Make No Fitness Goals

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When you walk into a health club or start a program with a personal trainer, one of the first questions you are asked is “What are your fitness goals?”. I have worked in several health and fitness clubs and our sales people always had a sort of script they would run through with all new potential customers that would take the club tour. This script was largely designed around the greatest potential to make the sale rather than address the customers individual needs. But these questions that come from not only fitness sales people but also from many trainers and instructors is a sure way to failure. You see our brains are wired for a sequence of things when we think about setting a goal. We first define the goal, then we start the activity and take the necessary steps to reach the goal. Once that goal has been reached, the activity is no longer necessary. Most people’s answer to the fitness goal question is “I want to lose X number of pounds” or “I want to fit into a certain article of clothing again”. I’m not saying you shouldn’t set any goals at all. But you should be very careful and specific about the kinds of goals you define for yourself. It’s kind of like asking “What are your sleep goals?” or “What are your personal hygiene goals?”. Well I would like to feel well rested and I want to be clean and not smell.  When you reach these goals do you stop sleeping or stop bathing? Of course not. Because if you did then you would soon get very tired and start to stink again. The only way to truly achieve permanent weight loss is to make weight loss unimportant to you and make health of primary importance. The weight loss will come anyway. If you are going to set any kind of goal right at the start then it should be something to the effect that you are going to partake in a consistent routine of exercise and healthy eating until it becomes automatic and permanently integrated into your lifestyle. In my mind this sounds much less like a goal, and more like a plan.

Hair has memory?

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Have you ever noticed how certain hair on your body grows out to a certain length and then stops while other hair seems to grow indefinitely regardless of how many times you cut it or shave it off? What is that about? Why can’t I get the hair on my face to stop growing? Why does the hair on my arms or chest grow back, but only to a specific length and then stop? Is it possible to rewire these hairs to do what we want them to? Where’s my geneticist?

“I don’t know”

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I have a love/hate relationship with this statement. On the one hand it drives me insane when I don’t know something. I must know.  On the other hand, when I make this statement it means I am about to embark on a search to find the answers. To KNOW. I love knowing. The process of learning and discovering something I didn’t know is a very satisfying one.

Pond Hockey with the Winter Hawks

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These past couple of weeks we have seen an unusually cold time here in Portland with no precipitation. Most days have been sub-freezing and the nights have been in the teens. Last thursday night I caught a brief piece on the news about a frozen casting pond at Westmoreland Park where people were ice skating. How cool is that? The weekend was shaping up to be warmer with good chance of freezing rain or snow so I decided to throw my skates in the car and head out early friday morning to see this frozen pond for myself. I wasn’t sure of the size but it turns out this pond is big enough to fit about 8 ice rinks inside it. When I arrived there were about 20-30 people of all kinds skating and it looked fantastic! This would be the first time I ever had the chance to skate outdoors. This is the kind of thing you just don’t see in Portland. I stuck around for a few hours and just had a blast. The Winter Hawks even showed up and brought a net with them. It was all very informal and we eventually had a big game going on that was basically the Hawks against everyone else. It was crazy fun! It’s a day I won’t soon forget. [album id=3 template=compact]Photos by Justin Pick

Information Credibility

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I have to laugh every time I hear someone say “You believe something just because you read it on the internet?”. Please fill me in on exactly where the sources of information exist that are 100% credible. You believe something just because you saw it on CNN or Fox news or read it in a newspaper? You believe something just because a doctor said so? Let me fill you in on something. Information is gathered, filtered, manipulated and delivered by human beings. Human being have all sorts of motivations and agendas and filters which alter the way they process information in these ways. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what the delivery vehicle is for that information. I will say however that I trust what I read on the internet more so than most any other source and here’s why. Politicians and big corporations have an easy time manipulating information that comes to us through traditional media outlets such as newspapers and television. And in many cases this same could be true of many web sites. But the net is the wild west of information and most of it is uncontrolled by these entities and is therefore unbiased and unhindered from corporate and political tampering. What this all boils down to again is who do you trust? Who or what is responsible for the information you are receiving? Our ability to trust is something we develop as children. What information did our parents feed us? Did we trust it or not? Why or why not? It’s in these very questions that we can begin to understand how we process the information we receive as adults. It’s a ‘listener beware, viewer beware and reader beware’ world.