You’ve heard the claims: “If you want the long lean legs of a dancer, do Pilates or yoga" or “To get supermodel sexy, do the Brazilian Butt Lift workout by Leandro,” or "To build an athlete's body you gotta train like an athlete and do Functional exercise." Such claims are made perpetually, yet most are wrong or just flat-out lies. I’m not bashing these methods, I'm a big fan of yoga, and progress can be made doing a wide variety of activities. But I will explain why the conventional association between activity and appearance is incorrect. 

Gut health is rarely considered as an obstacle when trying to improve performance or when overcoming an injury. Yet, gut health has a massive impact on how fast you recover from training, illness, and/or trauma. Without a healthy gut, your immune function will be compromised and you will not extract all the vital nutrients from food or supplements. This can lead to an inability to fight infection and create nutritional inadequacies that will exacerbate the problem. 

1.) Health and Fitness are not interchangeable terms

A healthy person is someone who is free of disease and chronic ailments. A fit person is someone who can perform physical tasks well above a resting threshold.

The accumulation of things, habits, and ideas are part of the American experience. But sometimes less is better; you may need to eliminate something in order to facilitate your goal. In order to achieve a positive change, you must remove obstacles that are holding you back. When you upgrade your mental software, you must first remove the old software. Many of you have the mindset of “any obstacle in my way, I’ll go through it with intense might and perseverance!” This is a good mindset, in certain situations, but not always efficient. Maybe you need to simply give up, go around, or avoid the obstacle. 

1) Get sufficient sleep the night before. To function at peak capacity, most adults need 7-9 hours of deep sleep; that means sleeping all through the night without interruption. Here are a few tips to help you achieve deep sleep:

• Eat last meal no later than 9pm
• No sweets or alcohol with last meal
• Avoid caffeine and stimulants after 2pm
• Ensure that bedroom is pitch black, the slightest bit of light can inhibit deep sleep
• Make sure all electronic devices are off and at least 4 feet away from bed

2) Eat a high protein, grain-free breakfast. A high-protein, low-carb, grain-free breakfast is the best way to maximize energy. Here is a sample breakfast (what I ate this morning):

• Ground Bison Patty (6-8 oz), pan fried in organic butter
• Raw Pecans, 1 handful
• Organic Blueberries, 1/3 cup

The Most Important Nutrient for Fat Loss: High Quality Animal Protein

The word protein is derived from the Greek word, “proteios”, which means “of prime importance.” Protein is very important because it is involved in every biological process that runs the body. Without adequate intake of high-quality animal proteins, physical performance and appearance will be compromised.

I am an advocate of intermittent fasting and low-carbohydrate diets. But like all diet plans, they eventually lose effectiveness. A way around the inevitable diet slow-down is to follow a phase-shift diet.

Drop the Quantitative Goals and replace them with Behavioral Goals.

Quantitative goal-setting is based on an estimated outcome. When it comes to body-fat loss, this type of goal setting is nothing more than a guesstimate; an educated guess of what you “should” be able to accomplish. Predicting the exact rate of fat loss with an individual is well beyond the abilities of any fitness expert. When a client asks me, “how much body-fat can I lose in 2 months?” I tell them, “as much body-fat as your physiology will allow.”

The main law of adaptation states that in order to improve strength and fitness, you must expose the muscles to unaccustomed physical stress. Once adaptation has occurred and the stress is no longer unaccustomed, you must present the training stimulus in a different manner. Presenting exercises in the same manner over extended periods of time will eventually lose effectiveness and progress will come to a halt; this biological response is known as accommodation(1). The law of accommodation states that, the response to a consistent stimulus will decrease over time. To circumvent accommodation the trainee must make qualitative (exercise) or quantitative (protocols) changes to their training.

“We have found virtually no relationship between the percentage of calories from fat and any important health outcome.”

Walter Willet, MD, DrPH, Chairman-Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health

Conventional wisdom states, “High cholesterol is bad and we must take steps to lower cholesterol by avoiding fatty foods.” You’ve heard this so many times that you would assume this recommendation is based on reliable evidence. But at best, the evidence against saturated fat and cholesterol is shaky and indirect.