Here’s what I’d tell Angelina Jolie and others.....

I meant to send this out a while back, but I've been a little busy. :)

Who saw the Oscars?  I don’t know if you saw it, but movie stars nowadays are so SUPER skinny…

I mean, I know the camera adds 10 lbs, so it’s a good idea to stay trim if you’re on tv. But really? I bet Natalie Portman has to run around in the shower to get wet. And if Angelina Jolie would just turn sideways she’d probably disappear. Not to mention that thing sticking out of her dress (some say it was her leg). I can only imagine the diets these girls get on.. and how extreme they must be. So with that in mind, I want to give you MY 2 cents on the controversial subject of…

DIETS
In this email I’m not going to tell you “diets are bad”…

I mean, I’m not a fan. But I don’t want to sound like a broken record… I believe that in the end of the day everyone should do what they’re most confident about. So in this email I want to point out some dieting ‘reminders’. The way I see diets is that they are an ‘entry-way’ to a healthier lifestyle. Kinda like a kickstart to your eating habits. I definitely see them more as the start of a MARATHON, rather than just doing a short sprint. So it’s important to have some flexibility when you diet. It’s a personal thing, so make your own rituals to make this journey comfortable for you :)

Here are some samples…
1- It’s OK to have dessert
The only ‘but’ here is that you should try to have your dessert on your ‘cheat day’.
If you eat superclean 6 days out of the week, it’s actually a good idea to go out of whack for one day.. if anything to trick your metabolism so it doesn’t get used to your diet-low calorie levels.

2- You can have unlimited amounts of veggies
On a diet you’re restricted to limit MOST food… except for the non-starchy vegetables. Like broccoli, spinach, snap peas, kale, asparagus…

3- Salads are not your best choice
More often than not, salads are calorie bombs. If you hate salads, don’t make yourself angry by eating them :) They rarely will fill you up unless they’re loaded with wrong stuff, like croutons, cheese, dressing, etc.

4- Have patience……….
Patience is one of the best traits anyone can have. When losing weight, getting fit, enjoy the process as much as the result.

You will always have more goals to come that you’ll want to conquer, there will always be more challenges ahead. So why not enjoy the “now”… knowing that every day you’re getting a little better.

And remember, 365 days of getting a ‘little better’ is a whole LOT better at the end of the year =)

Yours in health,
Greg DiRenzo, M.S.
Performance Coach, Trainer
"S.M.A.R.T.fit" - THE NEXT BIG THING!
"Small Hinges Swing Big Doors"


Nothing is hard.... it just takes time!

Fastest Results You’ll Ever Get.....

Hey, Greg here with Lakeside Fitness Center – hope you’re having an awesome day!

This email may be one of the most important ones you read all day.  I’m not just saying this to make you read it… it’s because this one is about mindset & positive thinking… something I’m super passionate about.

Ever since I read “Think & Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill, things in my life literally changed. Not instantly, but close.

That was one of the many many many books I’ve read over the years that has provided me with a little "knowledge".  Although this wasn’t part of my 12 month challenge last year, I chose to re read it as part of my "52 book challenge" in 1 year… (I got to 56!!!)

After I read that book and let its’ content sink in, I felt like something changed.

I know this goes against popular thought, but most people believe that change has to be worked at for months or even years. We expect to try and fail numerous times before we ultimately give up or succeed.

So how does this relate to your fitness goals?

Well, how many people do you know struggle with their weight? They want to make a healthy change by getting in shape, but the change never seems to take hold?

Or what about you? Is there something in your life that you want to change? Do you have weight to lose?

Do you have high blood pressure? Do you have a pair of pants that you wish you could fit into?

What is keeping you from making a positive change in your life? According to Anthony Robbins, it's the getting ready to change that takes time. In the end there's a single instant when the change occurs. Robbins goes on to outline three specific beliefs that you must have in order to instantly create a lasting change.

Belief #1: Something MUST change. (kind of like my Risk vs. Reward philosophy I always talk about)
Do you sort of want to get into shape, or do you absolutely have to lose the weight? Does dropping a few pounds sound nice, or is living another day in your current body unbearable? In order to make a lasting change you must be convinced that the time has come.

Belief #2: I (and nobody else) must change it.
It is vital that you take full responsibility in making the change. Sure, others may assist you, but in the end you are the one who is going to make it happen. You have to need this change enough to make it your personal mission—no one else will do it for you.

Belief #3: I CAN change it.
Don't let past failures get in your way. The truth is that you do amazing things when you put your mind to it. Believe that you are capable of losing weight or making any other positive change in your life.

Why do most people fail to make lasting change? They leave it up to willpower. This works for awhile, but you'll always revert back to what's comfortable. The solution?

Change what you're comfortable with.

