READ THIS OR FAIL MASSIVELY WITH YOUR FITNESS GOALS IN 2016

Brendan Rawlings
Jan 14, 2016
8 min read

Happy New Year b2bers, I hope you ate and drunk your body weight in naughty food and booze and don’t regret it for a minute. Life is way too serious to worry about 2 weeks off the wagon.

I genuinely believe that previous statement but how are you going to bounce back and then push through to levels of fitness and body composition that you haven’t seen since your teens or twenties? Well that’s an easy one. Transform Circuits and following our nutrition guide to the letter.

BUT...Often it isn’t not knowing what to do that’s the problem, it’s not letting those things or people that sabotage your progress feck it all up.

From a personal perspective I know that alcohol really effects my motivation for training and life in general. Hey I’m practically suicidal for two days following a big session and have to sacrifice alcohol completely in order to keep on track with specific fitness goals. For others they can have ten pints the night before and still get up for a 6am Bootcamp before killing it at a 9am work meeting, good for them. I would probably have a heart attack during Bootcamp and then forget what I was talking about mid sentence in front of the CEO. It’s about knowing what your personal motivational nemesis’ are and taking steps to avoid letting them creep in and pull your pants down.

Below are the most common saboteurs and their solutions.

Alcohol

Lets face it if you have got your Dubai social life under control then your doing better than most people. Where else in the world is an ‘all day session’ acceptable every weekend? I remember being in the UK and that only happened once or twice a year and would probably be rained off anyway. Boozing is the number one reason above ‘sickness’ when it comes to my client cancellations. Of course you have the flu it’s Wednesday morning at 6am and I saw you lunging through The Westin in a miniskirt whilst chucking Prosecco down your neck on Facebook last night…but I hope your ‘flu’ clears up soon.

Drinking at home is also a silent progress killer. Apart from massively impacting your fat burning capacity whilst in your system, most drinks are comparable to a donut in calories. Why sabotage yourself like this? Would you sit and have 3 donuts with a meal when on a health kick? So why do it with wine?!

Solutions:

Put a financial incentive down to stay off of the grog for a period of time. Bet one of your mates and the first one to cave in loses. 3 months is long enough to gain a dramatic body transformation.
Faking it is also a cheeky way to get through the night without getting plastered, either have a couple of drinks before moving on to soda water (you say vodka soda) or drink soda all night.
Be the designated driver. With zero tolerance over here its easy, ‘I’m driving and don’t fancy spending a month in prison thanks’ job done.
Reevaluate your fitness goals. If you’re out boozing on a Tuesday night then you can’t be that serious about achieving the body you say that you want. If you aren’t, fine but don’t cry when your results aren’t happening quickly enough.
Don’t buy wine to have in the house. If you’re having guests round one night fine, but whilst on the cut down it’s a dirty temptation that you just don’t need winking at you every time you open the fridge.

Friends/Family

This is a tough one. Although you love them, they can also be the hardest people to say no to and can often be the least supportive. ‘Go on you can have one’, ‘why are you doing this stupid fitness thingy anyway? you look fine’, ‘ You’re so boring these days’. They might be right but if it’s important to you then they should be supportive. Studies have shown that if you have an overweight spouse then you have a higher chance of ending up overweight yourself. It’s hard keeping on the straight and narrow when you are restricting your calories and your hubby or darling wife is curled up on the sofa scoffing Pinot Grigio and Kettlechips. Equally if your friends or colleagues are pushing you towards eating at Chillis instead of grabbing a decent bite somewhere that doesn’t promote heart disease and misery.

Solutions:

Take a packed lunch to work, eat it before your colleagues go to lunch and then order a tea or coffee as they have their lunch. Anti social? No, focused and driven.
Explain to your loved ones how important reaching your health or fitness goal is and that you need their support. If they really love you and want you to be happy then they’ll understand, make them promise to help you achieve your goal. If they don’t then you might have bigger problems than fat loss.
If your friends aren’t working for you in any part of your life and refuse to support your dreams, then perhaps it’s time to surround yourself with people that do?

Work

A great excuse for not attending Bootcamp or having to cancel a personal training session. A meeting came up, I’ve got too much work to do, it’s a busy time of year, I have to travel.

It’s very hard to argue with people that present these excuses because at the end of the day, we are all here to work. We’ve left loved ones and friends to better ourselves here in the Middle East, I get that. However, the hard truth is that they ARE just excuses. If someone said to you that if you don’t exercise today your life would end at the stroke of midnight, would you find the time? Yes you would.

