Master Your Time And Master Your Life

“Anything that is wasted effort represents wasted time. The best management of our time thus becomes inseparably linked with the best utilization of our efforts.”

Alec MacKenzie

I’m an avid reader and I love quotes. I was talking to a good friend tonight about inspiration. He told me he hasn’t been inspired lately. I have to admit, I get inspired pretty easy, but I didn’t used to be that way. I blame it on reading. What I’ve come to realize is that successful people read a lot, and then apply what they’ve read. This makes them more successful than the average, which aids in fueling more inspiration.

Now let me get to the point and why I picked this quote.

Everybody is pressed for time. Everybody doesn’t get everything done that they would like. There’s just not enough time in the day. So we need to focus on the most important thing that needs to get done and stay focused on our goals or objectives. Whatever it is you want to call it.

When it comes to training, how much time you can honestly commit to, should dictate what you should be doing to achieve your goals. So lets say your goals are to lower your body fat and build some muscle and you can only commit to exercising three times a week. What would be the best way to spend that time training to achieve this? What would be the biggest return on your investment. This is the question that you need to ask yourself.

Now comes the hard part…getting the answer.

With all the information out there today on exercise, how do you know who to listen to? More than likely, you don’t have the time to research this question to get the answers. So here’s my answer for you.

Outsource it.

That’s right. Get someone who studies exercise for a living to give you the answers.

I can hear you already. “But what trainer should I be listening to? There’s several at my gym where I work out.” Or something like that right?

You must have a good filter. Let me share mine with you.

1. Make sure they have to pay their bills by getting people into shape.
2. Make sure they’ve been doing it for a long time.
3. Make sure they’re still in academia so they continue to learn.
4. Make sure they have real world proof. Basically, look at their clients results and what they have to say about them.

Those are just a few of my criteria before I bother to even listen to someone talk to me about fitness.

So if someone asked me for credibility and used my rules, here’s how I’d stack up:

• I’ve been doing this for over 12 years now for a living. It’s my only job and I pay my bills.

• I get bored easily if I’m not learning (thank God this hasn’t happened to me yet).

• The reason it hasn’t happened is because I continue to dump my wallet back into my education. Last year I handed my accountant over $25,000 in receipts for books, DVDs, CDs, and seminars that I purchased or attended.

• I’m a research freak. I study the best people within my industry (something I’ve learned from successful people is success leaves clues).

• I have research and, more importantly, REAL WORLD proof on the best training to elicit the fastest results when it comes to fat loss, building muscle, and gaining strength (If your goals are training to entertain yourself and not results based, I’m not your guy. I’m a results guy, that’s all I care about).

But just like I said in the beginning of this email, successful people learn and then apply what they’ve learned.

That’s why I love my job. I’m here to put people in the amazing business, and it starts by taking action.

Stay focused,

Chris Grayson

Picking The Best Bang For Your Buck Exercises

Sometimes I guess I take for granted what I know about training and assume people that do train with weights (I don't know much about jogging since I think it sucks) should know more. After all, this is the information age. That's probably a big part of the problem though. To much garbage information out there.

When it comes to weight training, you need to pick the right exercises that are going to give you the biggest return on your investment. It really doesn't matter much if your goals are to build muscle, gain strength, or lose body fat. Take the right tool out of the tool box that will do the best job.

It drives me crazy when I see someone paying a personal trainer and the trainer has them sitting on machines attempting to isolate muscles with pathetic poundage due to poor leverage.

If you want results, and you want them fast, you need to utilize the big, compound exercises that require lots of muscles to perform the exercise.

For example:

Squats over leg extensions

Dips over tricep kickbacks

Barbell curls over concentration curls

Barbell or Dumbbell Bench Press over flyes

I could go on forever.

One thing that makes it easy is think of the amount of weight you can lift in each exercise. Most of the time, the amount of weight you can lift will be greater with the better lift.

Nobody should be married to the gym and if you're spending more than an hour there you're either socializing or need a little help with your training.

Like I mentioned in some older posts, training longer than one hour becomes counter-productive from a hormonal stand point. Cortisol, one of your body's stress hormones is SO elevated and your androgens have already declined to the point of no return.

Get in, hit it hard, and get out and start the recovery process... eating clean food with high nutritional value and get plenty of rest.

