What is your Motivation?
There are times when people ask me about motivation and what drives me on to achieve the things I want to do. The thing is, I could tell you, but it would probably not resonate with you. Everyone is different and what motivates me won’t necessarily motivate you, even if our goals are similar. So you have to ask yourself…..”what are my goals?, what do I want to achieve? and how can I realise them?”
However, many people have dreams but few realise them and there are a variety of reasons and I find a lot of them are to do with fear.
Fear
Fear of failure, fear of losing friends, fear of success (after all success might be an unknown to you and mean the people you know and care about may resent the fact) and even fear of fear! Fear is a big driver on holding people back and even though this is about motivation, fear can stifle you dreams if you let it.
But wait, many people don’t realise than fear is just an emotion, a feeling, just as happiness is and sadness and anger. My point is is that fear cannot hurt you! in fact motivation is a big factor in overcoming your fear! the bigger the motivation the bigger the chance that despite feeling fear, you will do it anyway.
Motivation
Another reason for a lack of motivation is the result of your individual programming and who you associate with! Surrounding yourself with the right people has a massive influence on success. If you want to do something and everyone around you is telling you that you can’t, what do you think you will want to do? On the flip side, if everyone around you is full of encouragement, where do you think that could lead??
Two Motivation Types?
The other point on motivation is that there are two types. Internal and external.
External motivation is provided by other people giving inspirational speeches or talks, or a training partner or coach encouraging you to push hard to achieve your desired results. This is great to give you a kick start, but I am sure you have experienced that once you finish training or come away from a motivational talk, your motivation and desire can fade. Now I am not saying that it is pointless, it is far from it but after a while your inner voice will then fall back into how it is programmed and will start finding every reason why not to do something and encourage you to do what you have always done.
This is why you have to reinforce your desires through Internal Motivation!
I have mentioned on here before about your inner voice, your subconscious, which takes in every bit of information from around you, what you say and how you say it , what you listen to and see on the tv, what other people are saying and even what you are reading. It is like food for the brain and like food you can consume good stuff that keeps you healthy and Junk that makes you feel crap.
Because of that it is very easily to fall into a habit of capitulation that your inner voice will reinforce, just as you have programmed it to do.
Change your habits
The good news is that you can change the way you think to help sustain your motivation and to get exactly where you want to go. Change they way you speak, use more positive words, “keep going” is way more positive than “don’t stop”. Even though they are taken as meaning the same thing, one is a negative sentence and one is positive and your brain will read it as such.
Use positive affirmations about yourself, tell yourself how great you feel, how great you are. You may not beleive it, but your inner voice doesn’t judge and just accepts it! Pretty soon you will be able to change you old habits to new good habits that with push your motivation through the roof!
Make sure you are hanging around and talking to more like minded people more often, than comes under external motivation, but both internal and external go hand in hand to get you where you want to be.
Visualisation
One final technique is through the use of visualisation. Thinking about what you want achieve isn’t enough, but by using visualisation you think about it, but to the point that you see every detail of where you want to be, how it sounds, smells, looks like and how it feels. The more information you can use the more believable it is, especially to your brain.
Motivation is a great thing, DO NOT let yourself keep your dreams as dreams, REALISE THEM. Make it happen, find like minded people, Bin the media (TV and newspapers), read inspiring books by inspiring people, think positively and talk to yourself in positive way regardless whether you believe it and just see what happens!
I have added some links to some books I recommend on motivation from amazon…..
Take your life and move it forwards.
Take care
Dean
20 Rep Shuffle
All you need
Hey there, just wanted to post up my training session from today.
You don’t need much equipment to put yourself through a gruelling training session. As you can see from the picture, a box, med ball, a pair of dumbbells and something to jump over is all I used, hell you could get away without any at all, your bodyweight would take care of the rest.
Today was a conditioning day and so used a modified version of the conditioning circuit I gave my class last night, they rocked it and I missed out, so not to be out done I swapped it about and changed the rules using repetitions instead of being against the clock.
