It's about progress, not perfection

I recently read an article by Margaret Moore who founded the Coaching Psychology Institute. "What it Takes to Change" is yet another way of helping your clients if they get stuck. Imagine the influence you will have once you implement part of, if not all of, this approach as well as Motivational Interviewing. When coaching, remember not all people respond to the same stimulus. It's up to you to figure it out...that's why they pay you the big bucks!!

What it takes to change--have your clients think about these:
1. What's working NOW for my health and well being?
Meaning: Try not to be negative all the time. There has got to be some good happening as well.

2. What's my vision for change?
Meaning: Establish what and WHO they want to be when healthy. Remind them to RECALL that vision when they are tempted, when moments of decision will decide their fate.

3. Why does the change matter to me?
Meaning: Find the DEEPEST motivation they have for achieving their goal...why?

4. What strengths can I bring to the change process?
Meaning: What talent can they bring from another facet of life to help with THIS goal of health?

5. What are my greatest challenges, and how can I overcome them?
Meaning: Pick out not only the challenges, but go ahead NOW and discover ways to combat those, and beat those. What resources and people can they draws upon to help them overcome?

6. What are my first priorities for change and improvement?
Meaning: Make the list...what to do to reach their goal. What are they willing to work with for the next 2-3 months? )I once had a client say "I don't cook, clean, or leave work during the day--now make me healthier...")

7. How ready, confident, and committed am I to take the first steps?
Meaning: If they are confident they can reach their goal, it's time to move forward. If not, scaling back their goal is probably a good idea.

8. What will I do next week?
Meaning: Changes that last make baby steps...always have SMART goals in mind.

Below is a video I made to introduce UNC Cycling to the upcoming season of training 2 years ago.

Worlds colliding

In one room I hear my 7 month old son coughing in his sleep. I know he is alright for now, but I hope he'll be okay forever.

In the other room is Sarah McLachlan singing on UNC-TV. Many years ago, I'd hear her sing, and wonder if I'd ever have the passion for anything, like the passion I'd hear in her voice. The answer is loud and clear.

I have passion for my wife, my son, my family, and my friends. Exercise Science is in the mix there as well. I'd love to have to find a new profession, because everyone around me lived up to their fitness potential.

Until that happens, I'll continue to learn...to learn how to persuade others to find meaning in movement.

"and it's a long way down
it's a long way down
it's a long way
down to the place where we started from..."
SM.

Want to see passion? For me, this is passion...

shuttle this...

Excerpt from a UC Berkeley study back in 2006...

If you "feel the burn," you need to bulk up your mitochondria

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 19 April 2006

BERKELEY – In the lore of marathoners and extreme athletes, lactic acid is poison, a waste product that builds up in the muscles and leads to muscle fatigue, reduced performance and pain.

Some 30 years of research at the University of California, Berkeley, however, tells a different story: Lactic acid can be your friend.

Coaches and athletes don't realize it, says exercise physiologist George Brooks, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, but endurance training teaches the body to efficiently use lactic acid as a source of fuel on par with the carbohydrates stored in muscle tissue and the sugar in blood. Efficient use of lactic acid, or lactate, not only prevents lactate build-up, but ekes out more energy from the body's fuel.

In a paper in press for the American Journal of Physiology - Endocrinology and Metabolism, published online in January, Brooks and colleagues Takeshi Hashimoto and Rajaa Hussien in UC Berkeley's Exercise Physiology Laboratory add one of the last puzzle pieces to the lactate story and also link for the first time two metabolic cycles - oxygen-based aerobic metabolism and oxygen-free anaerobic metabolism - previously thought distinct.

"This is a fundamental change in how people think about metabolism," Brooks said. "This shows us how lactate is the link between oxidative and glycolytic, or anaerobic, metabolism."

He and his UC Berkeley colleagues found that muscle cells use carbohydrates anaerobically for energy, producing lactate as a byproduct, but then burn the lactate with oxygen to create far more energy. The first process, called the glycolytic pathway, dominates during normal exertion, and the lactate seeps out of the muscle cells into the blood to be used elsewhere. During intense exercise, however, the second ramps up to oxidatively remove the rapidly accumulating lactate and create more energy.