You've probably heard that humans are motivated by two things: 1) to avoid pain and 2) to gain pleasure.

When you want to change a behavior pattern the key is to associate pain with the behavior that you don't want and pleasure with the behavior that you do want.

You know that you want to lose weight and that to do so you need to quit eating comfort food late at night.

You also know that you need to start exercising on a regular basis. Up until this point your brain is trained to associate pleasure with eating comfort food late at night and to associate pain with exercise.

It's time to retrain your brain to feel good about exercise and to feel bad about eating late at night. Think about all of the negative things about being overweight and connect these unpleasant thoughts to your late night snack. Now think about all of the wonderful things about being in shape and connect these pleasant thoughts to exercise.

You are capable of making a big change in your life. Come in and ask for a free fitness evaluation to help you construct your program and path, and why not bring a friend for a trial.  Remember, you have what it takes to make that change, in order to swim you eventually have to push off the wall in the deep end!

Remember, change can happen in an instant!

See you soon,
Greg

Try this out (it’ll change things..)

Try this out (it’ll change things..)

 

What are your habits?

 

Do you eat the same thing for lunch, go through the same exercise routine, and fall into bed at the same time each night?

 

Or maybe you've made a habit out of eating whatever looks good, avoiding the gym, and staying up as late as possible.

 

John Dryden famously said, "We first make our habits, and then our habits make us."

 

Confucius said, "Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them."

 

And Aristotle noticed that, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."

 

It's pretty clear that the habits you adopt will shape who you are. When it comes to your body, the two habits that define your physique are your eating and exercise habits. In fact, everyone that you know who is in great shape has dialed in these two important habits.

 

If you aren't happy with your body, then simply adjust your eating and exercise habits.

 

Aaaaand here’s how:

 

FIRST…

Decide on the ONE habit that you would like to develop. It's tempting to pick up 3 or 4 healthy habits, but choosing just one new habit is realistic and doable.

 

 

I’m talking about stuff like this:

• Do not eat after 9pm each night.

• Bring your lunch to work instead of eating fast food.

• Exercise 4 times a week after work for 45 minutes each time.

• Only eat fruits and veggies as your afternoon snack.

• Get up early and exercise for an hour each morning.

 

SECONDLY…

Write your new habit down on paper. Also include your 3 main motivators for developing this new habit, the obstacles you'll face, and your strategies for overcoming these obstacles.

 

 

Here's an example:

• My new habit is to go to Bootcamp 3 times each week.

• My 3 main motivators are to feel confident in my bathing suit this summer, to have more energy, and to fit into my skinny jeans.

• The obstacles I will face are not having the energy to go to my session after work, not having enough money to pay for Bootcamp, and not having my spouse's support.

• I will overcome these obstacles by doing my workouts before work instead of after work, so I have more energy, cutting down on frivolous spending to ensure that I can afford it, and asking my spouse to join me so we can get in shape together.

 

THIRD…

Commit fully to your new habit, in a public way. This could mean posting it on Facebook, or simply announcing it at the dinner table. Put yourself in a position where you'll be embarrassed to give up on your new habit.

 

FOURTH…

Keep track of your progress. You could keep a detailed journal or simply make a check mark on each calendar day that you successfully exercise your new habit.

 

FIFTH…

Keep yourself publicly accountable. This means either status updates on Facebook or verbal status updates at the dinner table. Your friends and family are in a position to offer you support, so don't shy away from those close to you.

 

SIXTH…

When you fail, figure out what went wrong so that you can plan around it in the future.

 

SEVENTH…

Reward yourself for your success.

 

AND THEN…

Once your new habit becomes second nature, usually in about 30 days, feel free to add a second habit by going through the same 7 steps.

 

This is truly a gamechanger. Really, do this and your life will change. It’s mostly in your hands, but if you need help in any way – as always - reach out to me anytime =)

 

 

Greg DiRenzo, M.S.

Performance Coach, Trainer

"S.M.A.R.T.fit" - THE NEXT BIG THING!

"Small Hinges Swing Big Doors"

My Marble Jar......

The older I get, the more I enjoy Sunday morning. Perhaps it's the quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it's the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first few hours of a Sunday morning are most enjoyable.

A long time ago I was shuffling toward my car with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as a typical Sunday morning turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it:

Many years ago I was having a bagel and coffee and next to me was an older man, and I love to listen to the old timers! He had a distinct voice, you know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business. He was taking to a guy my age about "a thousand marbles." I was intrigued and stopped to listen to what he had to say.

"Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you're busy with your job. I'm sure they pay you well but it's a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. It's too bad you missed your daughter's dance recital," he continued; "Let me tell you something that has helped me keep my own priorities." And that's when he began to explain his theory of "a thousand marbles."

"You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.

Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3,900, which is the number of Sundays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. Now, stick with me, Tom, I'm getting to the important part.

It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail," he went on, "and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Sundays. I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1,000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container in the shack next to my work bench.

Every Sunday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life.

There's nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.
Now let me tell you one last thing before I go. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next Sunday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time.

It was nice to talk to you and to meet you Tom. I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to talk to you again. This 75 year old man, wishes you a good morning!"

You could have heard a pin drop it seemed. I guess he gave me a lot to think about. I had planned to work that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few buddies.

Instead, I went home and woke my kids up with a kiss. "C'mon kids, I'm taking you all to breakfast."

"What's up?" They asked..

"Oh, nothing special, it's just been a long time since we spent a Sunday together. And hey, can we stop at a toy store while we're out? I need to buy some marbles."

GODSPEED little ones....

Greg DiRenzo, M.S.
Performance Coach, Trainer, Motivator
"S.M.A.R.T.fit - THE NEXT BIG THING!
"Small Hinges Swing Big Doors"

The Proof is in the PROGRAM!!!!

Nothing else really too much to say except....

A Guaranteed Way of Getting You 86,400!

Investment strategy....

Imagine there is a bank which credits your account each morning with $86,400 and it carries over no balance from day to day, it allows you to keep no cash balance, and every evening cancels whatever part of the amount you had failed to use during the day.

What would you do?  Draw out every cent, of course!  Well, everyone has such a bank. Its name is TIME. Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off, as lost, whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose. It carries over no balance. It allows no overdraft.

Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the records of the day. If you fail to use the day's deposits, the loss is yours. There is no going back. There is no drawing against the "tomorrow". You must live in the present on today's deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness and success!

The clock is running.   Make the most of today.   

Greg DiRenzo, M.S.

Performance Coach, Trainer, Motivator

"S.M.A.R.T.fit" - THE NEXT BIG THING!

"Small Hinges Swing Big Doors"

The Magic of Myelin

The Magic of Myelin

This has been a terrific piece for me personally to put together and I hope it will be for anyone wanting to better understand “talent.” In the world of sports psychology we talk a lot about and instruct athletes to work on "deliberate practice." What exactly is “deliberate practice” and why is it important?  The simple answer is – IT HELPS THE ATHLETE PRODUCE MYELIN.  Myelin is the fatty insulation around nerve fibers that makes electrical nerve signals more efficient.

So what is the connection between “deliberate practice” and Myelin?

It is now very well known that superior athletes and superior leaders of great skill in any field have spent many years carefully sharpening and perfecting their technique (this includes savants, who, by nature of their disability, are able to focus obsessively and persistently on math or music or art, effectively tuning out distractions). Why does high-level skill take so much time and steady effort to develop? It turns out that this slow, patient persistence is exactly what myelin needs to become a thicker and more efficient insulator. You can't rush that process. In neurology, myelin is being seen as an epiphany. This is a new dimension that now helps us understand a ton about how the brain works, especially about how we gain skills, all skills.

Let’s take a look at the current epicenters of great sports training; the Spartak tennis center in Russia, golfers in South Korea, baseball payers in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. What is the common thread?  Deliberate practice.  This is an obsessive focus on technique. Each of these places are incubators for deliberate practice. Harnessing the competitive drive comes later (at Spartak, they don't allow students to compete in tournaments for at least three years).

“He’s gifted”  “What a natural” “That guy was born to do that” Those are all things people say when they see extraordinary feats and phenomenal skills.  But are some people born that way?  Are some people born with more efficient myelin-boosters than others? Maybe so. Maybe, on top of the years and years of persistent development of technique, Anna Kournikova and Tiger Woods also got lucky in the genetic lottery. But what I as well as many others in this field have learned following the last few years of research, genetic differences seem less and less relevant. 

Here is why:1. No one has actually found these much-vaunted genetic differences relating to skill and talent.  Maybe they're connected to intelligence, maybe even persistence….?  All we know is that we haven't actually found them yet.
2. Regardless of what differences we're born with, there is a lot of evidence that suggests: most people do not come remotely close to achieving their genetic potential
high-level achievement is simply impossible without hard work and persistence
3. We also know from definitive research that no one benefits from a mindset that relies on their "natural" abilities. Students encouraged to rely on their natural gifts stagnate, as do poor-performing students told that they are limited by some disability. In opposition, students of every caliber perform better when they are encouraged to equate hard work with results.

Athletes and age of peak performanceThe path of an athlete’s career follows a parabolic arc: a fairly steep rise as the body matures and skills are acquired, a peak, and then a slower, flatter decline as ability fades. But what causes this peak and decline? Obviously it has to do with physical attributes like speed and power, but what about the deep, underlying aspects of performance?

