‘Tis the season for holiday parties, family get-togethers and, of course, gift giving. This year, why not give the gift of health and fitness? Trust me, no one will want to return any of these great gift ideas and you won’t have to beat the crowds at your local big-box retailer:

Holiday Gift Ideas

Cooking lessons:  What? Cooking lessons?  Yes, of course.  Look for a healthy cooking class, one that teaches you how to make delicious, nutritious, well-balanced meals without added fats, salt, sugar or bad carbs.  Delight your friends and family with great tasting, healthy meals. This is a gift that lasts a lifetime.

Resistance bands:  No more reason to find excuses not to workout while traveling. During the holiday season, it’s always a challenge to get your workouts in.  Aside from taking a long walk before or after a big holiday meal, do yourself or someone else a favor and buy a set of portable, packable resistance bands for a challenging workout on the road.  Buy them above – You’ll thank me later.

TRX fitness system: this is a bodyweight suspension exercise system that you can use to train your whole body pretty much anywhere.  If you’ve got a doorway or a tree nearby, you’ve got a full body gym system ready to go!  Click the image above to buy.

Personal journals:  You’ve heard me tell you how important it is to keep a nutrition and workout journal. Yes, there are apps for that. But nothing beats tracking your progress in a beautifully bound journal. Add pictures of yourself. Write down your goals.  Write down your rewards and keep track of this important stage of your life.  When you feel you’re slipping off track, go back to your journal and review all of the progress you’ve made and get back on the road to optimal health and fitness.

Personal training sessions

You know you want them.  So do your friends and family.  What better way to start the new year and stay on track with your goals than working with a personal trainer to meet your health and fitness goals.  Call or contact me today to set up a personal training program.  Working out and transforming your body is the gift that lasts a lifetime. 

I’m offering gift certificates too – get someone you love the gift of health and fitness!  One, a few, or whole training packages!

Happy holidays!

Joe

Your personal trainer

Beginning your personal training program with the right mindset is absolutely essential to your ultimate success in your fitness endeavor. I will make a declaration here and now; you must be prepared mentally to go much further in time and effort than people believe in our world of instantaneous gratification.  Most training clients come to the personal trainer in their thirties and forties, drastically out of shape, radically underestimating the intensity and commitment level it takes to achieve visible and noticeable physical changes. In my competitive days as a bodybuilder, I had to diet perfectly with no breaks in discipline, for months to achieve my goal condition. I many times lost forty to fifty pounds in my preparation as a male in my twenties. It took monumental commitment. I vowed to myself I was going to achieve my goals (win) or die trying. This level of commitment, which I call a do or die commitment is utterly necessary for any middle-aged person to lose a major amount of weight…. let us say for example fifty pounds. Cardio twice a day six days a week for forty five minutes, no cop outs, no excuses. A consistent, rigid diet on controlled calories day in a day out for months.

When You Know

When the trainee has become utterly sick of themselves in their miserable overweight condition, this is when they finally develop the mind set for victory. Now the trainee needs to dedicate themselves to self-denial at a heroic level, for no compromise with the diet can be allowed. No breaks, no off days. Discipline must be utterly unrelenting, always having one eye on the prize which is a new fit and healthy self-identity. Getting optimally fit from being overweight is not easy. Follow the advice you read in this article as if it were the gospel, and you will succeed….. Nothing good comes without utter, unrelenting commitment.

How To Start

Now I will move on to some practical tips. Many will not want to hear what I am going to advise next. Set your daily calorie intake, or better yet let a quality fitness professional set your caloric intake goals. Keep your diet utterly consistent, yes I mean keep it the same every day. Only then will you know exactly what you are taking in. Don’t bitch about it being boring….this article is not written to entertain you, it is to teach you way to program success.Take vitamins and minerals, in a balanced way covering all the bases. Nutritional deficiencies can crop up when on a calorie reduced diet, some mineral combinations can significantly improve performance, but I will elaborate on that in another article. I cannot stress enough how important proper diet is, it is 75% of the game. I am always preaching to my clients the two secrets of my rapid fat loss program…. daily cardio, and rigid caloric control. Any trainer worth his salt will write his client’s diets himself, unless they have medical conditions which dictate special dietary requirements. Dedicate yourself to utterly consistent eating, it may not be exciting, but it will be monumentally effective! In this process we will put to death the scourges of self indulgence, and gluttony which takes away the health and happiness of so many in America. Say to yourself: “I am resolved to do this or die trying.” Do this and truly mean it, and nothing will be able to stop you from achieving your goal and feeling great while doing it!

