worth it!

Today, it’s not about eating just a little bit better, or exercise a little bit more, or trying to get a little more sleep. It’s about living the healthiest lifestyle possible, which is really just a return to what’s normal and natural, only now, you harness the power of healthy living in a proactive way so you can thrive and that requires lifestyle skills.

Join the 3% club! (by the way, there actually is a 3% club coming soon).

This morning, as I was reading Google Alerts on Nutrient Rich foods, I came across an article by By: Linda Hepler, BSN, RN, that reminded me of the time when this question dominated my mind.  It makes the same point about living “healthy” that I was thinking.

Healthy living is usually about exercising more, eating better or less and making sure you get your zzz’s. But doesn’t go very far beyond that and when it does, it’s off the radar screen for most people.

But if it were so easy to manage your energy, eating and exercise everyone would be doing it really well. It’s not easy to live a healthy lifestyle successfully, especially if you are a goal oriented person who is focused on achieving life and business goals, where healthy living often takes a back seat.

To top off the confusion…

What is a “healthy” lifestyle anyway and how to do you live a healthy lifestyle successfully?

The answer is of course, having the performance lifestyle mindset set and skill set to function and perform optimally while focused on your life, business or a sporting goal. That focus of course, is what drives you to make the right healthy living choices.

But that’s the mindset of only 3% of the population. Most people do not know how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully.

Have a read of this article.

Max Muscle Nutrition Planning Article: LIVE LONG, LIVE HEALTHY
Include lots of nutrient rich foods in your daily diet. … Tip: “Nutrient dense food or nutrient rich foods as they are called today, are foods that are …
www.maxmuscle.com/nutrition-article/44/

It’s a basic article that delivers 8 tips that are good to know including the one about nutrient rich foods, but the point I want to zero you in on is in the first few paragraphs.

MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY can keep us alive longer than ever these days. It’s surprising then to learn that research, such as a recent Michigan State University study, suggests that only about 3 percent of Americans are living consistently healthy lifestyles – which most health experts agree is the key to longevity. But, how exactly to define a healthy lifestyle?

If you hit the gym five times a week, eat lots of protein (debatable), and try to get your zzz’s each night, it’s a good start. But, there’s more to healthy living than that. You may think you’re doing all the right things, but still be putting yourself at risk for health problems.

How to tell if you’re making all of the right choices for a long and healthy life? With so much conflicting health information out there, it’s hard to know sometimes. Each day, it seems, there’s a different story about the positive or negative effects of coffee, the newest super fruit, or the latest and greatest supplement to try.

Many experts will tell you that the best way to get and stay healthy is to forget about the latest health trends – and the newest super fruit – and get back to the fundamentals of a healthy lifestyle.

Here are some top tips from the professionals for getting back to the basics.

The Performance Lifestyle formula, identifies the 12 fundamentals of living healthy, that will guide in you in how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully and  just so happens; help you achieve your life, business and sporting goals in fine fashion at the same time.

The most interesting part of the formula is this:

While directly managing your energy, eating and exercise, are the 3 core essentials of health and high performance, they are only 1/4 of the formula. Every other skill in the lifestyle formula will enable you do to do those three things well, achieve your goals, and give you a much better quality of life.

Performance Lifestyle defines how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully in a context you can understand.

Yeah of course, our lifestyle’s are also about enjoyment, social status, and about quality of life, health etc… but I’m talking about the purpose of your life “style”. Ultimately it’s about achieving your goals from the moment you get up in the morning to the minute you go to bed.

You are always achieving something.

But the reality is, most people are just to-doing themselves to death. They’ve got so much going on they are barely hanging on and unfortunately they trade their health for success. And the worst part about this is that they don’t necessarily achieve their goals even at that high cost.

What would have happened in they weren’t violating The 7 Rules of Achievement and were actually clear on their goals?

I’ll go one step further.

What’ would have happened to date, if they actually had the lifestyle mindset and skill set to achieve their goals, in a balanced and healthy way? Whew!

Just stop and consider what hold most people back from achieving their goals.

These are the two aspects of goals achievement that must go hand in hand.

1.  You must be clear on your goals.

I would say first and foremost most people don’t have clear goals or they have too many and are all over the map. They have violated what Tom Terwilliger calls The 7 Rules of Achievement.

2.  You must have the lifestyle to support goal setting, peak performance and achievement.

• What’s holds so many people back?
• Personal energy debt
• Lack of support and balance
• Poor internal thinking, that’s focused on what they don’t want
• Lack of motivation or the wrong kind
• Confusion
• Overwhelm
• Lack of Energy
• Overweight,
• Lack of stamina and fitness and the kind of endurance goal achievement requires.
• And of course, back to square one, they are not clear on their goals!

