The Perfect Day Wrap Up

Click to be taken to your perfect week intro, your perfect morning, your perfect afternoon and your perfect evening.

Congratulations!

You've hopefully just put together the perfect day. 

It's not easy doing this for even one day and a lot of you might not have completed it 100%, but try as hard as you can to get as close to the perfect day, as you can. 

Give yourself the best chance to succeed.

Now there's an even bigger challenge ahead that you are now prepared for - the perfect weekend!

I have found that people tend to "behave' more during the week as they have a sense of routine with work but with the weekend it shifts dramatically to an "anything goes" approach. 

Think of it this way:

There's 168 hours in a week.

Sunday night at 10pm to Friday evening at 6pm accounts for 114 of those hours.

That means the weekend fills the other 54 hours which can easily undo your perfect 114 hours from earlier in the week.

Here are some rules to cover while you're "on your own":

1. If you're heading out for Friday night drinks then get some training in at lunchtime and make sure to have dinner. Don't be the talk of the office around the water cooler come Monday!
2. Make sure to train over the weekend sometime with Saturday morning being a great option if you went straight home Friday after work. If you had a few drinks then do something mid-afternoon Saturday, especially if you're catching up with friends again Saturday night
3. As much as you can, continue eating your prepared meals from earlier in the week so when you go out for dinner, you can anything you like - guilt free.
4. Remember you'll probably need to cook up another batch of food for the week on Sunday so make time to head to the supermarket and cook up another storm.

So there it is, the perfect week.

I can guarantee that if you follow this to the tee then you can see dramatic results in how you look, and how you feel, in no time.

Perfect Practice + Consistency = Perfectness!!

I hope you enjoyed "The Perfect Day" series and next week we'll look at how you can optimise your training sessions through strength, aerobic and mobility/flexibility training.

Have a great weekend and we'll catch up Monday morning.

YOUR PERFECT EVENING

Click to be taken to your perfect week intro, your perfect morning and your perfect afternoon.

OK so after the last few days we covered the preparation stage, the perfect morning, the perfect afternoon and the perfect training session.

Last on our list is the perfect evening.

This can be where a lot of people come undone, but not you. 

Not today.

You've completed a perfect day so far so why come all this way and let it all go to waste now?

Another long day comes to an end and it's time for a little ME time.

1. You get home and you're pretty happy with your day but now it gets even easier because you've already cooked up your dinner options for the week so pop one of them in the oven or microwave and heat it up.
2. While you wait for dinner, have a shower.
3. Turn on the TV or the computer and have some "me" time. Even better catch up on some reading you've been meaning to do for a while!
4. You can have some "screen time' for a little while but as soon as you're done with TV or the laptop device, turn it off and be done with it - screen time close to bed can affect your sleep a lot more then you think!
5. The clock ticks on 10:00pm and it's time to prepare for bed.
6. Turn off all appliances
7. Put on some soothing music and go through a simple 10 minute stretching routine easing into each stretch and performing 5 belly breathes for each one. Breathe in deeply through the nose and exhaling fully out the mouth
8. Set your alarm for an early get up and repeat!!

A this point you should have no problems falling off to sleep. Our body has been trained, as well as our mind, and we've completed that we had planned to for the day. The stretching routine has put your mind at ease as well as putting our body in a parasympathetic state, with a decrease in blood pressure and heart rate, putting in peak sleep mode.

Tomorrow we'll wrap it all up!

YOUR PERFECT AFTERNOON

So far this week we've covered the introduction to the perfect week and also your perfect morning - check them out straight after this if you haven't already!

Yesterday you completed the perfect morning and you'll want to maintain that for today, as well as for the rest of the week.

Let's build on that now with a guide to perfecting your afternoon:

1. DING, DING, DING! It's 1:00pm - grab your lunch and get out of there! Regardless of how long lunch is, take it outside. Before you start eating lie on the grass and take 10 big breathes, making sure to inhale through nose and exhaling out the mouth. Aim to fill your belly up with air, avoid rising up through your chest and shoulders, and actually blow the air our of your lungs through semi pursed lips over 3 - 5secs. Now you're in a relaxed state which will allow you to actually enjoy lunch, even if it is a shorter version today.
2. While you're having lunch punch in yet another reminder in your phone for 3:30pm with another "get up and move around the office" note, and get into the 2nd half of your pre-prepared snack.
3. Refill your water bottle and aim to consume it by the days end! Keep it front of you which will encourage you to drink from it more often without even thinking about it.
4. It's 5:20pm, time to get outta there! Buy now you should have easily made your way through 2 refills of your water bottle.
5. I'll be seeing you at Level 1 / 308 Toorak Road for some good old fashioned personal training to unwind and de-stress from the work day.