Training helps people get rid of the lactic acid before it can build to the point where it causes muscle fatigue, and at the cellular level, Brooks said, training means growing the mitochondria in muscle cells. The mitochondria - often called the powerhouse of the cell - is where lactate is burned for energy.

"The world's best athletes stay competitive by interval training," Brooks said, referring to repeated short, but intense, bouts of exercise. "The intense exercise generates big lactate loads, and the body adapts by building up mitochondria to clear lactic acid quickly. If you use it up, it doesn't accumulate."

To move, muscles need energy in the form of ATP, adenosine triphosphate. Most people think glucose, a sugar, supplies this energy, but during intense exercise, it's too little and too slow as an energy source, forcing muscles to rely on glycogen, a carbohydrate stored inside muscle cells. For both fuels, the basic chemical reactions producing ATP and generating lactate comprise the glycolytic pathway, often called anaerobic metabolism because no oxygen is needed. This pathway was thought to be separate from the oxygen-based oxidative pathway, sometimes called aerobic metabolism, used to burn lactate and other fuels in the body's tissues.

Experiments with dead frogs in the 1920s seemed to show that lactate build-up eventually causes muscles to stop working. But Brooks in the 1980s and '90s showed that in living, breathing animals, the lactate moves out of muscle cells into the blood and travels to various organs, including the liver, where it is burned with oxygen to make ATP. The heart even prefers lactate as a fuel, Brooks found.

Brooks always suspected, however, that the muscle cell itself could reuse lactate, and in experiments over the past 10 years he found evidence that lactate is burned inside the mitochondria, an interconnected network of tubes, like a plumbing system, that reaches throughout the cell cytoplasm.

In 1999, for example, he showed that endurance training reduces blood levels of lactate, even while cells continue to produce the same amount of lactate. This implied that, somehow, cells adapt during training to put out less waste product. He postulated an "intracellular lactate shuttle" that transports lactate from the cytoplasm, where lactate is produced, through the mitochondrial membrane into the interior of the mitochondria, where lactate is burned. In 2000, he showed that endurance training increased the number of lactate transporter molecules in mitochondria, evidently to speed uptake of lactate from the cytoplasm into the mitochondria for burning.

The new paper and a second paper to appear soon finally provide direct evidence for the hypothesized connection between the transporter molecules - the lactate shuttle - and the enzymes that burn lactate. In fact, the cellular mitochondrial network, or reticulum, has a complex of proteins that allow the uptake and oxidation, or burning, of lactic acid.

"This experiment is the clincher, proving that lactate is the link between glycolytic metabolism, which breaks down carbohydrates, and oxidative metabolism, which uses oxygen to break down various fuels," Brooks said.

Post-doctoral researcher Takeshi Hashimoto and staff research associate Rajaa Hussien established this by labeling and showing colocalization of three critical pieces of the lactate pathway: the lactate transporter protein; the enzyme lactate dehydrogenase, which catalyzes the first step in the conversion of lactate into energy; and mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase, the protein complex where oxygen is used. Peering at skeletal muscle cells through a confocal microscope, the two scientists saw these proteins sitting together inside the mitochondria, attached to the mitochondrial membrane, proving that the "intracellular lactate shuttle" is directly connected to the enzymes in the mitochondria that burn lactate with oxygen.

"Our findings can help athletes and trainers design training regimens and also avoid overtraining, which can kill muscle cells," Brooks said.

Dr Len Kravitz from New Mexico State was talking about this 'shuttle' back in '03 and was ENTHUSIASTICALLY talking about the upcoming research about it. Boy was he right!!

Engage and attack...

What language are you speaking?

So you want to get through to your clients. You want to tell them, "hey, either work hard, watch what you eat, or don't succeed...in other words, fail."

But you can't. If you did, you would alienate some of them, intimidate others, make others cry, and some will outright quit. So what do you do, coach?

Do you know your client? If you don't by now, it may be too late. IF they are not fully invested in their health, you are probably doing all YOU can do. They at some point have to take over. You can periodize anything, you can crosstrain all day, you can set up whatever program you want, but if the client is not doing their 'homework' you may be wasting your time.