The difference between reps and time is that depending on time limits, reps can be harder, no clock saving you, you just gotta rep it out!
I picked 10 stations, 20 reps per station and no rest until the circuit is done. By completing 5 circuits it gives you 100 reps per exercise!
- Box jump – Standing jump on and off a box, bench etc
- Dips – Off the box or bench
- Frog Jumps – Squatting down palms on the floor and jumping up
- Dumbbell punches- Light dumbbells, arms moving in and out in front of you
- Prisoner Squats – Hands behind your head, squatting down and up
- Med Ball Slams – Pick a med ball above your head and slam to the ground fast!
- Dumbbell Lunges – As you lunge down, press dumbbells into the air
- Lateral Burpees – Perform burpee, jump sideways over an object and repeat
- Pushups – Different variations (Wide, Normal, Narrow, Pike, Divebomber)
- Skipping rope – High knees, keeping a fast cadence
So 20 reps per station, with the exception of 2, You ain’t gonna get much from 20 dumbbell punches and 20 rope turns, so I upped them to 100 each.
Train Hard, keep lean!
The beauty of the 20 rep shuffle is that it is versatile, exercises can be changed, number of reps or number of circuits. But remember… IT IS MEANT TO BE HARD….. No shirking off!
This is a great way to burn fat, save lean muscle and build explosive power and build a high level of stamina, muscular endurance all in one simple workout.
I would love you to drop me a comment about this workout or anything else you want to know
So there you have it the 20 rep shuffle…….With a twist
Stay strong, stay fit and I will speak to you soon.
Dean
Spice up your Training Tabata Style!
Med Ball Slam
There may be some of you thinking, so what is this tabata thing all about? well I ain’t gonna bore you with the science behind it other than it’s named after someone and it is a great conditioning protocol. Thats all you need to know!
Tabata Style!
So how do you train tabata style? the answer is any which way as long as it involves 20 seconds of fast paced exercise followed by 10 seconds of rest, with each exercise having 8 rounds. It can make for a tough 4 minutes if you are flat out. It can be bodyweight, with weight, a mixture, anything that you can go at a fast pace.
Short on Time?
These drills are perfect when you are short on time. They are anaerobic and crank your metabolism right up, with it sitting raised for up to 24 hours after the event. Thats right, higher metabolism = more calories burned even resting afterwards!
Of course that means exactly squat if you then go and eat crappy foods. It may sound boring but the nutrition part goes hand in hand if you want to shave some lard off!
Anyway, it just so happens that today I was short on time so after a warm up on my heavy bag, I tagged 4 exercises together to really crank up a tabata style workout!
doesn’t have to 4, hell it could be 3 or 5, point is though is that you have to be able to maintain this fast pace to its end
Example Workout
I cranked out this workout earlier, using a combination of bodyweight exercises and a medicine ball for good measure!
Here goes:
- Flex strap rows – inverted bodyweight rowing with straps.
- Med ball Slams.
- squats and alternating with lunges with the med ball.
- Pushups (variations).
I added a core finisher at the end of ab wheel rollout’s and hanging leg raises, it is up to you whether you want to tag anything on the end!
it may sound easy, but keeping a fast pace and doing these exercises for 8 rounds each can result in 16 minutes of hell. If it is easy, make it harder, the challenge it to yourself, not to me.
What are your favourite exercises you could plug into tabata training?, fire the comments in and lets find out!
stay fit and train hard
Dean Coulson
Circuit Training Variations
I have been playing around with different circuits to keep things interesting and thought I’d share this cool conditioning circuit.
Using the “integrated circuit training” principle, I created a 10 station circuit using a combination of body weight and weighted exercises. The premise is simple, each station lasts 30 seconds before immediately going onto the next exercise, this continues until the 10 stations are complete.