The Perfect Training Session

Let's discuss quickly what a perfect training session should include. Training is great for de-stressing after work and it also provide the body with a physical challenge for the day. You're probably a little drained mentally from the workday which is why a personal trainer can be a great idea as you don't have to do any of the thinking, just the doing!

A perfect training session will register about a 8 or 9 out of 10 on the effort scale. For every 15 minutes you train, you want to hit a stage where you literally need to stop and catch your breath for about 10 - 20 seconds. Do not confuse this with feeling a little uncomfortable, you physically need to be out of breathe. You can go to a full 10 out of 10 but make sure you can get up for work in the morning!

You want a mix of mobility, stability, strength and endurance in your workouts. We're not professional athletes here, but we do need to cover the essentials because it's those training 'gaps' you have that will either result in injury or a quick training plateau.

I can set this up for you no worries which you'll find out with your complimentary session (call 0411 091 978!)

Tomorrow we'll run through finishing your day up with a perfectly planned evening.

YOUR PERFECT MORNING

OK, so you've been to the supermarket and cooked up a storm like you're on Master chef. 

Your training clothes have been neatly folded and are ready for training this week and your BFF is on-board too.

Achieving just 1 perfect day is going to take a lot of work so to not overwhelm you, we'll break it up a little.

Today we'll go through the perfect morning.

There's a big chance that if you don't start the day well then it will be extremely difficult to catch up and end the day on a good note.

Being prepared means you're controlling everything that you can control, so anything that comes out of right field will hopefully have only a minimum amount of impact.

1. Make sure you're lights are off a full 7 - 8 hours before your alarm is due to go off in the morning.

2. Physically rise on your 1st alarm.

3. Head straight to the kitchen and make yourself a glass of lemon and hot water which aids in digestion, system cleansing, immunity, the balancing of pH levels, skin health and a heap other stuff!

4. Put your training gear on (look good - feel good, remember!) and head out for a 20 - 30 minute walk without any headphones in, taking in the sounds and smells of a summer's early morning. Your emails can wait a little longer to respond to!

5. Cook yourself an omelet filled with veggies and a drink of your choice - yep I'll even let you have a coffee but make it a good one, because it's water from here out for the rest of the day!

6. Get ready for work and don't forget to pack your pre-prepared snacks and lunch.

7. Check your emails on your commute to work.

8. While you're there set your alarm for 10:30am with a 'get up and do a lap of the office' reminder.

9. Once at work, get yourself set up with your aluminium drink bottle and put your food in the office fridge or your desk draws.

10. DING, DING, DING! It's 10:30am - get up and do a lap or 2 of the office. Get stuck into the first half of your snack option for today.

11. When you get back to your desk, set your alarm for lunch at 1:00pm with a "get out of the office for some fresh air reminder".

What a morning - I bet you haven't even felt a hint of fatigue yet, even with the hustle and bustle of work!

I'll be back tomorrow with your perfect afternoon!

THE PERFECT DAY

These days life is a fast paced, little rest type of affair where we often don't even have tome to reflect on what we accomplished from fay to day, let alone have some time out to do something positive for ourselves.

This week I will try and lay what a perfect week might look like.

Now I'm under no illusions that completing a near perfect anything is bloody hard, if not impossible, but it will at least give you an insight into what to aim for and it also gives you something to try and get as close as you can to.

If you can only get part of the way through the perfect day, or can only completes parts of it at various times then that's fine - that's simply your starting point.

Your aim then is to not drop below your starting point and then to try and build on it over time.

This week there will be 5 posts (including tomorrow):

Monday - Prep Day (today's post)

Tuesday - Your Perfect Morning

Wednesday - Your Perfect Afternoon

Thursday - Your Perfect Evening

Friday - Perfect Week Wrap Up

So onto Prep Day.