I highly recommend that you pay attention to the purpose of your lifestyle and to the upcoming posts on Tom Terwilliger’s Vision, Action Achievement Boot camp!.

~ JAM

Shawn and I have been leaders in the emerging field of lifestyle performance and I love doing events with him.

In this this insightful 5 minute interview, Shawn asked about the one thing people can do to optimize their energy right now.

I went back and listened to the 5 minute clip again this morning and I noticed a comment that he made at the end of the segment where he mentioned… (I paraphrase)  “that people are often looking for a more complicated answer to how to increase their energy, when the answer is simple“.

Now I know exactly what he meant and that he was right on. And yet, I then thought to myself, yes the answer is simple, but the truth is -  the simple answer’s are often very complex, not because they are complicated, but because you need to have a full understanding of all that goes into increasing and managing your energy, before you can do it well.

That’s the difference between a lifestyle solution and say drinking a cup of coffee. Drinking a cup of coffee to increase your energy is very simple, but the consequences of relying on stimulants to manage your energy will get very complicated. Learning how to recuperate you energy (sounds simple) but is actually pretty complex, but once you know how, it’s actually is simple.

It’s not enough to say, simply – sleep, rest, recover, (relax) and rejuvenate your energy and you’ll increase your energy; if it where that simple everyone would be doing it. Remember these are lifestyle activities and they require that you have the ability to stop yourself and those two words will reveal allot about your life. If your life is overwhelming for example, that alone will prevent you from being able to do even simple things like recuperate your energy.

So I wanted to share with you 3 steps for increasing and managing your energy.

Note: unlike food and fitness where you are working with tangible items in most cases, to manage your energy you’ve got to develop a mental dashboard so you can manage something you can’t see; managing your energy is a game of pure learning and getting grounded in experience.

1. Learn the difference between vital energy and food energy
2. Learn how how to actually recuperate or “regenerate” your personal energy
3. Get grounded in experience.

After all, it’s not what you know but how you actually live that matters!

~ JAM

PS: I will be uploading content and a very special ebook on this very subject at ManageYourEnergy.com in the coming weeks, I’ll keep you posted and keep sharing some posts on this subject.

Here’s The One Thing I shared.

A couple days ago I got a call from the legendary Shawn Phillips, creator of Full Strength and author of Strength for Life.

Shawn Phillips is also one of the brothers who launched one of the biggest and most successful companies ever in the fitness industry EAS, and now, in addition to running his new company Full Strength, which transforms the lives of mostly men in mid life (women too) by helping them live at full strength for life, he has launched a new Mind Body and Lifestyle Show Called The One Thing.

What’s The One Thing?

The One Thing is a great idea; Shawn calls you impromptu, with a prior invite, to ask you what’ s one thing about “X” that you can share in 5 minutes or less that will no doubt help someone create a better result. I got one of those calls last week and he asked about the one thing I could share that would help someone increase and optimize their personal energy.

As a leading authority in Performance Lifestyle training and coaching, the one thing I’ve learned about living a healthy lifestyle successfully, and achieving your goals, is that you MUST know how to manage your personal energy. Maintaining a high level of personal energy is literally the key a successful lifestyle. Everything else you do and if you are going to do it well like eat better and exercise, depends on your personal energy.

In Shawn’s words “there is so much wisdom out there, but so little bandwidth to consume it” so I think his show is sure to be a hit.

So here’s the “5 minute” interview question that Shawn asked me:

What’s the one thing I could share that would help someone right now optimize their personal energy levels?

Here’s The One Thing I shared.

By the way, here’s a two week challenge from Shawn.

Once key aspect of your lifestyle is obviously your diet.

Recently, I was talking with Tracie Boyle (not Susan Boyle) but Tracie  Boyle, who switched to a nutrient rich diet as part of a more successful lifestyle that she is improving little by little.

When she began her transformation, she changed the quality of the foods she was eating, from refined foods to nutrient rich whole foods, and didn’t even get into formalized exercise and look at the natural weight loss transformation she made.

I am thrilled for her as this is one of the most dramatic natural weight loss transformations I have seen.

She said: “I started to exercise, but not in  a formal way, I walked more, and included more physical activity into my day like parking further way from the store.” You know, lifestyle changes.

Of course, that level of activity is not going to build extraordinary levels of fitness, but combined with eating a  nutrient rich whole foods diet, meaning a diet that gives you the nutrients you need and not too much energy (calories) or the stuff your body doesn’t need, you can start to live at or near your ideal weight.

