Your Health vs Your Career

This is an article I was excited to read by an Entrepreneur named Joshua Steimle.

He opened up with this line:

If exercise stops then everything else will start falling apart

There's a prevalent attitude among not only entrepreneur's but society in general, that work comes first.

It trumps, family, friends and especially health.

If you are in a management type role at work, then you are in charge of a set of team members that rely on you to make sure their paychecks come on time, the benefits are there for their families and that obstacles are removed so that they can get their work done.

This adds up to a lot of tasks and a lot of pressure, which can only performed if you are up to it physically and mentally yourself.

The author states that even though he has about 50 things to do an any given day, and can only get through about 10 of them, he still makes time, SCHEDULES TIME, to make sure he gets 10 hours per week to focus on physical exercise.

He even prioritises them over his work activities and if there is a client meeting but he needs to get a run in, then he does the run and re-schedules the client meeting.

He says that his business can survive the consequences of rescheduling a meeting, even if it means losing that client, but if he stops working out then he might stop working our permanently.

When physical activity drops, so does work performance.

Motivation can waiver for all things and the onset of depression can set in (seriously).

You first need to identify area's of your life that you can control and one of those is YOUR HEALTH and thus, your level of exercise.

Being fit and healthy lifts up all other area's of your life, including your work.

I have a very similar way of thinking with my own training.

I train 6 days per week and there are days when I really can't be stuffed training but I have to, or I'll suffer the fate of what he suggests above.

I have a disable wife who cannot work, a 6yr old son and a small business constantly on the edge - if I don't stay at the top of my game physically and mentally, then it all falls apart very quickly for us.

Instead of thinking of your career as your top priority and that if you're not gunning 110% all the time then you're not doing enough, try taking a step back.

What permits you to give that 110% in the first place? Long work hours? Little Sleep? High Stress?

It's your physical and mental well-being.  

He goes on to say that if life is made up 10 priorities, then it's not as simple as saying that if you move career from #2 to #1, that your career is going to benefit. But if you bump exercise from #10 to #1 then YOU will, and thus career and everything else does as well.

Do you want to bump exercise up your priority list? Head here for our January special that has 2 weeks to go!

3 Steps for Creating New Habits

Everything we do is from habit.

Everything we don't do is from lack of habit.

You want to change something in your life?

Simple...

Change your habits, or make a new one.

This weeks article looks at a bunch of Stanford University psychologist's and how have narrowed habit forming down to 3 tiny steps.

If you hate the monotony of running on a treadmill but you continually make yourself do it, then you're setting up yourself up to fail.

In actual fact, it can make reaching that goal even harder then not doing anything at all!

For lifelong habits, look to make small but consistent wins, to gain confidence from each success which is derived from designing behavioral changes that are easy to do, and implement into your everyday activities.

Aim for automaticity.

One simply needs to look at social platforms and how they get us to use their products without thought, through they're constant testing.

One of the Stanford researchers, B.J Fogg, has developed the,  wait for it - Fogg Method, which is comprised of 3 key steps:

STEP #1 - Identify Your Desired Outcome
 - do you want to feel less stressed at work?
 - do you want to lose 10% of your body weight?

STEP #2 - Identify the Easy-Win Behaviors
 - tiny habits that put you on the path to your goal
 - be aware that the method for say, reducing stress, might not be the behavior that will work for you e.g jogging with your dog might sound far more achievable then that high intensity spin class after work

STEP #3 - Find a Current Habit and Graft a New Habit Onto It
- putting an apple next to the coffee machine

Fogg also has a Tiny Habits program for free that can help out immensely with habit forming.

One insignificant action could result in more insignificant actions which can then result in significant actions. For example your goal might be to simply put on your sneakers when you put the dishwasher on, and and one day you'll start walking because hey, I just put my shoes on so I might as well do something with them!

SPECIAL STEP #4 - Give Yourself a Pat on the Back
- you re-writing your identity as someone who succeeds over and over again

The ripple effect is that thanks to small victories, you can break down other barriers in your life.

In the studio I set my programs up for you to succeed 95% of the time. I want to breed that type of confidence in you that you can do something you haven't done before, such as a load you've never thought you could lift, or an exercise that looked too hard the first time you saw it.

I set my own training up like that as well.

If you want to make actual strides in 2017 then give the tiny habits program above a try - the 5mins out of your day could turn your life around by 2018!

Just quickly, we have a promo for January - pay once, and train for the rest of the month! So you pay for you initial small group personal training session ($43) then train as much as you like for the rest of the month.

You want health and fitness habit forming? I'm giving it to you right now!

Call 0411 091 978 or email troyfullcirclefitness@gmail.com to get stared today.

6 FREE WORKOUTS FOR YOU TO DO OVER XMAS!

Back in days of yore in I think my 2nd attempt to get this blog up and running I did a series of free workouts.