Solutions:

Use your time more efficiently. I’m not pointing any fingers but how many of you are actually working on productive things ALL day at work? Do you take cigarette breaks? Do you check personal emails and Facebook? Whatsapp your mates on the 15 different Whatsapp groups you’re on? Did someone say Internet shopping? Surfing the web aimlessly hoping to find something that catches your eye? We’ve all been guilty here. If you added up the time wasted doing this shite, could you leave work earlier and make time for exercise? Probably.
If you’re travelling, look up a pay as you go gym or ask me to email you a bodyweight program that you can do in your room or in a park. All you need is 20 minutes, there’s literally no excuse.

Sleep

Did you know that lack of sleep makes you more susceptible to eating junk? It also limits your fat burning capacity, increases anxiety, other stress hormones and increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Nobody feels like working out whilst tired. Don’t let it affect your energy levels by preventing it from happening.

Solutions:

Exercise! It helps sleep, so not doing it when you’re tired only increases the chance of falling in to a vicious circle.
Limit caffeine. Obvious I know but try not to drink any caffeine after 3pm, this way you’ll be getting dozy when you need to be and not looking like an owl on speed.
Limit the use of your laptop or phone late at night. The brightness of a screen has been proven to trick the brain into being awake. It thinks that it’s daylight and therefore will keep you up. To add insult to injury, if you're reading emails and performing work related tasks, you're likely to be too pent up to fall asleep properly.

Limiting beliefs

This is one that you might think is a bit obscure but is potentially the biggest Guy Fawkes of them all. Limiting beliefs are those that constrain us in some way. Just by believing them, we don’t do things that we are capable of because we believe we are not capable of doing them, or fear the consequences of doing them. And in doing so we impoverish our lives. We may have beliefs about rights, duties, abilities, permissions and so on. You may believe that just because you have never achieved a certain fitness goal that you never will. Or that you were rubbish at sport at school so can’t join a Bootcamp. I call ‘bullshit’ and so should you. You are a human being with as much capability as the person next to you. Don’t listen to that devil inside you telling you that you can’t do it. Lift your head up, stand up straight and go for it.

I remember going to Exeter Chiefs pre season training for the first time. I had been injured for months after shoulder reconstruction and had been training on my own to get in shape. I didn’t really know what I was doing but worked hard and consistently. When I turned up for fitness testing only one person out of 30 squad players even acknowledged me. I was petrified. We started the 3k timed run and all I was thinking was ‘don’t come last, please, don’t come last’. I ran my heart out, literally and came second behind the fittest guy in the squad in a time of 10:52, I was more relieved than happy and later went on to vomit, but that’s not the point. I was later selected for the squad and the rest is history. Had I not believed that I was good enough to reach the squad, I likely wouldn't have even bothered training for it and never made the pre season training in the first place. Put your mind to it and you will succeed, change your limiting beliefs into UNLIMITED beliefs.

Solutions:

Change your conclusions. Whatever you think you know to be certain is probably a lot different than you think and what you think to be a definite usually has much more leeway than you think. Question all of the conclusions you have about what you think to be true, fixed or possible, especially when it relates to your own abilities.
Test your beliefs. Without pushing the boundaries and testing your beliefs, you won’t be able to move past your limiting beliefs. You need to do something to break the pattern. You need to test yourself by doing something that puts your assumptions to the test. Just make sure that you’re not staying in the limited headspace that leads you to reinforce what you already hold to be true. Try it. What’s the worst that can happen?

Sickness

This is usually a result and culmination of all of the above. If you are boozing, working harder not smarter, getting shitty amounts of sleep, eating crappy food with your mates and negative in your outlook, otherwise known as burning the candle at both ends…your body will get run down and you will get sick. I’m talking about sniffles and flu although chronic ‘burning the candle at both ends’ will result in chronic illnesses that start with C and HD.

Solutions:

Make sleep a priority, you never regret going to bed early, what’s more important…staying up and watching some fabricated, mind numbing, bullshit series or waking up feeling like a champion that can seize the day and feel great about themselves?
Eat fresh, whole, life giving foods. Not the carcinogenic packet crap that's full of sugar and fat.
Take a positive outlook and put things in perspective. Whatever your beliefs, we are only on this earth for a short time. Be a positive empowering example to your kids and friends around you and make sure you are experiencing good feelings 90% of the time. If you don’t feel good then things have to change.
Don’t let work rule your life. Make work, work for you. If you don’t know how then read some books. It’s never too late to realize your dream job. Failing that work smarter not harder.
Alcohol. In moderation. I’m realistic, so go on a big night out once a month or have a couple of glasses at the weekend. But the moment it starts affecting you negatively or interfering with what's important in your life, then you might have to address it's place in your life.