Portable Personal Trainer 100 Ways to Energize Your Workouts and Bring Out the Athlete in You

1. Don't Just Dream Big, Dream Huge Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream! Mark Twain, writer (1835-1910) How we've forgotten to dream! As we get older, our goals and our visions tend to grow smaller, more manageable, more "realistic." Our limiting beliefs are more confining than we realize. Nowhere is this truer than in our personal visions of health and exercise. We're constantly making excuses and concessions, and over time, some of us have resigned ourselves to a lower standard of fitness than we ever intended. It's time to demand more from your body. When I began training for triathlons seven years ago, I was overweight and had no background in cycling or running. Yet I decided that in one year I would be ranked in the world's top ten. People thought I was mad. I read and reread Dave Scott's Triathlon Training and followed his advice to the letterso far as riding to work through torrential Caribbean downpours! Six months later I was ranked number six in the world. You may not aspire to be a world-class athlete, but nevertheless you will benefit tremendously from this strategy. The first step to igniting your passion and opening the door to your boldest fitness goals is to set new goals that excite, inspire, and move you. Goals that reside "within your comfort zone" are unlikely to ignite your deepest passions. Setting new, passion-driven goals is the foundation of any successful fitness program. Get outside. This exercise cannot be done indoorsto truly open up your mind to new fitness possibilities, oxygen must be coursing in your blood, your endorphins must be pumping, and your consciousness must be liberated. (In fact, I recommend you do most of the "action items" in this book while in motion, during exercise.) Exercise at a nice, steady aerobic effort, and think about what you want from your body. When you complete your workout, pull out a fresh sheet of paper and write down your three boldest fitness goals. The trick here is to think huge. This is not about "thinking outside the box," it's about disregarding the box altogether. It doesn't mean you have to achieve those goals, but the sheer act of writing down new, lofty goals will begin the process of igniting your passion and will open the door to higher personal performance. Now that your boldest goals are on paper, scale them back ever so slightly into the realm of realism. Olympic two-hundred-meter champion Michael Johnson's advice on goals is to make them quantitative and time based and realistic. Thinking huge first determines what's most important to you, what's really possible. This raises your own standards. You'll always have your eyes on that prize, and you just never know how close to those goals you may come. Congratulations. What you just did is how champion athletes begin their quest toward world-record performances. They just dream absolutely huge. 2. Pinpoint Your Ends Motivations Every battle is won before it is fought. Sun Tzu, Fourth-century general, author of The Art of War To enjoy long-term success in fitness, you need something to hold on to, something to motivate you, something to inspire you over the long term. If you can discover what that is, the battle of reaching your fitness goals "will have been won before it is fought." Staying motivated is one of the most challenging elements of any fitness program. The first step is to clarify your deep-down motivations to work out. When you do this, you change your fitness destiny because you will be motivated to exercise more consistently and with more passion. There are "means" motivations and "ends"Harr, Eric is the author of 'Portable Personal Trainer 100 Ways to Energize Your Workouts and Bring Out the Athlete in You' with ISBN 9780767906418 and ISBN 0767906411.