They were designed to be completed at home with no equipment as well as being extremely time efficient.

This makes them perfect for the holiday break!!

Below are links to each workout that you are free to use before you finally come to realisation that nothing compares to the real stuff and you decide to make health and fitness a priority for 2017.

In the meantime get started with these simple workouts;

Workout #1 - http://fcfpt.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/free-home-workout.html

Workout #2 - http://fcfpt.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/here-it-is-free-home-workout-2.html

Woekout #3 - http://fcfpt.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/full-circle-fitness-home-workout-3.html

Workout #4 - http://fcfpt.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/full-circle-fitness-hoe-workout-4.html

Workout #5 - http://fcfpt.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/full-circle-fitness-home-workout-5.html

Workout #6 - http://fcfpt.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/full-circle-fitness-home-workout-6.html

No excuses in 2017!!

12 Tips to Tune Your Nervous System (article)

As you have probably gathered from my previous posts, I'm all for fine tuning your nervous system and this article from Anthony Mychal gives 12 tips to do this.

It's written from a physical performance output point of view but it holds true whether you're main focus is competitive sport, casual training or even just to perform at work at the highest level you can.

Some of these I've touched on before in various details and some I haven't so please give the original article read here but my biggest takeaways are:

- Enhancing performance is about balancing stress and recovery.

- The autonomic nervous system has 2 main branches with the sympathetic division which "excites"  (fight or flight response) and the parasympathetic that "inhibits" (rest and digest).

- You need to know when to excite and when to inhibit but most people stay "on' even when you don't need to be so you're going to run out of gas even though you're not physically expending any energy.

- Understanding the balance between the 2 sub-systems is is critical for optimal function

- A bad day energy wise is fine, it's simply you're body telling you "I'm just not up to it today and I can't really handle much stress today' so you HAVE to adjust what you'll spend your spoons on at work, at home and at play.

- A big event, physical or mental, requires big recovery so whether you have a huge presentation you just finished or a triathlon competition run on the weekend, make sure you plug in some recovery to get you back to a parasympathetic state.

- Don't hop from diet to diet, training program to training program and try and get a routine of some form. Every decision we make induces some form of stress and without a routine, even deciding what shoe to put on first creates minute stress. I am full of routines for the most part making decision making as little part of my life as I can. My morning ritual is fully ingrained in my brain because when the alarm goes off at 5:10am every bloody morning, the last thing I want to do is make 10 decisions before I even get to work!

- The easier you can kick your parasympathetic nervous system in and relax, the better you'll recover from any stress event meaning you can perform them more frequently. Yes you can induce high levels of stress which is how we adapt to workload but you need to be able to handle that stress and get rid of as well to get the balance mentioned above. Turning off is just as important as turning yourself on. If you need to turn on semi-regularly for sport or work then you if you stay turned on then you don't have another level to go to, and stress overtakes the body and you get sore, tired and sick. You HAVE to learn ways to disengage from reality and taking work and emails home with you isn't the way to do it. You hear of athletes sitting at home playing video games and gambling - this is what they're doing, just not in the best way they could be! I watch Friends and eat.

- Being able to nap is a GOOD thing and there's no medals for who can get up the earliest, do the most work, and stay up the latest. If you're struggling to sleep then you're in for a host of issues, GUARANTEED! I'd nap 2 - 3 times a week during the day and I want to nap right now before a school pick up but I gotta get this done!

- Train hard, recover harder! High intensity activities are great to do but again you need to make sure you are recovering even harder so that can manage the fatigue from them throughout the other parts of your life (work, family etc). Doing more bootcamps and group classes, both that have a ridiculously high emphasise of building fatigue (and not much else), is not the best idea.

- Reconsider your schedule and try and pace high stress events as evenly as you possibly can taking into account work, family and other outside interests. Trying to squeeze your weekly training into 2 days might not be a great idea with a 20 hour plane trip the next day!

- Celebrate special occasions especially after times of high stress as this can actually provide you some "closure" or a 'brain dump" of sorts that can 'officially" end the event and you can move forward rather then talking about it for weeks after it, what could I have done better etc. It's done - move on.

- Don't change all the time as new stimulus provides new stresser and when a stresser is new, it induces far more stress then after you've done it 5 times. Remember that great idea you had to start running again? That run around the block almost killed you but now you can do 5 laps before work. That's what new versus old stress looks like.

- It always comes back to breathing with me doesn't it! Learning how to breath correctly can control your heart rate and circulate oxygen around the body which will keep you in a parasympathetic state for longer assisting with all the things I just said above. And also if you don't breath, you die! A bit dramatic but you get the idea...

Your Hips Don't Go Out of Place (article)

This article came across my desk last week and I immediately knew it was the subject of this week's blog post.