Now’s the Hard Part

Ok, you have signed up on your program, now I will share with you what character trait you most surely must apply now for success, for the first three weeks you must cultivate total and complete mental commitment. If you establish your program properly from a psychological standpoint properly at the beginning you will be able to radically transform your body beyond your wildest dreams.

Your Training Program Will Be Hard

Uncompromising disposition, what do I mean by this, no alcohol, no carbs, no skipping workouts or cardio sessions. No giving in to your softer inclinations. Do you finally want to achieve transformation? No compromise. Did George Washington compromise with the British during our nation’s Revolution? No!!!   Incredible adversities were suffered by our armies in the quest for victory.

You too will encounter adversity on this program . The first three weeks is when you must establish victory by never compromising with yourself, do you want to look and feel your best. Follow the program like clockwork without compromise.  The first three weeks you will be sore as hell, your mind is a weapon, endure hardship, take joy in knowing soreness is a sign your muscles are getting fitter every minute,  after the first three weeks the soreness will dissipate because your conditioning level will rise exponentially. Hunger pangs are to be meditated on with joy because when you are hungry you can be assured you are losing fat at a rate faster than you can believe.

Your soft side must be crushed, our mindset on the training program must be that of a revolutionary fighting a tyrant. The soft hedonistic mindset is the enemy, every time you even have the idea to cheat on the diet you are commanded right here and now to get on the treadmill, or walk outside at an uncomfortably fast clip for an hour.

We are going to attack the fundamental problem: a soft compromising mindset. Victory or defeat is found totally in one’s mental approach, we will give the body the exact opposite of what it desire, we are going to crush soft thinking right at the outset. Every time you even think of skipping a workout you are to do an hour of cardio.

Your Training Program Will Be Rewarding

I have repeatedly used this psychological technique I call the principle of opposite to bring myself to competitive victory in my bodybuilding days, we establish a revolutionary, uncompromising mindset from the beginning, victory will be assured, this mental approach can help you in all spheres of life, not just the physical. Now let us proceed to the inevitable victory which is your destiny from now on, in every sphere of life you chose to apply a revolutionary mindset.

If you want your fitness endeavor to be successful the following virtues must be practiced:

1.) Desire

2.) Commitment

3.) Goal orientedness

4.) Intensity

5.) Persistence and Perseverance.

Virtues For Success

Desire is the underlying force which has impelled you to seek change. It is a powerful thing when a person who has long desired to change their body, finally becomes so fed up, that in their their mind there is no alternative but to begin taking the steps to create change. In short, a person has to want to change, and to truly create radical physical change takes total commitment.

Commitment is a dirty word to many in our culture today, but with respect to creating physical change total commitment is necessary. What is total commitment; it is being willing to do whatever it takes to achieve your goal, no matter what. Re-creating your body necessitates a 24/7 commitment. Your food intake must be strictly regulated every meal and snack, every day. You cannot miss workouts just because you are not feeling one hundred percent that day. You cannot miss workouts because you had a bad day or your boss or your spouse is angry with you. Success necessitates that a person overcomes all adversity and sticks to the workout program and eating plan no matter what, without any excuses.