Now all we need to discuss is loading parameters. How many sets, reps, and rest to take.

I cover that in the next post.

Stay Focused,

Chris Grayson

http://www.fastresultsfitness.com

Structural Balance: How To Stay Aligned To Avoid Injury And Ugliness

One of the most important facets of program design is keeping your body balanced. Doing so will help prevent injuries, aid in your continuous improvement towards progress in the weight room, and keep you from having horrible posture, and therefore, an ugly, unbalanced body.

One of the simplest ways to go about doing this is to pair up your exercises with ones that are the exact opposite of other ones.

For example. If you're doing a flat barbell bench press, pair that up with a seated row.

You can take it one step further by using the same hand position as you used with the bench press. In this case, that would be a pronated grip. So the palms of your hands would be facing the floor.

Now, to make it easy, we'll use the same repetition range and number of sets as you did with the bench press.

So, if you do four sets of the barbell bench press with 6 to 8 reps, you would match that up on the seated pronated-grip row exactly the same. Four sets of 6 to 8 reps.

I'm keeping this very basic to make it as simple as possible.

If you did a pull up for 5 sets of 4 to 6 reps, you could match this up with the standing overhead barbell press for 5 sets of 4 to 6 reps.

If you did a standing barbell curl for 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps, you could match this up with lying dumbbell tricep extensions for 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps.

Are you starting to see the pattern here?

Most people I see at a regular gym (I say regular because it doesn't happen at my facility since I'm training or at least over looking the training here) or people that ask me questions about training, don't do this. These people typically do one exercise at a time, sit or stand there in between their sets doing nothing, and sometimes don't even bother thinking about the opposite motion or the opposite action of the particular joint/joints being used.

Here's another explain to illustrate what I mean:

• Flat Barbell Bench Press: 3 sets of 10 reps
  
• Rest: usually long enough to have a conversation with someone at their gym or stare for awhile at the other people training. Their rest is never timed, and therefore never measured.
  
• Another set of the flat barbell bench press.
  
• Repeat.
  

After the three sets they have planned, they usually move onto another chest exercise because that's what the body building magazine or one of their buddies told them to do.

Soon they start having the posture of a eighty year old woman with osteoporosis accompanied with shoulder pain whenever they bench press.

Why?

Because of poor structural balance between pushing and pulling muscles and the joints involved.

That's the quick and easy readers digest version.

Keep striving for improvement,

Chris Grayson

Overcoming Your Fear Or At Least Failing Forward

Nothing will always come easy to you. But just because of this, don't be afraid to fail. Just like anything else, the simple act of doing IT, even if you flat out suck at IT, will make you better at IT. 

It doesn't really matter what IT is.

John C. Maxwell, an amazing author and life coach, refers to this as failing forward.

This Video motivates the hell out of me and shows that even the best in the world have to fail forward.

What separates them from the rest of us is that they aren't afraid of the forward.

Are You Short On Time: Full Body Workouts Is Your Warranty

Don't let the title of this post deceive you. If you have all the time in the world to train, full body workouts might still be the best way for you to train.

One big mistake I see people making when it comes to working out, is splitting up their body parts and training like your typical body builder does. What works for a genetic lottery ticket winner on steroids won't work for the regular guy, with a real job, and who's not a walking pharmaceutical billboard.

When I first started training with weights, I also made this mistake. This was back when I was 13 years old. Long before the internet. The only resources I had then were, unfortunately, body building magazines.

Although they did motivate me to train my ass off (I wanted to be a mass monster back then), I made modest gains at best. I can recall being at the gym for over three hours doing every exercise I imaginable for one or two muscle groups. A workout back then looked something like this:

Leg Day:
4 sets of Squats
4 sets of Hack Squats
4 sets of Leg Presses
4 sets of Leg Extensions
4 sets of Lying Leg Curls
4 sets of Calves

This was performed after training shoulders the exact same way.

I could write a small book on why this is ridiculous but I'll save you the time by giving you just two reasons.

Cortisol and Recovery.

Training any longer than an hour is a waste of your time from a hormonal perspective. Cortisol, a stress hormone, gets elevated as you train (exercise is stress). So you want your workouts to be brief and intense. Get in and get out and start the recovery process.