I'm not a motivation slogan type of guy but one of my favorite saying sis "failing to prepare is preparing to fail."

This post is pretty much that.

To achieve perfection is anything you need to prep your mind, your body and your life to do so.

So before embarking this series of perfection you'll need to do the following:

NUTRITION

Go shopping for easy to prepare meals if you're not a master chef so you can get home from work and you just have to cook or heat it up and not have to get some takeaway on the way home. 

TRAINING

Schedule in 2 - 3 training sessions for this week. Whether it's personal training (I know a guy...), group classes, actual use of your gym membership or whatever, schedule it in and do it - no excuses.

SUPPORT/ACCOUNTABILITY

Get yourself a buddy to do this with which should be an easy sell as you'll have everything worked out and they just need to follow you - it's a simple 7 day commitment. Sit down and develop your calendars together as you'll need each other to complete this week and achieving perfection ids always better with someone else then on your own.

THE LITTLE THINGS COUNT

Get your gym stuff from out of the back of the cupboard. Check if your gym shoes are ready to go. Get that half eaten apple out of your gym bag. What exercises are you going to do when you train? Don't leave anything to chance - prepare the aspects that seem insignificant because 50 insignificant things can instill make a huge change in anything or anyone.

Tomorrow we'll kick off with the perfect morning.

Pain Science Week

Over at the FCF Facebook page I've ran a little pain science dealio that actually started last week but as I completely forgot about Easter, I did half last week and half this week.

Each day I put up a short post with 1 - 2 real fine points in regards to pain science.

If you;ve had pain, or have chronic pain then this is exactly the stuff you need to hear as the current pain treatment model of physio', chiro's etc has little evidence to suggests it does anything for pain, especially once you actually know how pain works.

Here they all are in a nice little blog post for you.

* Pain is normal, personal and always real.

All pain experiences are normal and are an excellent, though unpleasant response, to what your brain judges to be a threatening situation.

* There are danger sensors not pain sensors.

The danger alarm system is just that – there are no pain sensors, pathways or endings.

* Pain and tissue damage is rare

Pain is an unreliable indicator of the presence, or extent, of tissue damage, and either can exist without the other.

* Pain depends on the balance of danger and safety

You will have pain when your brain concludes that there is more credible evidence of danger than there is safety relating to your body, and thus infers the need to protect.

* Pain involves distributed brain activity

there is no single pain center in the brain as pain is a conscious experience that necessarily involves many brain areas across time.

* Pain relies on context

Pain can be influenced by the things you see, hear, smell, taste and touch, the things you, think, believe, do, places you go, people in your life and things happening in your body.

* Pain is 1 of many protective outputs

When threatened, the body is capable of activating multiple protective systems including immune, endocrine, motor, autonomic, respiratory, cognitive and emotional pain, and any of these systems can become overprotective.

* We are bioplastic

While all protective systems can become turned up and edgy, the notion of bioplasticity suggests that they can change back through your lifespan.

* Learning about pain can help the individual and society

Learning about pain is therapy in itself and when you understand why you hurt, you actually hurt less.

* Active treatment strategies promote recovery

Once you understand pain you can begin to make plans, explore different ways to move, improve your fitness, eat better, sleep better and gradually do more.

Let me know your thoughts over at the Facebook page.

Lack of Exercise is More Deadly then Obesity (article)

The title really says it all here folks.

A study of 334,000 men and women, a huge sample size, showed that twice as many deaths were contributed to physical inactivity then obesity.

The study concluded tat to be classed as active, you simply need some form of activity that will burn about 100 calories - the equivalent of a brisk 20min walk.

The results now show that public health campaigns which have traditionally focused on reducing obesity should now look at promoting a modest amount of exercise.

Remember Norm from above?

Well as it turns out we were on the right track in the first place!

In addition to preserving physical integrity, exercise also keeps your mind sharp and has been found to be one of the best ways to preserve your brain as you get older.

You're only as old as you feel!

OK too many puns but the idea is to find something that works for you right now.

If that's walking then walk.

If that's competitive sport, then join a club.

The specifics of the activity are irrelevant, it's the activity that matters the most.

If training under guidance is your thing then let me know if I can help.