Now given Tracie’s prior diet, she was going to get a big bang for making every calorie count eating a nutrient rich diet, and now she is making other lifestyle changes. Her thinking has already begun to change and she is now in the process of living better and better.

Lots of amazing things changed when she started to eat better, and one by one started thinking differently. As she went through changes, she started learning how to live better.

That’s what we do in a Performance Lifestyle.

Congratulations Tracie!

We will keep you posted on her progress as a guest blogger here on PerformanceLifestyle.com

How many ways are out there to change?

Countless, some are healthy and some are not, some solve the problems and other don’t and can actually create more, but in the short term all you need to do is change a few variables in your life, like your diet and exercise habits, and you can see incredible changes that will really inspire you.

What most people don’t often see when it comes to personal transformation or fitness challenges are the changes that people inevitably have to make in order to eat better and exercise more consistently in their life and it is these hidden challenges that Performance Lifestyle skills address including the best dietary and exercise strategies.

When you deal with these hidden challenges, “proactively” you can prepare yourself for a personal transformation or fitness challenges and get far better results because you won’t have anything holding you back.

For instance:

• Ever feel exhausted and unable to accomplish even routine daily activities? You’re overspent! That’s personal energy debt, the hidden variable that undermines all health and success.

• Living as if everything depends on you will eventually lead to hitting the wall—and could even lead to disaster. Creating a support plan can solve this.

• When you don’t feel sustainable you need to recuperate and recalibrate your personal energy on a regular basis and “live” in balance. This requires skills.

• Your personal story has been written from childhood and serves as the framework for how you view the world around you. When you discover how your story impacts your life and how to change those aspects of your story that are throwing your emotions and lifestyle out of whack, you will be far more successful with transformation and challenging yourself.

• Something is motivating you—now you need to discover what it is. Learning what drives you will lead you away from energy depletion towards revitalization and a renewed focus on your real goals.

• Can you see the real causes of your current situation? What’s preventing you from moving forward? Most people don’t know. When you learn to understand and assess your present situation so that you can gain a clear view of where you are in your life right now your approach to things will improve.

• These days, it’s so easy for us to zoom around in too many directions and lose track of our long-term goals, which is why we need to know how restructure and reorganize—to get more done in less time—by focusing our energy on what matters (and that includes YOU).

• If you run at top speed all of the time, you’re bound to stall, so structuring your life and business around your weekly capacity to perform well will go a long way. The end result will be optimal energy capacity, all day, every day.

• Do you know how to regenerate your energy? Learning how to recharge your energy at any time and in any situation, so you’ll always have the energy you need when you need it is a very powerful skills to have.

• Stopping the cycle of junk food cravings, unnecessary hunger and weight gain before you enter a fitness challenge is very powerful too. When your body is not getting what it needs to succeed, you’re set for failure. Learn to eat nutrient rich—for health, high performance and “natural” weight loss.

• Fitness is not only about working out; it’s about managing activity and momentum. Even when you engage in transformative periods that are highly regimented, know how to manage momentum is key.

• Do you know what your goals are? Do you have a 3-year plan for transitioning from where you are now to where you want to be. Bring together everything you’ve learned to accomplish your objectives, achieve your goals, and realize the vision you have for your life. Sometimes not having a clear picture of where you are headed and why can hold you back from changing.

Your lifestyle must always support your performance if you want to challenge yourself and achieve your goals. Get your lifestyle working for you and personal transformations and fitness challenges will be exciting events in your life.

One of the greatest discoveries I found when leading the development of the Performance Lifestyle Formula, was this:

The very same set of lifestyle skills that will enable a person to get out of the downward energy trend and increase their energy, will enable someone to dramatically improve their health and get their weight under control, as well as achieve peak performance and the goals they have set, ultimately improving quality of life. The power is in how the skills are applied (tactics) – what skills you apply, how  you do it and why.

For example: if a person is training for a transformation challenge or sporting goal, when you Activate and Strengthen Your Body in a Performance Lifestyle, your lifestyle would include more sport specific training than someone who has ambitious life or business goals and does not require fitness training at that level.

So here are a few way in which a Performance Lifestyle can apply in your life:

1. It’s how you live a “healthy lifestyle” successfully – this is one of my most common answers because a healthy lifestyle has many definitions and is very subjective. Meaning, anything can be deemed “healthy” even if it’s not. For example; in a Performance Lifestyle we eat nutrient rich foods, and when you know what a nutrient rich food is, the guess work is taken out of  it and you actually learn how to eat for health, which is a skill. We take the same “best practice” approach to each of the 12 fundamental skills you learn in the lifestyle, each of which enables you to function and perform better and live a healthy lifestyle, successfully.