Training the way I did in the above example, would take to long to recover, thus keeping you from making big gains. You'd be forced to rest those muscles to long, so they would start to atrophy or shrink. One step forward, one step backward = getting nowhere.

Full body workouts lasting no longer than an hour will keep the volume down, allowing you to recover faster so you can train again. Even though you're probably doing a lot less volume than you're used to; don't worry. By the end of the week the volume will be about the same.

Since we learn better by application, let me give you an example.

You train your legs every monday and you do 12 total sets for them.

You switch to full body workouts and pick one exercise for legs that gives you the biggest bang for your buck, and do four sets. You do this on monday, wednesday, and friday.

By the end of the week, you performed 12 total sets for legs. The same as doing all 12 sets in one day.

The difference is you don't destroy your legs from doing all the sets on just one day, they recover easily, allowing you to train them more often. They get bigger and stronger because of the law of repeated efforts. Just like learning a foreign language would require more exposure, so will getting bigger and stronger.

Here's the workout I did yesterday with my good friend Ben.

A1: Back Squats: 4 sets of 6 reps with a two-second pause in the bottom position (disadvantageous position)
A2: Dips: 4 sets of 6 reps with a three second eccentric
A3: Neutral Grip Pull-Ups: 4 sets of 6 reps with a 25 lb. weight vest on.

B: Prowler Push; Low End: 3 sets of 20 yards.

So the A's were performed in a circuit fashion, hence the numbers after the A. We rested the amount of time it took for each of us to do each set, which was roughly 30 seconds.



This took probably 40 minutes tops.

Stick To The Basics

“Creativity is over-rated. Most business success comes from doing boring, diligent work. From developing a system that produces consistent results and sticking to it.”

Ray Croc - Founder of McDonalds

Perhaps you’re wondering what this has to do with exercise, working out, training, or whatever it is that you call it. If you do it for a living like I do, it means everything.

I train a lot of athletes, especially young ones. Ranging anywhere from 10 years old all the up to the professional level. I often have parents say to me something like this, “We’ll have little Johnny try it out and see if he likes it.” I then explain to them that little Johnny might not like it…BUT DO YOU WANT HIM TO BECOME FASTER, STRONGER, AND BIGGER FOR HIS SPORT? That is the question they should be asking, not if he’ll like it.

I’m not in the entertainment business. If I was here for that I’d put on a clown suit and run around squirting water out of a flower on you or your kids. Maybe even kick you in the balls with an over-sized clown shoe (hey, I’d find it funny). I’m here to produce results in the fastest, yet safest way possible. I do this by picking the correct loading parameters, exercises, rest intervals, and frequency and it more often than not, involves your basic, complex exercises. These almost always produce the most bang for your buck. I say always because there’s always exceptions.

The majority of people I see training in gyms or talk to about training, confuse trendy with cutting edge. Perhaps they’re more entertained and have more fun balancing on a bosu ball or doing a bunch of unstable exercises thinking that it’s more “functional”. If you are just trying to have fun and this floats your boat, I ain’t mad at ya. But if you actually want results from your training, you’re wasting your time.

Here’s a few quick tips on how to design an effective results-based workout.

1. If you’re exercising with weights 3 times a week or less, do full body workouts.

2. Balance your body by training both sides of your joints.

3. Pick the exercises that are going to give you the biggest ROI (Return On Investment)

4. Choose the right loading parameters based off your goals.

5. Pick the correct rest intervals based off your goals.

6. Measure your workouts effectiveness by writing down what you do (keep a training log).

7. Make sure your workouts are progressive.

8. Stay laser focused on your goals.

One of my clients, and close friend, got caught up in training with all the fancy equipment at his gym. He started training with me and all I did was return him to the basics. The exercises that produce results. Here's what he had to say:

Before training with Chris:

250 lb bench press
305 lb dead lift
6 body weight pull-ups
305 lb squat
18% body fat

After training with Chris for four months:

285 lb bench press
425 lb dead lift
8 pull-ups with body weight plus 30 lbs hanging from me
360 lb squat
12% body fat

Enough said!”

Ryan Serge - Film Productions Assistant Manager


In the next post, I’ll go into detail on all 8 tips.

In the meantime, stay focused

Chris Grayson