Make no mistake this is tough, it is meant to be, pushing your body through fatigue increases your general physical preparedness (GPP) and allows your body to adapt to train further during fatigue as well as decreasing your recovery time.
I aim to to 5 circuits with 1 minute rest in between each one. However if you feel you need more rest then take it, however I’d advise to keep it as minimal as possible.
Here’s the circuit:
- Body weight squats (with or without 5kg dumbbells)
- Body weight Lunges (with or without 5kg dumbbells).
- Heavy Bag Punching.
- Elevated Push ups.
- Burpees.
- Squat Jumps.
- Dumbbell Alternating shoulder press (high tempo).
- Bench Dips.
- Skipping.
- Heavy Bag punching.
In this circuit I emphasise “doubling up” on upper and lower body exercises until station 9 and 10. I wanted to create more fatigue on the same muscle groups with a combination of exercises. You can just as easily make it upper/lower. The exercises are not set in stone either, there are plenty substitutes if you don’t have a heavy bag, Shadow boxing with a pair of light dumbbells would suffice.
The key here is that the circuit is continuous. It is possible to play around with the amount of stations, the time at each station and of course the exercises.
Don’t forget an interval timer such as a gym boss is an excellent training tool here, it takes care of the time so you can concentrate on the training.
Stay sharp and train Hard!
- Dean Coulson
Pushing Mental Boundaries
How often do you really go for something? I mean really go balls out to achieve your goals?
How far do you go and do you keep going until you achieve it?
What are you trying to achieve? Maybe it’s further education or a promotion at work, losing that fat that has accumulated over the years, keeping up with your kids or getting a personal best at the gym. Everyone has a motivation for what they want to achieve, what is yours?
Comfort zones
To get anywhere in this life you have to want to go beyond your comfort zone, way beyond in fact so that it feels so damn uncomfortable. Too many people in this world plod along mindlessly, too afraid to do anything about their dreams. A lot of the time they listen too much to what other people say, and in doing so keeping themselves back because these people don’t have the bollocks to try it themselves and instead keep others down to their level. People fear change and if they see someone else doing it their natural response is to try and hold them back so they won’t be left behind.
Well don’t let anybody do this!! No matter who it is! Move forward and get uncomfortable and when this is achieved you are going to have to do it again and again, constantly being in an “uncomfortable state” if you like. This is how we grow, to push our boundaries in our lives so that we can enrich them.
What holds us back?
Fear, Doubt, apprehension – that uncomfortable feeling in the pit of our stomach, the anxiety that makes us feel sick and makes us doubt what we are doing sometimes before you even start. That little voice inside our heads, your subconscious that keeps us back is the voice echoing what you have done all your life, it only does what you have trained it to do, so start educating it!
What you have to remember is that fear is just an emotion, it does not hold substance. It can be overridden.
Do it anyway!
Do what you want to do regardless of how you feel and you can achieve great things. You will eventually become desensitised to its affects.
That is until the next thing you want to do and then the cycle repeats. However, the more you tackle these feelings the more used to it you will be and you will be better equipped in the future to deal with them.
Realise your Potential!
Too many people are stopped in their tracks by fear and never realise their dreams. What I am saying here is realise your potential and go for it. DO NOT let anything hold you back, believe in yourself, keep pushing your boundaries and you will get to where you want to be.
Eliminate Fear
Remember, the key is in handling this emotion, if you are not careful it can devour you,
completely paralysing you by its effects. YOU MUSTN’T LET IT DO THIS. The sick feeling, the shaking, the dry mouth, the tunnel vision, it is all the affect of adrenaline, the fight or flight syndrome, built to protect us for 1000’s of years, but in modern society it can be a completely misplaced ideal.
Remember it is only adrenaline, a reaction to a stimulus, a by product of feeling anxious or stressed. Don’t let it control you, understand it and you can be it’s master to harness it for your own gains.
Fear is the friend of exceptional people, get used to it and utilise it!