The takeaways:

 - Health professionals, or even friends for that matter, who tell you that you;re back is out (out of what?) are contributing to your problem because if you hear something enough, then you'll start to believe it. Health professionals are not great at the language they use and will often diagnose issues you didn't even know you had but now all of a sudden that issue is now holding you back from doing certain movement and modes of exercise - even though you were doing them with no issue just last week!

 - What something "feels" like and what is actually happening are 2 completely different things. Frequent readers of this blog will now be aware that pain isn't what we all think it is and that we can have pain and no injury as well as injury and no pain - 2 completely different things.

 - Treatment professionals (chiro's, physio's etc)  are often sought out to treat these types of ailments but what are they treating? There's often no injury and you're back can't be "out" or you'd be in diabolical pain.

- The treatment can "work" as it's providing different and hopefully, positive input to your brain that can then send out different messages to the body that aren't pain signals reacting to a perceived threat.

- When episodes like this occur then you'll also tend to determine what was the cause and this leads to a fear avoidance of movement so you don't throw your hip out again. This can shift stress to a certain set of muscles or overload a certain movement and then you can have an actual problem of overuse and potential joint/muscle breakdown.

- If heading off to your treatment person for a mild adjustment is enough force to put your hip 'back in" then that implies that it's takes next to nothing to put it 'out" in the first place. This makes buying into strength training, that will actually help you a great deal, next to impossible

- Your body is made up of resilient structures  and it actually takes over 1000 pounds of force to deform fascia by even 1%...but that's light hands on treatment put your entire back into place...

- Treatments technique can decrease pain but not from anything physical but more psychologically. You believe that the treatment has put your back in, everything is well in the world, your mood improves and pain is reduced as the body has responded to your less stressful state and down regulated whatever threat it perceived prior to the treatment.

- If you believe strongly in a treatment type then it's probably doing whatever issues have good, but not for the reasons you think. If you an believe in something a lot cheaper, then you could save yourself a lot of money! In the end though the treatment does something that your brain likes and thus has a positive influence on your result but just remember it's often not changing anything physically.

- Once you are "aligned' then it's important to promote threat-free movement and loading as soon as you can to "cement" this position or state, a position/state that your body loves and perceives as safe.

I follow these types of pain management strategies in the studio all the while on my never ending crusade of pain education and stress management so if you need a hand with this type of thing then definitely get in contact with me.

You can read this article in full here.

If Breathing is so Easy, Then Why Can't You Do It Properly?

You might recall the "Stress = Pain = Stress" blog series from the middle of the year, a 10 part-er looking how stress, pain and breathing all relate to each other.

In a nutshell here's how it works:

1 - Our working/busy culture of today pushes out bodies and minds to the limits

2 - Over time all these what seem like small stress events accumulate fatigue and the body needs to down regulate energy expenditure as it's in a state of threat. Think buying up cans of food in the event of Armageddon. This down regulation of energy expenditure mostly presents itself in 2 ways.

3 - The brain perceives your current fatigued position as a threat and needs to decrease energy output so it decreases ranges of motion at the hips and shoulders as a decrease in range of motion means less calorie expenditure.

4 - The brain also moves to a sympathetic (fight) state which alters your breathing patterns. Instead of inhaling and exhaling full breathes through the diaphragm like you do in a parasympathetic (rest) state, you shift to taking shorter, harder breathes through your neck, shoulders and back.

5 - The vital part here is that diaphragmatic breathes circulates great volumes of oxygen all throughout the body where shoulder/neck breathing barely circulates any of that breathe at all, let alone oxygen. You're basically taking a small amount of air in and and pushing that same air back out again, taking no oxygen in whatsoever.

6 - When you're body tips "over the edge", those the niggling little aches and pains you normally don't feel, come with a rush and you are at a greater risk of injury as the body's defense system is "down". That nagging knee and back pain you have for no reason? That's not an injury, it;s a stress response for the body to slow you down and as above, decrease energy expenditure.

During the week I has a young lady come in for her first Be Activated treatment with me. She'd had a small taste from a friend before but never the full treatment.

The full treatment takes about 40mins and various activation points, in sequence, all over the body.

The aim of the treatment is make the body initiate everything, breathing and movement specifically from the inside out, not the outside in.

First up we activate zone 1 which is the diaphragm, psoas and glutes - the 3 most important muscles of the body.

When you are ins sympathetic state, these muscles can shut down and then other muscles take over - muscles not equipped to do their job and that is what leads to overuse and breakdown of muscles and joints.

So 5mins into the session this is what her breathing stated at and shifted to:


Notice how the diaphragm/belly area uses the muscle to release to increase her inhalation - she has pretty much tripled her oxygen intake in 5mins!

