The dirty little secret we’re going to talk about today is almost as bad and in some ways worse because it explains one of the main reasons why people struggle so much to maintain their weight loss once they try to transition back to more normal eating!

To be fair, it’s not just the diet industries fault.  They are merely suppliers for consumers who continue to demand easier and faster ways to lose the weight that they most likely spent quite some time putting on!  For a lifetime of healthy weight management there are no pills, injections, or magic workouts.  Hard to believe based on the number of infomercials you see on a daily basis that promise exactly that but if you actually do a little research for yourself you will see that this is true!

Okay, back to our big secret.  Drumroll please……..

The secret is…. that if you go on a diet that causes rapid weight loss – more than a pound or two per week – you are most likely losing a ton of water weight along with some muscle weight, but very little actual fat in comparison to these other two.  Some of the more popular diets over the past several years have demonized just about all carbs – bread is evil right!  So just what happens when you first go on an Atkins or Dukan diet?  Well surprise, surprise you drop a lot of weight.  Yeah, but what kind of weight?  You guessed it; it’s almost all water weight, not fat!  There is certainly a lot to learn about healthy carbs versus the processed junk that many people eat too much of but the amount of carbs that these kinds of diets have you cut out fall far outside the healthy mainstream recommendations that are supported by not just hundreds but thousands of studies from legitimate scientific and medical journals.

So what  do we do about this little bit of trickery?  First off we don’t ever recommend going on a radical diet.  You can become more fit from sensible exercise and appropriate supplementation  - lower blood pressure, better blood sugar control, lower cholesterol – while you are learning to lose weight in a way that you can maintain for a lifetime.  We use proven tools like our Daily Journals and On-Line Meal Planner along with teaching you healthy ways to modify your lifestyle and behavior that will last.

Secondly, we help you understand that the weight scale can only offer a partial and sometimes deceiving amount of information.  Can a weight scale tell you if you’ve lost a pound of fat and gained a pound of muscle?  The answer is NO!  Is this important?  The answer is YES!

This is where Body Composition comes into play.  Body composition is essentially a form of measurement that determines how much of your weight is made up of muscle, fat and water.  If you want to know an easy way to evaluate a legitimate diet and exercise program, just see if they emphasize measure body composition as opposed to your weight!  Body compostion testing will tell you exactly what kind of weight you are gaining and losing so that there is no deception possible.

Can you measure your body composition by yourself.  Well, yes and no.  You can buy a relatively inexpensive body fat scale even at Walmart and Target these days but the accuracy of these scales is pretty bad.  On the other hand, they will at least do a decent job of showing you changes in your body composition as you either gain or lose weight.  To really get an accurate idea of body composition – and this doesn’t include going to a university and getting dunked under water or going to a hospital and having a scan done ( both of which are very accurate but not very convenient ) – you can go to a fitness expert who has both higher end testing equipment as well as experience in administering these tests.  Ideally you should have a skinfold test done – where a special device is used to measure the thickness of skinfolds on specific areas of your body – along with bioelectrical impedance – which when done with the right type of device can be very accurate – and finally a series of girth measurements – taken with a tape measure on specific areas of the body.

All of our clients at XCELFIT go through these measurements as an essential tool for measuring progress and we’d love to offer you a free body composition test at your convenience.  Fill in the contact form below and we’ll set it up!

Well for about 2 percent of the population that’s actually true, for the rest of us, that’s not quite the case!  In response to both the lack of knowledge and  the lack of discipline that most of us suffer from many companies have come along to make the job easier for you.  The diet industry is a multi-billion dollar industry and yet the average success rate that people have on just about all of these diets is less than 5 percent.  Success being defined as losing healthy weight and then keeping it off for any period of time over 2 years.  Some focus on restricting certain food groups, some focus on making all of your meals for you, and many have you taking a variety of supplements to stay healthy while you essentially starve yourself!  Well, there are reasons why all of these diets fail and we have a great video on the homepage of our website that walks you through Weight Management 101 without all the half-truths and misleading information you’re contantly bombarded with.

We’ve all heard the expression, “knowledge is power” which is certainly true, but knowledge by itself is pretty much useless unless it then translates into taking action.  The truth is that it doesn’t take rocket science to eat well or to be fit but as opposed to just focusing on the fundamentals and consistently doing them, we keep looking for magic pills, injections, gadgets, and gurus to help us do what we already know how to do!  This is why at XCELFIT we focus on equipping our clients with the fundamentals of good eating and exercise and then provide systems that encourage, challenge and teach our clients how to transform their lives for sustained success.

