Everybody goes through these types of thoughts and struggles at some time in our lives.

Not everything is as easy as some people will have you believe, especially not advertisements, salesmen etc.  I remember when I first tried to play a guitar, it took me about a year before I could play a decent song the whole way through, and at the start it seemed absolutely impossible.

I also remember looking at my body in times gone by and thought “I am not happy with this, but how do I change it?”.

Having too much body fat and not enough lean muscle to stand out from a bunch of rakes at a tool shop, I decided to do something about it. I researched, bought products, books, watched videos, tried to discard the gold from the quartz and then did the most vital step, I made a PLAN and took ACTION.

Even if I had never learned a thing about nutrition, cardio or resistance training, if I had just made a plan and taken action, I would have learned along the way and eventually got the result I wanted anyway.

This is to prove that you can lose weight, you just aren’t wanting it bad enough.

You might last a week on a diet that Uncle Jobaba from Turkey recommended, but you aren’t strict enough and you end up blowing off the diet.

You heard about a new workout where you have to try and cover a mile faster every day for a week, but one day it rains so you blow it off as well.

You see an advertisement on a website for a pill that sheds body fat faster than Jenny Craig clients on Meth, but you are trying in vain because it won’t work.

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These are the most common excuses people have:

• You have too many excuses about why something won’t work
• You can’t stay on a diet for more than a week
• The last time you ran was when your partner tried to make veggie burgers for dinner
• You are too old, too young, too fat or not fat enough
• You don’t have enough time because of (insert excuse reason here)
• You have no money
• You have too much money and so you think you don’t have time
• If I wasn’t so stressed I could lose weight
• My family won’t like it if I start dieting
• If somebody helped me do some housework
• If I could just rewind to last year

People think that if they have a good enough excuse then that they don’t have to do something. They feel that they have justified themselves and given themselves a reason to do nothing about their physical (and mental) state. Excuses are just a self-created alibi to fool ourselves into thinking we have no other option.

Excuses are for losers, lazy people, miserable people, martyrs, chicken littles and fools.

Real men and women, boys and girls make things happen no matter what their current circumstances.

Hell, I have been so broke that I can’t even afford the miserable $7 to get into my local gym so I have had to get creative. I could have just said “Oh well, I guess if I don’t have the money,it’ll have to wait”.

I have been through struggles in my life, I have been too depressed, too hyperactive, too mediocre, too tired, sick, injured, geees, find me somebody that hasn’t had struggles in some form or another.

If you can just see past your excuse or whatever reason you have that is currently saying “I can’t …”, ask yourself “How can I make this real?”.

Try asking “Why not?” or “How can I …”, instead of “I can’t.

So to help you with your struggle, go and check out my site, get some good ideas, and if you have no money, go dance in the street for a while.

Until next time, can the excuses and get real!!

And check out the home page to grab you free course download on how to shed body fat like crazy!

Johnny

I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine cranking out an abacus and performing calculations to find out how many points this meal is going to add up to and if I am allowed to eat it.

I also can’t be bothered spending an hour jogging on a treadmill in “Fat Burning Mode” staring at the blank wall ahead of me.

When I want to lower my body fat % I want it to be dead simple, efficient and effective.

Here are a few tips to make your body fat loss program a little more simple and therefore easier to stick to.

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1. Set out your weeks workouts in front of you.

This has saved me procrastinating, wondering what I am going to do and making excuses. If I have booked in a session of staircase sprints and it is raining… Too bad. A light patter of rain on the body isn’t going to kill me, in fact I feel fantastic after I get home from a run in the rain, although I don’t make a habit of it. I allocate times for the gym and a bit of interval training throughout the week and make sure I keep those times free.

2. Keep your diet simple.

I have found through intense experimenting that when I have a diet that allows too many foods, I find that it is easier for me to cheat the diet. At the moment my diet consists of pretty much the same sort of meal 4-5 times a day, even for breakfast. I can whip it up in about 5 minutes and eat it in another 5 minutes, simple as that, no slaving over a hot stove for me

3. Make your exercise a challenge, but fun.

I enjoy beating my old records, so most times I go out for a run I try go further in a shorter time. Obviously the effect plateaus after a while but you can always change it up for a new challenge e.g. swapping interval sprints to just a 20 minute all out run for a few days aweek, then back to sprints.

On the weights, it is pretty obvious that every time you go to the gym you want to lift heavier weights, or lift the same weights more times. I find it a great challenge and after a while, just as anything, progress plateaus. So then one might go to doing some 1 rep max lifts (lifting the heaviest weight you can lift for just one repitition), a body split (training different parts of the body on different days) or a full body workout.

These are a few things that have helped keep me motivated, because motivation is the key. Make a game of it and you will not want to stop the game! If you can stay motivated, no matter what you are doing, you will eventually get there, don’t let minor set backs such as injuries, missing a day, bad weather, arguments with a spouse, lack of money etc get you down. I have been through times where I have simply not had the $7 to go to my local gym and so I have to pump out some body weight exercises and get creative about getting money for the gym.

I have had arguments with my partner that have left me feeling so annoyed, down etc that I find it hard to do anything, but if we can get over these hurdles and just focus on the training, becoming a better and stronger person then it will be a huge blessing to us for our whole lives.

Until next time, sort out a rational, logical answer to your challenge and get into it!

Johnny

Exercises – Home Body Sculpt

Some people are hermit crabs. Other people are just anti social. Some people are not too generous with cash. Others just don’t like traffic. Some people don’t like to be seen doing “exercise”, and others just prefer to motivate themselves.

Whatever your reason for wanting to workout at home, it is irrelevant.

I tend to do both. I will workout with some lighter weights for hard exercises such as clean and press and any dumbbell exercises + boxing workouts. But I will go to the gym to go hard and heavy on deadlifts, squats and bench presses. Sometimes it just depends how I am feeling. There is nothing like meeting a girl at the gym, but there is nothing like blasting “Some Kind Of Monster” by Metallica at full noise while smashing the boxing bag into submission.

Here are a few of my favorite tips for working out at home, plus an intense workout you can do with absolutely no gear.

• Make sure you set how many reps and sets you do before you even pick up the weight
• Play some music sometimes, and other times workout in silence. The motivation music brings is amazing, but the reflection and self growth that comes from the sounds and thoughts of silence is equally beautiful.
• Drink heaps of water
• Always incorporate full body workouts into your routine – even if you are doing say arms on one day, always throw in some full body workouts such as clean and press, deadlifts or squats of some variation.
• One thing I do sometimes is to end my workout with a one rep max of a couple of bodyweight exercises such as press ups or crunches, pull ups or chins.
• Record exactly what you do in your gym session, you always want to progress.

Here is a workout to help you burn fat and build a lil’ muscle:

Set the timer (if you have a laptop you can bring it with you and use This Bad Boy which is a stopwatch that rocks so hard.

Warm up by beating up your flatmates or cleaning the house then:

• 2 minutes skipping
• 1 minute burpees
• 1 minute crunches
• 1 minute lunges
• 1 minute press ups

Rest because you are lazy then:

• Hold the plank for 1 minute (youtube it)
• Squats for 1 minute
• Box jumps for 1 minute (are box jumps self explanatory?)
• If you are human, you should be a bit sore by now, if not go and run up a mountain

Until next time look good, feel good and workout like you are going to live for one more day!

Johnny (wants you to visit his site How To Get Abs ) make me happy

Feel free to comment and ask me to post about anything you are interested in, if it is related to fitness and nutrition… Even better! My email is also on the site so feel free to drop me a line, I respond to every email and enjoy it!