Goal orientedness is having, at the very least, a mental picture of how you want the outcome of your training to be. I strongly advise each and every client of mine to obtain a picture which represents how they want to look. I require that it be a person of similar physical structure who has optimized their physical condition. Constantly meditating on that image keeps a goal visually present and helps immeasurably in fueling the desire to go on to total success

Intensity, if you want to get results from your training, you must train with sufficient intensity. What does this mean? It means pitty-pat workouts will not do the job. I, as a personal trainer have seen people who are wasting time in the gym with low intensity workouts. They go through workouts which do not create results for months, even years, but results will never come unless they put in the sweat and elbow grease it takes to reshape a body. Proper intensity is training as hard as you are capable during the entire length of the workout. Workouts without a burn will not create significant change. In my opinion, if you feel no need to grunt and groan at all in your workouts, you are training without sufficient intensity. Sweating is good thing, it is the body’s response to vigorous exercise. No sweat in this trainer’s book equals insufficient intensity.

Persistence and perseverance. Do you want to succeed? Dogged determination to create results must be practiced for a successful training program. What is persistence? It is doing what needs to be done to create physical change each and every scheduled training day without exception. Intense weight training sessions done as scheduled without calling off and never missing your cardio sessions, this will create change Perseverance is gutting it out, sticking to the program even when your mind tells you that you are wasting your time. There will be times when you think that you are not changing quickly enough and it is at these times that you will be tempted to throw in the towel and quit. Perseverance is what causes a person to stay the course, do what needs to be done for a long enough time to attain desirable results.

Fort Lauderdale Personal Trainer Joe Kozma is a master trainer who has been practicing for over twenty years. Joe is a former national bodybuilding champion and college football player. Joe’s fitness and weight loss service provides body makeovers, body sculpting, strength gain, and more. See his clients at his fitness website.

Fort Lauderdale Personal Trainer

Whether you are walking to lose weight or strength training to build lean muscle, muscle cramps end up getting the best of us. A muscle cramp is an involuntary contraction of the muscle which can cause quite a bit of pain to those unprepared. Serious muscle cramps can only be treated by stretching and massaging the leg, but a mild cramp will usually wear off in less than a minute. In most cases muscle cramps occur in a person’s legs or feet. Although the exact cause of muscle cramps is unknown, there are still plenty of ways you can help prevent it from happening to you.

The number one muscle cramp prevention technique would be to warm up before working out or running. Be sure to target the most common areas where muscle cramps occur, those being the legs, feet, abdomen, hamstrings, calves, quadriceps, arms, and the muscle groups you are working on that session. Warming up and cooling down will keep the muscles warm and flexible which is believed to aid in the reduction of an involuntary contraction.

Muscle fatigue can also cause cramps. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t push past your limits, but it does mean you should be weary not to over train and make sure you have proper form when performing an exercise. Over training is usually the result of people skipping out on their rest days in order to get ahead, but unbeknownst to them rest days are the period that the body best builds muscle. Improper form is often caused by those attempting to finish an exercise as faster than normal. Unfortunately this is also counterproductive, so be sure to pay close attention to the motions of an exercise and work out slowly.

Dehydration and electrolyte imbalances are also suspects of inducing cramps. In most cases water is enough to re-hydrate your muscles and prevent possible cramping; however it would be wise to drink a sports drink filled with electrolytes after an intensive workout. Electrolytes are responsible for aiding in the function of our cells and an imbalance is usually caused by a lack of sodium, calcium, or potassium.

Consulting with someone who specializes in fitness and muscle cramps may be a wiser choice to make rather than guessing and testing different ways to prevent the cramps yourself. A personal trainer is the type of person you will need to look up. Be sure to do your research in order to find the best personal trainer in Fort Lauderdale. You will find that a trainer will not only prevent and stop muscle cramps, but will also help you reach your fitness goal whether it is to gain muscle or lose weight.

Here now my advice on nutrition for the success of your program with a top quality personal trainer. You client, absolutely must take in enough calories to keep your blood sugar levels even, so that low blood sugar levels do not cause reactionary hunger levels which create a virtually unstoppable hunger of which all binges have their beginning. Hear me again, if blood sugar levels are not controlled by regular protein based meals, you will binge and you will destroy all the work you are doing in the gym. Call Josef Kozma at 954-245-7896, He will for the paltry price of $199.00 write you a diet, completely unique to you, that will enable you to totally control your hunger, and then successfully enable you to lose weight and fat with ease.

Josef Kozma

Fort Lauderdale personal training