The first thing you need for proper meal planning is knowledge – the knowledge of what a healthy breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks would look like.  That knowledge includes, 1) how many calories/what size meals are appropriate for you given body composition and activity levels; 2) the various levels of vitamins, minerals, and other essential nutrients that you need to maintain optimum health; 3) variations for your meals – what proteins, fats and carbohydrates can you substitute so as not to end up eating the same boring food every meal; 4) basic information on what supplements are worth the time and money you spend on them; 5) a basic system to help you stay encouraged and accountable for making the lifestyle changes that will lead to a lifetime of healthier eating.  There are other components but enough for now!

A topic for a future post will get into the other key ingredient of lasting lifestyle changes – the psychology of change – but today’s post is meant to  deal with Meal Planning.  After you’ve watched the Weight Management 101 video take a few moments to look at our On-Line Meal Planning tool.  This planner provides incredible help for making meal plans, making sure you’re getting all the nutrients you need to stay healthy, and even helps with making grocery shopping lists once you’ve made up your meal plans.  Go here to view the demo.

These resources cover a variety of topics including position statements from some of the most respected fitness, sports and medical associations in this country such as the NSCA-the National Strength and Conditioning Association, the NATA-National Athletic Trainers Association, and the AMA-American Medical Association.

Along with these resources are some of the materials we use on the XCELFIT web site on topics such as Red Flags of questionable diets, some very scary Obesity facts, a great summary on The History of Diets, and some research papers that should challenge some of the accepted thinking in the fitness industry in regards to balance training, functional exercise and using cables versus traditional selectorized machines for strength training.  I hope some of my fellow strength training professionals will take a look at these and then add their thoughts – hopefully backed up with some good research and experience – to the discussion.

If you have  any subjects or sites you’d like to see us add please send them my way and I’ll check them out.

Here’s a direct link to the Free Resources page!

Just remember…

Average coaches accept and do what “everyone” else is doing;  good coaches experiment and test ideas out themselves before they subject their clients/athletes to any of these ideas; great coaches constantly evaluate the effectiveness of their coaching tools and methods,study quality research,  learn at least the basics of the sciences involved and then experiment and test things out on the field of battle! 

At XCELFIT, our mantra is “Encouraging, Challenging, Teaching, Transforming”.  For me personally as a coach, whether it’s in a fitness setting or in the volleyball arena, encouragement is probably the area of coaching that I need to be most conscious of working on with my clients and athletes.  I am wired to be more internally motivated and to be pretty self-critical so I often expect this of other people.

According to a man I consider to be one of the greatest coaches of all time, Tony Dungy…

Encouragement is one aspect of leadership that you can’t delegate – you simply have to master it, whether you are predisposed to it or not.

Speaking of Coach Dungy, I’d highly recommend pretty much anything he’s written but one book that I’ve recently read that has already helped me to be a better coach is The Mentor Leader: Secrets To Building People and Teams That Win Consistently.

A few other good quotes on encouragement from Coach Dungy:

It’s not just in tough situations that people need encouragement.

You’re probably better off overusing encouragement than underusing it.

Coach Dungy quotes Goethe in the book:

Correction does much, but encouragement does more.

Coach John Wooden, perhaps the greatest coach of the past  50 years, puts it this way:

 A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.

Another quote from Coach Wooden that can be seen by some as inspiring and by others as intimidating goes like this:

Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.

This is the kind of encouragement that not everyone is up to handling but it leads into another great bit of wisdom that I have always tried to lean on and have often used to encourage athletes when they are labeled as “not talented enough”.  I spent about 8 seasons training a great guy named Joe Orsulak who played for the Baltimore Orioles for several years.  Every year,  even though Joe might have ended up leading the team in hitting the previous year, it was predicted that some newer, younger and more talented player was going to take his spot.  Every year,  Joe hit the gym, the batting cage and did whatever it took to make sure those predictions proved false and more often than not they did!

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Calvin Coolidge
30th president of US (1872 – 1933)

Trainers and coaches come in many shapes, sizes and backgrounds but at the core of becoming a great encourager is the ability to create and cast a vision for your clients and athletes that not only inspires them but also gives them a new way to see themselves without the self-imposed and other-imposed limitations that keep them from achieving and often surpassing  their goals - that is if they even set goals!  This doesn’t mean you tell the person who is tone deaf that they can win American Idol or that you tell the guy who runs a 6.45 forty yard dash – after years of training – that he is going to win an Olympic 100 meter race on this side of Heaven.  Great leaders/coaches are also excellent talent evaluaters and are very good at helping people find the niche that they are most likely to succeed in.  Once there, these same leaders/coaches continue to nurture and grow these people to be all they can be by excelling in the fundamentals of coaching with encouragement as the cornerstone.