I also came across this image today also showing the importance of breathing;

And the link between cancer and lack of oxygen have been around for 80 years.

If you want to improve your breathing then a Be Activated treatment is just what you need so contact me to make a booking.

YOU AND POOH

You and I, we're about to take this relationship to a whole new level right now.

The subject: Pooh, and how relates to your eating and lifestyle choices.

This is an article that appeared on the Precision Nutrition FB  page last week, a page that I have referred to before bit instead of nutritional and stress relieving information, we're getting real personal today.

It's a decent read but here are the high, or low lights, depending how you look at it.

- Bowel movements can signal what you;re doing great or suggest health challenges before symptoms arise.

- You're after "good looking" pooh, whatever that means

- pooh quality can provide information on your core muscles, your gastrointestinal system, your fiber intake, your hormones, your stress levels, your intestinal health, hydration levels, food intolerance's, your activity levels and general health issues that stand between you looking good or looking bloated.

 -   Step 1 is to actually look at your pooh then identify it in this chart:


                                  

- Your shooting for a pooh in the 3 - 5 range with 4 being the optimal pooh - good times.

- You should be having a sit down 1 to 3 times per day

- They should be quick and painless with no straining required

- It should be brown but coloring can change if you've eaten certain foods (red for beets, green for leafy greens etc)

- It should stink but not to extreme levels

- If it sinks then your diet is high in fiber and if it floats it's high in fat - that's interesting.

- Look for long term trends and don't be afraid to have a pooh diary.

- There's been a fair push for gut health in recent times and for good reason because nutrient absorption is vital.

 - Gut dysfunction can can be causes by things such as nutrient deficiencies, autonomic nervous system problems, immune problems, hormone imbalances, blood sugar irregularities, irregular sleep, medications, aging and chronic diseases.

- Because of how hour gastrointestinal brain works, we don't feel pain when things are wrong in our gut

- The gut bone is connected to the brain bone which controls your autonomic nervous system, which controls every voluntary and involuntary function of the body and the state of your GI tract can affect message signalling from gut to brain which can bring on brain fog, anxiety, depression, mood disorders, ADD and ADHD.

- Physically you might have issues with weight management, asthma/allergies, autoimmune disorders, skin conditions, arthritis/joint inflammation, heart disease, narcolepsy/sleep disorders, migraines and kidney problems.

- Fix this by opting for minimally processed foods like fruit, veggies and fresh meat and taking your time with your eating.

- Bacteria in the gut (or gut flora), helps digestion and absorption by breaking down carbs and helping to create digestive enzymes but problem pooh can let you know that your bacteria levels are low which can be brought on by travel, a change in diet and antibiotics.

- Gut flora protects the body from pathogens, boosts immunity and makes certain vitamins

- Struggling gut flora = struggling gut function

- To build a lot of gut critters get into beans/legumes, fruits, whole grains, starchy veg ans also consider foods that contain probiotics (good bacteria) such as yoghurt, mold-enhanced cheese (what the?), fermented products and again minimally processed food options and don't be afraid to try fruit from straight off the tree.

- Avoid overusing antibiotics which kill all the bacteria in your system, not just the bad stuff.

- Your pooh is a reflection of what you eat and from the chart above pooh's 1 and 2 indicate constipation so you'll need more fiber.

- Everyone reacts to foods differently but the main offenders for food intolerance's are lectins (seeds, grains, legumes, nuts), gluten (grains), casein, lactose, immunoglobins (dairy) and fructose (fruit sugars) and other sugars and starches

- Must I mention processed foods again?

- Keep a diary for a week or two and rate how you react to certain foods, good and bad.

- If your pooh is small and hard then you might assume that you need more fiber but it may actually mean you're dehydrated as water is used to move waste through your gut and if there isn't enough water to do so then the body will draw it from somewhere else and now you have 2 issues such as cramping or dry mouth.

- Keep track of your fluid intake and have a look at water vs sugar/caffeine/alcohol intake.

- Your GI tract is connected to your central nervous system and allows your gut and upstairs brain to talk to each other. When you're stressed your brain and gut know this and to conserve energy in times of high stress, they slow down digestion so you might find yourself suffering from constipation, bloating and indigestion. When stress gets really high then you meet a dodgy dude called Gary. Gary Gastro.

- If you're a regular of this blog then you'll know I've blabbered on about decreasing stress forever so look back through the archives and check out to combat it but anything that results in you feeling relaxed during or after it is what you;re after, and do them regularly.

- Too much or not enough movement have negative affects on your pooh where doing nothing can cause constipation and doing too much can put you in that high stress area we mentioned above

- So in the and you want to look at your pooh everyday for the next week while also increasing your water intake and nothing else and document any changes - there's nothing like a good old fashioned pooh study is there?

You can read the full article here.