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Showing posts tagged motivation
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Get Ripped Beach Body Abs by following these two tips.
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How to Tone Up the Back of Your Arms (Triceps)
For More Fitness Advice Join my Email List by clicking the link http://forms.aweber.com/form/92/27545892.htm
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”Today is the day you can change yourself forever. Think about it, your new life can begin NOW.
Greg Marshall
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Maximum Heart Rate and Some General Guidelines to Follow
Here is the link to the video as well http://youtu.be/4nHepIlLojs
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Quick and Healthy Nutrition Tips for You
Greg’s Tips
• Eat lean proteins consisting of chicken, fish, lean beef, and
turkey.• Consume protein before eating carbohydrates to stabilize
blood sugar levels. This is true for both snacks and meals.
It is a great way to control blood sugar and appetite.• Eat complex carbohydrates consisting of whole grains, oats,
and vegetables.• If possible, choose organic/natural foods.
• Eat healthy fats consisting of olive oil, nuts, fats from fish,
and peanut butter.• Drink water when you feel hungry to avoid eating when you
are actually dehydrated.• Drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water per day.
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Know Why You Want to Reach Your Goals For Better Success
Discovering Your “Why”
In order to truly reach your potential and stay motivated for a sus-
tainable amount of time, you must understand your “Why.” Why
do you want to better yourself? What motivates you? It’s hard to
stay motivated just by telling yourself that you should do better
or be better—sometimes that can even be harmful. Instead, strike
to your core and feel the reasons why you are doing what you are
doing. And then take the time to figure out your “Why”: why you
want to better yourself.It can be hard, but allow your emotions to get involved in this
process to get the maximum results. We are driven to do things by
emotion. First understand the emotion that has kept you from at-
taining your goals or the emotions that support negative behaviors.
Then you need to give yourself a strong emotional connection as to
why you want to change your behaviors.
Ask Yourself:• Who was your role model growing up? And why?
• Who is your role model currently? And why?
• What makes you feel the most positive about yourself?
• What makes you feel negative and unmotivated?
• What kind of legacy do you want to leave?
• With what kind of people do you associate yourself?
• With whom do you want to associate yourself?
• Why are you going to make a permanent change in your life?
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How You Can Be More Successful in Your Fitness and Life
Often when you are looking to do the right thing and make the necessary changes you need to make in your life, especially when it comes to fitness, you need to invest in a daily exercise of writing down certain aspects of your day.
A successful exercise that you can use that can add a lot of value and help with positive reinforcement in your life is an exercise I personally like to do which is to answer the question…
What have I done successful today? Or what have I done right today?
The power of this exercise is it forces you to stop what you are doing and focus on not only the right actions that you are doing but how to correct or even increase the positive actions that you want to incorporate in your life.
It will give you a sense of control and allow you to slow your life down so every action that you are taking is intentional.
An example would be writing on the top of a piece of paper “Things I did right today” and then right below it you would right things such as
I did cardio for 5 minutes today
I did strength training for my legs today for 15 minutes
I stretched after my workouts today
I ate a healthy protein filled meal
I spent quality time with my kids for 30 minutes
I educated myself on the importance of eating a post workout meal
etc…These are some examples that I wanted to show you to give you some ideas on how this works. Share your thoughts
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Your Free Leg Workout
Squats are one of the most important exercises that you can do for your legs. If you are looking for maximal calorie burn while simultaneously trying to build your core then this is the key exercise to incorporate in your program.
Squats can be done multiple ways to emphasize different parts of your legs. For example, if you do your squats with your legs shoulder width apart and focus on keeping a majority of the weight on your heels then you will activate the hamstring and glute muscles (the back of your leg and your butt).
Or if you would like to emphasize your inner thigh and tighten and tone them up then I highly recommend that you do a wider stance squat with your toes pointed out slightly. This change in angle still works the legs out with an emphasis on the inner part of your legs. I like to use the wider stance squat in replacement to the inner thigh machine as I think the squat is much more effective in getting the results you want.
Another way to do the squat can be with your feet completely together (narrow stance). This can emphasize a little bit more on the outside part of your thighs. Replacing the outer thigh machine.
As always with any squat motion be sure to keep your core tight (belly button sucked in towards spine) to protect your back as well as making sure that you are always doing the correct form to get the maximal benefit of the squat.
There are different tools that you can use to do the squat such as the smith machine, barbell, dumbbell, squat machine, physioball, and bosu ball.
All of those tools can accomplish the same goal as long as you keep your form correct and you pay attention on every rep and movement to ensure you are working the targeted area.