The consistency of this rise-peak-decline pattern is striking, even across very different sports. For nearly every major sport, the age of peak performance is in the range of 22-30, and some interesting trends emerge when you look at sport type in relation to an athlete’s peak age. The age at which performance tends to peak across sports seems to mirror the continuum from purely explosive, athletic sports to slower, more skill-based sports, with explosive sports peaking earlier. Further, even within sports that combine different abilities, explosive abilities (like base stealing in baseball) tend to peak earlier than more cognitive, skill-based abilities (like drawing walks in baseball).

• For baseball, a number of studies, using different methods, have pegged peak age between 27-29.
• For Tennis, peak age has been pegged between the early 20′s and 25.
• For basketball, peak age has been found to be at 27 for all positions, with different positions showing different patterns of decline.
• For Track and Field, peak sprinting age has been found to be in the lower-mid twenties, with endurance events having a little older peak ages.
• For golf, athletes have broader peaks–between 25-35, with slower declines.
• For football, running backs and receivers peak around 27, with running backs showing sharper fall-offs than receivers. Quarterbacks have a broader peak between 25-35. 

But why do athletes decline? One place where we are now looking for an explanation is in myelin integrity. As noted above, myelin is a fatty sheath that insulates the axon of the neuron, the long portion of the neuron that conducts the electrical signal when a neuron “fires”. This sheath acts like an electrical insulator, and allows the axon to conduct a signal much faster than an unmyelinated axon. You’ve all heard of “gray matter,” but myelin is what we call “white matter” when we’re talking about the brain as opposed to “gray matter”, which is mostly composed of neuronal cell bodies. Neuroplastic changes in white matter have been observed in musicians and other categories of experts–it’s as if repetition and practice cause the laying down of additional layers of this myelinated insulation–so it isn’t too great of a leap to anticipate that highly trained athletes might exhibit differences in myelination and white matter when compared to the general population.  

Given that myelin is associated both with expertise and with the ultra-fast conduction of nerve signals, it seems logical to explore whether the degeneration of myelin might be associated with the decline that we see in athletes’ performance. Myelin integrity also exhibits a parabolic trajectory with age, and the breakdown of myelin is associated with slower nerve conduction and cognitive and physical decline. But while this seems like a plausible explanation, studies have shown that myelin integrity actually peaks around age 40. In a study conducted at UC San Diego, a range of subjects were tested on a very simple but common neurological test, finger-tapping speed. Maximal finger tapping speed requires high-frequency action potential bursts and is associated with myelin integrity. The study results found that myelin integrity, as measured by brain imaging techniques, and finger-tapping speed closely mirror each other, and peaked around age 39. The study’s concluded that the results suggest that in this very healthy male sample, maximum motor speed requiring high-frequency burst may depend on brain myelin integrity.

Interestingly though, even in the most skill-based sport, golf, performance decline begins before 39, the age at which studies suggest that myelin integrity peaks. Decline in every sport happens while myelin integrity, and thus the quality of the signals sent through the brain and body, should still be improving. So, again, why the decline?  It is potentially productive to examine when certain physical attributes begin to decline, and whether those might explain why athletes lose competitiveness with age. Decline does not seem to be related to a loss of physical strength. Studies have found that muscle atrophy due to aging doesn’t begin until around age 50, so that seems like a dead end.  Another potential cause might be an accumulation of injuries.

Certainly in high-impact sports like football, or sports with razor-thin margins that make injuries relatively more debilitating like track and field, we tend to see younger ages of peak performance. It may just be that the wear and tear on the body over the years erodes an athlete’s ability. This idea is bolstered by research on how football running backs who carry the ball more than 370 times in a season tend to show a predictable pattern of decline in the ensuing seasons after that huge workload.

But the metric that seems most related to decline is pure explosiveness. We see the most explosive sports, like track and field sprinting, peaking the earliest. Even within sports, as in football, positions that rely more on explosiveness (running backs) peak earlier than those that rely more on other, more experienced-based skills (quarterbacks). The neurological metric that seems to fall more in line with peak athletic age, and with this explosive speed, is reaction time. Reaction time peaks in the 20′s and then begins to fall off. Specifically, it is complex reaction time that declines fastest. So why do reaction time and explosiveness peak when they do?  In reality, athletic decline is probably due to a number of interacting causes, both physical and, potentially, neural. The exact mechanism behind why athletes peak when they do, despite the predictability and inevitability of the process, is not 100% understood, but it’s getting there.

So how do you become a superior athlete?  Deliberate Practice and Myelin!  Practice smart, practice hard, practice long!

Greg DiRenzo, M.S.
Performance Coach, Trainer
"S.M.A.R.T.fit" - THE NEXT BIG THING!
"Small Hinges Swing Big Doors"