• Get out of a downward energy trend and restore yourself – underlying almost all diseases of lifestyle (not genetic diseases, but those driven by choice and by the environments you subject yourself too), is overwhelm, exhaustion, fatigue, over stimulation, under recuperation, over consumption, under nourishment, over busy (over trained) limited physical inactivity, all of which give rise to the overweight condition and health complications and what we call “diseases of lifestyle”. In a Performance Lifestyle, staying out of this trend is top of mind.

• Get free of Performance Addiction – some people just can’t stop themselves, yet they are trying to live in balance, with vibrant health and peace of mind and they have anything but “peace of mind”. They have so many stories floating around in their head, most of which are unsupportive, that they can’t stop moving, doing, being better, striving, proving themselves etc. If they want to get free of performance addiction the answer is to get into a Performance Lifestyle.
  

• Overcome fat loss resistance and “metabolic syndrome” - how many times have you felt like you are doing it all, but just can’t get things to change, like your weight? The specific reason why is not also easy to identify, but the one thing is simple to clarify, there is some aspect of your lifestyle that is holding you back and causing problems. In a Performance Lifestyle you will learn how to overcome fat loss resistance by making a whole lifestyle change and that means taking steps back far enough so you can make changes at the needed level to move forward in a position of strength.

• Set a big goal (life, business, sport) and achieve it with the support of your lifestyle. The purpose of your lifestyle is to achieve your goals, and goal achievement requires performance; that’s why it’s called Performance Lifestyle. The whole idea of eating, thinking or living better is to achieve something greater and bigger than health itself. Health is your birthright, success isn’t!

• Prepare for a Personal Transformation or Fitness Challenge (coming next) – it’s one thing to live the healthiest lifestyle you can, it’s another to transform or challenge yourself in a highly regimented period in your life. This is a time period when you are following a proven training program or system that is planned and only lasts for a period of time. Your lifestyle then helps you maintain your results. If you want to prepare for a personal transformation or fitness challenge, then get into a Performance Lifestyle to get ready, and learn how to do it right!

• Get the most out of our life – how do get the most of your life without life getting less than the best from you? You must stay out of that downward energy trend which will do more to negatively affect your energy, attitude and outlook than anything else. You also need to align the structure of your life, your lifestyle and your goals so that you start “firing on all cylinders” so to speak. This is a tall order no doubt, but whether you know it or not, that’s what we are all striving for. Having a lifestyle that is sustainable; that works so well, it’s an amazing ride with the best quality of life possible each step of the way. If you want that, then Performance Lifestyle principles and practices to work for you.
  

Each lifestyle skill in a Performance Lifestyle is clear. You learn how to manage your energy including the quality of the food you eat and your activity levels so that you can challenge yourself and stay fit consistently in a Performance Lifestyle and achieve your goals. To do that, we need to develop a resilient  mindset and skills set and that’s what you learn in Performance Lifestyle training and coaching like the LS 365 Training at The Lifestyle Coaching Center.

That they are asking about the logo and what it means, means the logo is doing it’s job which is to:

a) attract attention, and

b) send a message.

So here is the short and skinny on why we call this the “Performance” Lifestyle and why the word “lifestyle”  is upside down and backwards.

Ok …

First, why is this called Performance Lifestyle?

A Performance Lifestyle is a healthy lifestyle (actually the healthiest lifestyle you can live) but a healthy lifestyle is not necessarily a Performance Lifestyle or going to promote your personal or professional success.

It’s a different mindset.

Healthy living undoubtedly takes a backseat for many achievers. Constantly faced with challenges, overwhelm and at times low energy, healthy living often goes on hold while achievers are busy taking care of other stuff that has immediate social and financial consequences.

For many of us, especially goal oriented people, the focus on productivity at any cost takes over, but it doesn’t take care of us. And whether you know it or not, productivity at the cost of your health and performance actually limits your ability to achieve your goals. Meanwhile we want to “live healthy,” but we just can’t get ourselves to take time out.

The same thing happened to me, but as I’ve gotten more experienced with a lifestyle focused on performance, taking “time out” to take care of my self and my body, has taken on a completely new meaning. In the past, I would just press on because “time was money,” opportunity and responsibility…

Then it hit me, does Tom Brady, quarterback of the New England Patriots hesitate to take time out? No. Does he get upset because he’s not playing at half time? No. Does he play both offense and defense? No. Few players ever do. Does he play football 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year? No! If he did, he would burn out and never be great.