The repetitions should always be varied every few weeks in my opinion so your body does not hit a plateau. To start I would do anywhere from 10-12 reps with a moderate weight and focus on your form before you add additional weight.
By adding weight to your squats it will not automatically bulk up your legs. In order for you to bulk your legs or your body for that matter, you need to intentionally do it by eating a high calorie diet. So if your goal is not to bulk up then you have complete control by paying close attention to your diet.
Here are a few more leg exercise ideas for you to incorporate
Leg Press http://youtu.be/oRflcUrFEH4
Stationary Lunge http://youtu.be/ZmzQz_BfyxA
Step Ups http://youtu.be/8QuSZXfjsX4
Please email or share with your social networks whoever you think can benefit from this advice.
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How to Make Eating Healthy Easier For Your Busy Life
You may be wondering, with all of the things that keep you busy throughout the day how can you still eat healthy and make it work for you? My advice for you is to first keep it simple and plan out in advance.
I want you to get a list of healthy foods such as healthy meats, vegetables, fruits, nuts etc. Next I want you to get a blank piece of paper out and then write down all of the foods that you enjoy or at least somewhat enjoy to eat,
From this list I want you to write down and plan one full day’s worth of healthy eating. I want you to plan it out so you can see what a good nutrition plan will look like so it can be your guide.
Next I want you to take this list and follow it for a minimum of 3 consecutive days. I want you to take notes and write down how you are feeling while eating this way. I want you to include things such as how your energy levels are, how hungry you feel throughout the day, how is your mood and things of that nature.
Next I want you to study what is going on during those 3 days and really pay attention to how your body feels. This is the exact way you can find your personalized nutrition that makes you feel your very best as well as look your best too!
I promise you, if you invest your time in studying yourself during these days that you are logging what you eat and how you feel, you can solve your problem of nutrition and know exactly what to eat.
This has been the exact way I have found my eating routine which works for me and allows me to eat the foods that I do enjoy while allowing me to have the results and energy I desire.
You are probably tired of hearing that you need to eat healthy, spike your metabolism, and eat 5-6 small meals throughout the day. You may be thinking where you are going to find all of this time to eat and cook all of this food in your exceptionally busy day.
Well my solution to your problem is to take this very seriously and invest your time for no more than a week and figure out what are the specific foods that nourish you to be your best you.
If you need a little help with your motivation then I created a video to help you out with that. Click the link to watch http://youtu.be/rDEWfaxDJc8
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Medicine Ball Ab Crunch
This is one of my favorite exercises to do for abdominals as I feel it challenges you to keep your core tight and adds resistance to your workout.
I typically like to use a 10 pound medicine ball while I suck my belly button in toward my spine so that my abs are doing all of the work. I like to do anywhere from 15-25 reps with very minimal rest in between.
I also enjoy doing a more advanced medicine ball ab crunch on the bosu ball as I feel it is one of the best exercises to challenge your lower abs.
I want you to incorporate this exercise into your routine especially if your goal is to strengthen up your core and have a better set of abs for the new year and the new you.
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How to Make Your Ab Exercises More Effective Than Ever
First I would like to start this post with a HUGE thank you to all of you who are following my blog and progress. This blog has been able to help some people reach their fitness goals and hopefully has motivated a few more to want to change their life for the better.
Ok so now for the tip that you are waiting for. The most important thing that I have found while not only training myself but training my clients as well, is if you want your ab training to be the most successful then I highly recommend you pay close attention to the form you are doing your ab exercises with.
I want you to visualize that you are sucking your belly button in towards your spine and keep them flexed so your core is completely engaged and on every rep you do, your abs are doing all of the work.
This will not only help you to develop the attractive abs or slim waist that you may want but it also strengthens up your core so you can prevent injury not only while you are exercising but also when you are not exercising as well.
That is a quick tip for you to use when you are training your abs. If you find this advice useful please share my blog address with someone you know and have them enter their email address to join our community.
Happy Holidays and like always if you ever have questions, do not hesitate to ask.
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How to Burn More Calories in Less Time
With your busy schedule and having more responsibilites than ever you may wonder how could you possibly have enough time to work out in the gym and still have a healthy body that looks great.
Maybe your goal is not to be the next Mr or Mrs Universe but you probably want to feel more comfortable in your clothes, have more energy, and overall just feel good about yourself.
You may think that you need to spend two to three hours per day in the gym to achieve all of those goals. Well, the good news is you can have more energy, fit better in your clothes, and feel better about yourself with workouts that are less than sixty minutes per day.