I suspect that most trainers and coaches would respond “NO” to that question!  Ultimately,  if trainers and coaches want to be treated and recognized as professionals similar to an engineer, or lawyer, or doctor or plumber then we need to stop stepping outside of our scope of practice and  make sure we pay our dues in regards to education, apprenticeships, and certification.  A weekend workshop on nutrition counseling does not qualify as comparable to what a dietician goes through and quite frankly neither does a semester or two of study!  Self-guided study is great, but we will tend to study areas that we have bias towards based on personal experiences and not pursue well-rounded and scientifically grounded study patterns on our own.  This is what professional educators are paid to do - develop courses that are appropriate for developing a sound basis of knowledge and analytical skills that allow us to then make educated decisions about the good, bad and ugly diet information that our clients are constantly bombarded with.

Does this mean that fitness trainers and coaches should never make recommendations about diet for their clients and athletes?  Well, that sort of depends on exactly what level of training and education that trainer or coach has obtained.  Ideally, we acquire enough knowledge to at least make general lifestyle recommendations and then are smart enough to develop relationships with nutrition professionals who can assist us with things that fall outside of our area of expertise.

In 2003 alone, more than 3.5 million children under age fifteen required medical treatment for sports injuries, nearly half of which were the result of simple overuse.  The quest to turn children into tomorrow’s superstar athletes has often led adults to push them beyond physical and emotional limits.

Mark Hyman’s book is titled “Until It Hurts: America’s Obsession With Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids“.  Here are some quotes from reviewers:

A hair-raising look at everything that is wrong with youth sports today.  Every parent and every coach who has ever been involved in youth sports and cares about kids has an obligation to read it.  BUZZ BISSINGER, author of Friday Night Lights

Hyman has authored a richly detailed, eye-opening look at an America hell-bent on turning our children into ‘winners’ – no matter the physical or emotional cost.  Important, compelling, and painfully honest, Until It Hurts looks in all the right directions, including the mirror. ARMEN KETEYIAN, Chief Investigative Correspondent, CBS News

I had the pleasure of meeting Mark when he found me while looking for a local trainer to show him the ropes of the Nike SPARQ rating system.  Mark figured that the best way to learn about Nike SPARQ was to subject himself to the process.  Mark ended up coming to my facility and we ran him through a a basic SPARQ rating test while he took notes and video taped – or had me video tape – the various tests.  I think he scored a bit lower than Tim Tebow but not by much!

Mark writes about sports for BusinessWeek and numerous other publications.  He previously worked for newspapers in Baltimore, Dallas, and Philadelphia.  His first book, Confessions  of a Baseball Purist, with ESPN’s Jon Miller, was published in 1998.  Mark also hosts a blog for youth sports parents at http://youthsportsparents.blogspot.com/.

So when it comes to doing SPARQ type training with young athletes, what would be some basic guidelines?  Where can trainers go to receive solid training in how to safely and effectively work with young athletes?

For the first question, it’s important for coaches to understand  the basics of youth physiology and development.  If you don’t have a working knowledge of what the Tanner scale is then you probably are not quite ready to be training  and  assessing young athletes.  Coachability is certainly always going to be a factor for determining what types of activity a young athlete should participate in.  Young people tend to be much more susceptible to heat injury so hydration and limited training in hot and humid climates is critical.  The muscle tone of young  athletes at various times can make any sort of aggressive power and/or  strength  training counterproductive.  Young athletes will respond best to activities that have a greater emphasis on fun than competitiveness.  At these younger ages, the focus should be on motor learning and movement mechanics not on increasing loads and intensities.

Now to the second question, where can trainers and coaches go for solid training and research on working with young athletes?  I would recommend two organizations.  First the  National Strength and Conditioning  Association or NSCA.  This organization provides a prestigious certification for strength and conditioning specialist know as the CSCS or certified strength and conditioning specialist.  The NSCA has been putting out position papers on training young athletes for almost two decades.   Their web site is www.nsca-lift.org and the link for their most updated position paper on youth and strength training is here.

The second organization was created to specifically address the issue of youth conditioning and is known as the International Youth Conditioning Accociation or IYCA.  Their web site is www.iyca.org.  The IYCA offers several training programs and certifications for trainers/coaches looking to equip themselves to work with young  people. 

Youth Fitness coaches can have tremendous influence on how both young people and their parents view youth sports and youth conditioning.  There is no way that young people should be following the same training models that adults do and any trainer that doesn’t know this needs to reevaluate why they’re working with young people in the first place.  Kids today are experiencing more and more issues of injury and burnout in regards to  youth sports and it has everything to do with how much of the “fun” adults have taken out of their activities and how little “play time” kids actually have in their lives.