I noticed the same mindset in healthy high achievers in other occupations.

If you’re going to step up your game, experience peak performance (when you need to) and achieve your goals, thinking that taking “time out” to take care of you is a waste of time will do nothing but hinder your success. You can’t play all the time, not if you want to perform well, win, and stay healthy.

When it comes to living “healthy”, the actions most people take are to avoid negative consequences and usually only when dis-ease has progressed pretty darn far do they proactively take steps to live healthier (i.e. overweight for example). We wanted to change that impotent way of looking at things and turn things around. We want to help people get far better results as a natural consequence of how they eat, think and live, not heroic efforts and diet and exercise merely to deal with the symptoms of their lifestyle.

A performance lifestyle is a completely different mindset when it comes to health and success. They go hand in hand. We do not make goals out “getting more sleep”, “eating less saturated fat”, “eating your veggies,” or “exercising every day”… merely to avoid negative consequences like gaining weight and getting sick. That’s only part of it. We focus on living the most successful lifestyle possible to ensure we have the edge – the health and high performance edge to get more out of life. (Literally)

So we created the Performance Lifestyle, which shows you how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully, by focusing on your capacity to function and perform well and achieve your goals, just like an athlete does, even if you are not into sports or even a fitness enthusiast.

When you have the performance lifestyle mindset, you’ll enthusiastically go to great lengths to learn how to eat, think and live better and naturally, live the healthiest lifestyle there is.

The key word here is performance. It’s not a word that should scare you. It’s a word that explains whether things are working for you in your life or not, from your eating, to exercise, to your thoughts, to how much sleep you are getting, etc. You want to achieve your goals and have quality of life in the process don’t you?

Just like you get feedback from your computer when it’s performance is suffering and affecting you, and you make changes; we do the same thing in a Performance Lifestyle.

Like anything else, if you do not experience success relatively fast, most people will write off the “healthy” lifestyle changes they need to make, or they will take the back seat. But something happens when people start to see all aspects of their lifestyle as the key to their success. They finally start taking steps at the level they need to to get the results they want!

Second, why is the word “lifestyle”  upside down and backwards?

The answer is simple most people have got it backwards when it comes to their lifestyle. They achieve success so they can live a better lifestyle, when the purpose of your lifestyle is achieve and maintain your success! Why else would you eat better?

So we wanted people to see that they have it backwards, and that they need to turn it around if they are going to live at or near their ideal weight all year round… It’s upside down so that you when you turn the logo upside down it shows you that your lifestyle determines your performance and your performance determines your lifestyle. The whole idea was then reinforced by this popular book too.

Performance and lifestyle go hand in hand and the mindset and skills set depend on the other for their full affect and power.

So there you have it, it’s only when you are ultimately focused on your success, will you enthusiastically learn to and live healthy and do what’s needed; and only a balanced and healthy body will perform the way you want it to.

Performance Lifestyle is how you live a healthy lifestyle successfully.

Let me know your thoughts.

John Allen Mollenhauer “JAM”.

There is no force more fundamental to your sustainability and longevity than regeneration, which quite simply means your body will repair itself and recast itself and regain it’s strength when you recover or regenerate vital energy, feed your body nutrient rich foods, and activate and strengthen your body based on a rich reserve of vital energy.

And today, that means you must manage your energy better than ever before if you are going to maintain a physical position of strength, given there are so many energy drains per day (stresses) that if you are not careful you will end up in the downward energy trend.

When we press on and never slow down for yellow lights – the signs and symptoms of too much stress, or not enough energy, or the consequences of not having the right kinds and quality of energy to operate with, you drive yourself into the downward energy trend.

You literally “drive” yourself down (in some cases into the ground) and while the body is resilient it is only resilient to a certain point; which, if passed, no amount of heroic efforts at diet and exercise will turn you around as fat loss resistance and metabolic syndrome will take hold.

Regeneration is quite possibly the most powerful aspect of lifestyle and you need to know it as it is the number 1 (numero uno) consideration for (peak performance) performing at your peak there is, even before food and fitness.

This is a video from my buddy Jon Hinds of the Monkey Bar Gym on the subject as it relates to training, even though he doesn’t refer to “regeneration”.

I will be delving into that subject more at ManageYourEnergy.com, one of the key Performance Lifestyle solutions that we will go live with soon.

If you are feeling low on energy, and your training is not going so well, it’s time to start managing your energy better  by periodizing your schedule.

You can learn the ins and outs on periodization at The Lifestyle Coaching Center.