Coach Peter Rule: The greatest mistake is to keep making the same mistake repeatedly without ever learning from it.
Hello Impact Family and Friends,
The road to success isn’t a long, straight comfortable journey to reach your fat loss goals. There will be obstacles to overcome. There will be mistakes to learn from. And your determination and willpower will be challenged with each step.
Now in my 13th year of coaching, I can look back and see so many things that I did wrong at first. I overtrained and undertrained myself. I developed many tweaks, injuries, and overall imbalances. Not only for me, but for my clients. I have been responsible for victories, but I’m sure I played a factor in losses as well. By making so many poor choices, it would have been easy to quit and find another career. But did I stop and give up? Hell NO! I learned from these mistakes and got better.
During my experiences and journey within health/fitness, I learned early on that I know nothing, but was super driven to learn from the past and become an expert in my field. I researched, educated myself, and connected with other fitness experts in my industry.
The outcome was a clearer understanding as to why Fat loss is so difficult to attain.
Here are the 3 common mistakes most make within training and ultimately fat loss.
- Not focusing on the foundation
- Smashing the square peg into the round hole
- Choosing Quantity over Quality
What I mean by not focusing on the foundation is the attention to detail with human movement performance. Exercise is not set up to break you, smash you, or get you crawling out of the gym. It’s developed to bring back the fundamentals, so you can move efficiently through movement as an integrated unit. Our lives of repetition, sedentary, and previous injuries(microtrauma’s) are creating degenerative challenges. This, in turn, makes exercise more difficult and awkward. We are compensatory machines and if we don’t align, mobilize, activate, and constantly reinforce. Distress is built on top of our distress of life. This is partly why we don’t lose fat because cortisol levels are increasing exponentially. When efficient movement is added to progressive overloads with squats, deadlifts, pushes, pulls, rotation, and anti-rotation. Eustress (good stress) is the positive effect and then along with proper nutrition (full article in itself). Fat loss results happen. Although metabolic work is a key component of fat loss, the dynamics of the process cannot jeopardize the efficient patterns with multi-joint, compound patterns of human movement performance. Just in the fact that we are battling atrophy (muscle breakdown and metabolic damage) after 25 years old. Strength training/hypertrophy training is the focus because of the metabolic and hormonal outcome that ensues after the quality work.
Smashing the square peg in the round hole just doesn’t work. Quick fixes with extreme diets are what got us into this nasty mess of gaining fat, losing muscle, and metabolic damage. It’s all about behavioral modifications. We have developed strong cables of habits that are difficult to break. My job as a coach is to establish strategies to break these cables and develop improved (not new) habits with behavioral goals as the focus. Getting your mind to understand the why and purpose for change is crucial for long-term sustainable success. Along with enjoying the process of feeling amazing, performing better, and getting strong. Now doesn’t that sound more exciting then dieting, depriving yourself, and feeling drained. All it takes is simple focuses on the one thing within your best practices that is preventing you from getting better (in this case losing fat). If it is more protein, we attack with a game plan. Maybe your sleep is the limiting factor. Let’s address it. Or it just may be consuming MORE of the great foods that you are already eating. Just space it out every 2 to 3 hours. My point is that if what you have done in the past is questionable, it’s not sustainable. So, let’s find a process that works with your life, gets you feeling amazing, and there is a tremendous chance it will stick….and you will lose fat and not just weight.
Choosing quantity over quality. We are too busy (in our head) to be wasting time with exercise that isn’t providing bang for the buck value. Like a broken record, I’m always focusing my clients’ target at 3x a week for exercise. Now, this doesn’t mean that incorporating hiking, yoga, biking, or any physical activity isn’t beneficial. It just means that I want exercise to compliment our lives. What we do at Impact is provide just the right amount of dosage with exercise, food, drink, and sleep. In conjunction with getting your mind, body, and spirit right. It’s an optimum formula for fat loss, fitness, and LIFE success.
Life doesn’t get easier, we need to get better! By preparing ourselves for celebrations, milestones, tragedies, and failures. There is no such thing as bad days. We have great days and good days. Less than optimum days are character building days. PERIOD!
-Coach Peter