How To Get Back On Track With Your Workout
We’ve all be there, where for a few months you’re cruising along, working out right, making steady advances and losing weight. We’re finally getting on top of our nutrition plan, we’re gaining more energy and feeling great. And then something goes wrong. An injury, a weekend of fun, a vacation, a family tragedy, we lose our focus, we stop exercising, we enjoy a few tasty snacks, and before you know it two weeks have passed and we’re gaining weight once more and feeling low energy. How do you deal with this? How can you get back on track with your workout?
In a perfect world, you would get everything you need nutrition-wise from your diet. You would eat derive all the right amounts of protein, carbs, fat and vitamins, minerals and more from whole foods that were locally and organically grown. You would eat fish, cruciferous vegetables, fruits and more. You would be healthy, bursting with energy, with a fantastic immune system and ready to live until you were 100. But today it's hard to get everything you need. When was the last time you ate high quality fatty fish? How many veggies do you really have each week? Are you sure you're getting all the fatty acids and minerals your body can't produce itself? The problem with people's diets today are their blind spots. The elements of their diets they don't know they're missing out on. Which leads to disease and problems later on in life as your body crumbles in on itself.
So what can you do about it?
Is it too late for you to start exercising? Is there a certain point beyond which extreme workouts are no longer possible? How do things change when you leave your 20's for your 30's? What should you know about your body so that you can best train it to maximize gains and performance? These are the kinds of questions people who treat health and fitness as a life long goal have to ask, and that people who are only in it to lose 10lbs never consider. Health and fitness is a life long passion, and today we know that exercise can not only make you feel better, but even reverse aging's effects. As such, we have to ask: how does your age affect your workout routines?
Have you ever noticed that naturally skinny people tend to pack on muscle when they overfeed, while naturally curvy people tend to pack on fat? And those naturally skinny people tend to lose fat quickly when they diet, while naturally curvy people tend to struggle to not lose as much muscle as fat? What's going on here? Why are some people naturally better at staying lean and getting ripped, while others have to fight their love handles their whole lives? It's simple really, and quite unfair: the culprit is something called your 'P-Ratio', and it's what determines what kind of body you're going to tend toward naturally. Love it or hate it, your P-Ratio determines nearly everything.
The message is always the same: Never Give In, Never Surrender. Work through the pain, tough it out, walk it off. Dig deeper, bring it, be all that you can be. But sometimes life intervenes, sometimes events go awry, and you just have to stop. An injury, a new job routine that hogs all your time, a complete implosion of your willpower, a failure to get the results you needed to stay motivated, something comes along and you find yourself unable to get out of bed and do your workout. What do you do then?
One of the questions we get the most from people trying our extreme workouts like P90X or Insanity is why they haven't dropped as much weight as they had hoped. Three, four weeks into the workout program, and they're standing on the scale, looking down at the numbers with a mixture of resignation and defeat as they see that they haven't changed as much as they had hoped. Despite the work, the sweat, the effort and careful eating, the pounds haven't fallen off like water. Are they doing something wrong? In fact, they are. They're focusing on the wrong thing.
In 1977, a series of tariffs and quotas imposed by the United States on the importation of cane sugar caused sugar prices to rise and US producers to seek another source of sweetener. Simultaneously, farm subsidies sponsored by the US Government ensured that the price of corn dropped, resulting in a huge incentive for those same producers to use high-fructose corn syrup, an artificially derived product that was vastly cheaper than table sugar. Coincidentally, obesity rates began to rise precipitously over the course of the last three decades, with about 59 million Americans now reportedly obese, which is classified as 30lbs or more over their healthy weight. Statistics show that if this trend continues, 2 in 5 Americans will be obese within the next five years.