Enter "Motivational Interviewing." An art it becomes--in your initial consultation with the perspective client--to be able to ask leading questions to get them to talk about themselves. In turn, letting you know how to better motivate them, to help them achieve their goals, and better improve their health. You gotta speak their language. Become one with many tongues.

There is too much info to go over in one blog post. But I have learned from some of the best in the field, when it comes to therapy and psychology. If you'd like, contact me and I can send you along the outline of my seminar on this art that is being used more and more to help those with addictions.

Is weight gain not part of addiction to unhealthy habits? Whether it's drugs, or food, or lack of exercise...it's all detrimental, right?!?!?!? We can help through proper interviewing skills.

OR sometimes...motivation is easy...kill or be killed.

Oh what a tangled web...

"Think of your body as a PC. The moment you wake up, it starts launching applications, etc. As long as you're tapping away and clicking the mouse, it keeps buzzing. If it sits idle, what happens? The screen darkens and the machine lowers its activity into power save mode...right? Your body is the same!! Inactivity research--a new body of science exploring our sedentary lives--shows that when you sit for a few hours, your body starts to shut down at the metabolic level! Fat burning enzymes, such as LPL, which are responsible for breaking down triglycerides in your bloodstream, simply start switching off. Sit for a full day, and LPL activity plummets by 50%.

As your body falls deeper into energy conservation mode, your circulation slows, your digestion becomes sluggish, and your calorie burning metabolism dims to a flicker! That's why it is hard to lose weight or maintain it, no matter how much you ride.

All that sitting is making us fat, unhealthy, achy, and sad. Researchers say that diabetes, depression, cancer, alzheimer's, and heart disease chances are boosted incredibly by sitting all day!

'The human body has evolved over years to stand and walk and live on the move...when you sit all day, you are doing something completely opposite of what you are designed to do. That's like hammering nails with a cellphone, failure is inevitable.'"

The above excerpt was taken from the latest edition of Bicyling Magazine...and this doesn't even take into account the problems inactivity places on the body's ability to move! Throw that into the mix, and no wonder there are so many problems in today's society!!!!!

Get mad at this problem, and show your clients how to fix it.

Figure it Out!

I've been trying to put into words just how I feel about motivation, and the lack of it in today's world. Why do we have more members of gyms, more people hiring personal trainers, and yet the growth of unhealthy diseases rise like the growth of our society's waistlines?

Enter Ross Enamait. Ross, if you happen to take a look at this blog, know that I give you all the credit for somehow putting on paper my thoughts!! Motivation is lacking. In Ross' words, here is something I think that helps:

"And even if you are training solely for looks, what happens when you are finally happy with your appearance? For example, suppose a woman decides that she wants to fit into her old bikini. She busts her ass for 4 months before summer and achieves her goal. What does she do now? Does she enter a 15 year maintenance period without any defined goals? The visual goal has already been realized, so what else can she look forward to? Without a measureable goal, it is common for the individual to lose passion. When passion fades, expect results to fade as well. When you focus on performance based goals however, you will never run into this problem. I am always finding new ways to challenge myself. Each challenge provides a unique outlet for my passion. I don‘t know what I’ll be doing this time next year, but I do know that I’ll be working hard on whatever the goal may be."

When passion fades...
Help your clients find something to train for! Fitness professionals need to understand that an unfit, unhealthy person needs to have a goal--make it short term, and SMART. There is nothing like failing to put a weaker minded individual 10 steps behind. Unfortunately, these are most of your clients. They've failed time and time again, or had some success then relapsed. Just like an alcoholic.

Help your clients find their passion for fitness.

Above is my passion. My 6 month old drives me to "figure it out." His future depends on me and his mom staying strong, confident, and enduring. Being fit handles part of that equation.

"The shoe that fits one person pinches another: there is no recipe for living that suits all cases."
Carl Jung

What does fitness do for you?

You may not think it does anything for you right now. However, 20 years down the line, when there is a surgery that begs for rehab...this is when lifelong fitness counts.

The constant application of discipline over time.

Fitness...