Cozy comfort zone.

Quote I came across today:

“You MUST be willing to step out of your comfort zone to hit your goals.

No matter if your goal is fat loss, building muscle or eating better you have to make a conscious decision to stop doing what is easy and natural to you, and try a route that actually works.

So many people say “that doesn’t work for me” or ” I can’t lose weight cause of my genetics” BULLSHIT. The problem is you want to keep doing the same thing you’re doing now and get different results. You want to eat ice cream and pizza 5 days a week and somehow get different results…

You have to sack up and step out of your comfort zone!”

-Vic Magary, GymJunkies.com (of course.) There are several other tips/quotes on the original post.

Also, I came across a couple of articles here and here about cardio training and sprints.

The more I read on GymJunkies and its linked sites (Mark's Daily Apple is becoming a new favorite as well), the more I'm finding out how my recent approaches to fitness have been, for the most part, counter-productive. Such a discovery has been disappointing, yes, but also motivating. Well, sorta, haha.

For example, when I read about High-Intensity-Interval-Training (HIIT), I was reading about it in the context of breaking weight-loss plateaus. And without being 100% certain about whether or not I've been experiencing a plateau, I ran with the info anyway and started making it a regular part of my weekly fitness routine.

And honestly, one of the underlying reasons I ran with it was to avoid strength/resistance training. Granted, I have been incorporating more resistance training lately, thanks to Biggest Loser Boot Camp, but it's still not the right tool (or rather, not the only tool) that will push me to the level I'll benefit from the most.

The bottom line is, in order to reach my goal (and possibly surpass it and possibly reach the 100 pound mark), I NEED to do more strength training. I also NEED to be more meticulous and conscious of my food choices. These are things I KNOW I need to work on in order to get to my goal faster, but I have just plain lacked the motivation to take action.

So, to help, I will continue reading through my new favorite sites and just beat into my skull that super-high calorie burning cardio sessions are not necessarily going to get me to where I want to be (not on their own, anyway). Plain and simple.

I think my heart rate monitor has caused some of this too. It's become both a blessing and a curse. Obviously, it's great for telling me how hard I'm working and how many calories I'm burning, but at the same time, if I look down at my watch and see that I'm no where near at least 500 calories, I get ridiculously frustrated. Ever since I bought that thing, I've gotten myself into the habit of expecting to see big numbers on the calorie readout. And big number calorie burns just don't happen with strength/weight training (yes, building muscle will burn more fat in the long run, even when I'm not working out. I've known this, yet I still ignore it).

I've conditioned myself to think that big, long sweats = big scale progress, but as I'm finding with each weigh-in, such an idea couldn't be farther from the truth.

I can't say quite yet what all I'm going to try in the coming weeks because there's still a LOT of information I need to filter through, but I can say that this weekend, I will try and fight my mega-cardio urges and instead focus on strength circuits. I need to at least make the effort to try different strength moves so I can find stuff I like (or am at least challenged by) and keep up with it on a regular basis.

I will continue to inhale GymJunkies.com, but will also try some of the tips on sprint training from Mark's Daily Apple as well.

These are the starting steps. I've come a long way, but I still have so much farther to go. Not only in achieving my own personal fitness goals, but in building the necessary foundation of someday becoming a personal trainer. I need to start walking the walk. My lack of progress lately is direct proof that I've been talking out of my ass instead of pushing it. I WILL get toned. I WILL become a size 8. I WILL be an image of health. No compromises, no excuses. No one else can get in my way except me. I've gotten pretty strong so far, but there's still so much left to achieve.