If you want to really maximize your calorie burn when you go to the gym, then I want you to focus on working your larger muscle groups. What I mean by this is, working out your legs, chest, and back.
You do not have to work all three of those in a workout, unless you really want to challenge yourself. But choose one of those muscle groups in a day such as legs and focus on doing compound movements.
Compound movements for your legs would be exercises such as squats, step ups, lunges, and leg press. If you are trying to burn the most calories in less time then I would avoid doing isolation exercises and focus more on the compound movements.
The next question you may have is where does cardio come into play with this? My response to you is you should do cardio after you do your weights and then if you are going for maximum calorie burn do interval training.
Interval training would be doing something with high intensity for a specified amount of time followed by rest. For example, if you were to sprint on the treadmill for thirty seconds and then walk on the treadmill for thirty seconds and repeat for twenty minutes.
You could easily get away with working out in forty five minutes (20 minutes weights/25 minutes cardio) and still get great results. Try it out and let me know how it works for you.
Those are some quick tips to follow when you are trying to burn more calories in less time. Hope those tips helped and feel free to check out my you tube channel for more advice at http://www.youtube.com/gregmarshall17
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6 Simple But Effective Ab Tips
1) Abdominal exercises are only part of the equation when looking to tone up your abdominal muscles. Be sure to do exercises that incorporate all of your ab muscles such as abdominal crunches, bicycle crunches, and planks. When doing each of the exercises, I like to do them for time such as sets of thirty seconds to a minute. The purpose of the timed set is to be able to focus on the form while keeping the intensity levels higher. In between your sets rest for thirty seconds or less. The goal is to not rest in between your sets in order to increase intensity and stimulate the ab muscles.
2) Eat a clean diet. The saying is true, abs are made in the kitchen. Your nutrition should consist of high protein foods such as chicken, fish, egg whites, and turkey. Keep your carbohydrates to a minimum especially the high sugar low nutrient carbohydrates such as white flour products, fast food, candy, and anything else that is high in sugar. Consume slow burning carbohydrates such as green vegetables, oats, and whole grain foods. Eat several small meals a day with your goal being four to six meals. Do not forget to drink a gallon of water per day to help increase your metabolism.
3) Incorporate resistance training to help build lean muscle tissue, which will help you to increase your metabolism. The higher your metabolism is, the more calories you burn, the greater your opportunity to burn fat. Great exercises to do in the gym would be squats, lunges, shoulder presses, bench press, and back rows. If you do not have access to a gym then you can of course substitute those exercises with jump squats, body weight squats, lunges, push-ups, and resistance band back rows.
4) Cardio exercise is not the only way to get those summer abs, but it is important. If you have access to a gym, incorporate the stair climber, treadmill, elliptical, stationary bike, and sports of your liking. If you do not have access to a gym then take a walk outside, go hiking up hill, ride your bike around town, or go swimming at a local pool. When doing cardio training intensity is the name of the game in my opinion. Focus on how you feel and if you feel like you are pushing your personal limits. Your body will be the best judge of your intensity so listen to it.
5) Reduce the stress in your life. Yes I said stress. Stress increases your body’s cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone that you want to stay away from, as it is a muscle wasting and fat gaining hormone (a summer abs nightmare). Work on budgeting out some “me time” every day to help you unwind. During this time do not feel guilty, instead look at it as an investment. This will be the best investment you will make because it will improve not only your summer abs but other aspects of your life as well such as being a better parent, spouse, and friend.
6) Stay consistent and most importantly have fun when going after your pair of summer abs. Choose the exercises and foods that you enjoy and create a routine for yourself where you can get into a “groove”. For more help on the exercises that I recommended, do a google search on them and get a few picture and video demonstrations. Also do a google search for high protein and low carb recipes to supplement your plan. I wish you the best of luck!
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Here is a Workout Challenge For You
When you are trying to get the best results possible you must always be open to trying new and different exercises. By switching it up, it will significantly increase your results as well as your motivation and interest. Here is a challenge that I suggest you try for a GREAT workout.
Squats
Leg Press
Step Ups
Cable Crunch
Decline Crunch
Bosu Ball Crunch
Stationary Bike (20 Minutes)Do all of those exercises 3 sets of 10 choosing a moderate to heavy weight and the challenge yourself. The goal of this workout is to not rest any longer than 15 seconds between each set. This workout should be done in 45 minutes or less. I would love to hear your workout feedback and how it felt. Good Luck :)
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How to get rid of muscle soreness
