Archive for January, 2011
In the past year, Results Fitness has been featured as one of America’s top ten gyms (by Men’s Health magazine) and been named by industry consultant Thomas Plummer as the most profitable gym in the USA per square foot.
As Anthony Robbins would say – this is not to impress you – but to impress upon you that we are doing things right. As I often say – I am just a kid from a small town in Scotland that did a few things right….
One of those things, and probably what we are known for, is our fat loss programming and coaching with our clients.
In March of this year, we’ll be running a two-day, no-holds-barred, everything revealed program design seminar – pulling back the curtain to reveal everything we do at Results Fitness to design and implement the best programs on the planet.
We get better results in less time than any of our competition.
And now we’re sharing that…
From the desk of the Results Fitness Team…
We have been working on completely revamping our programming templates. You see, as we have added in some of the new tools over the last 5 years including TRX, kettlebells, ropes and various other equipment that we use on a day to day basis we realized that we needed to start over from scratch thinking through the ENTIRE PROCESS of designing and implementing a Results Guaranteed Experience for our clients. We are now ready for the first time EVER to reveal our BRAND NEW information, thought process and completely revamped programming and coaching process.
This seminar will include:
- The EXACT Principles that every Results Fitness Program is based off of as of RIGHT NOW (Brand NEW!).
- The thought process behind the brand new program design templates to give you the tools to create your own results producing experience for your clients.
- How to use assessment techniques and not just assess for the sake of assessing and create a program for your clients based off of what you learn about them from the initial meeting.
- The STEP BY STEP Action plan to designing and re-creating the process we go through everyday at Results Fitness, for your clients and business. Including how to know what to do to “Release the Brakes” with some of your clients who continually plateau with their results.
You’ll leave the seminar knowing how to write a program and create the bigger picture that you can absolutely guarantee your clients will get results with.
Plus
- Go behind the scenes and learn the fitness methods from one of America’s Top Gyms.
- Learn the story behind the Results Fitness Methodology.
- Learn the stuff behind the stuff- and see why Results Fitness has been featured in Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Shape, Muscle and Fitness Hers, More Magazine, Men’s Fitness, Woman’s World, U.S. News & World Report and on television on Fox, ABC, WGN and Dr. Oz.
- Understand the principles of program design that had top soccer players such as Wayne Rooney, World Champion Martial Artists and Fortune 500 companies including Nike, Gatorade, Secret and Zappos contacting Results Fitness for their expertise as a consultant.
Spaces are limited (those of you who have been to our events before know this is not hype).
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AC
Tags: “The seat of the pants salesman will never, ever match the income of the systemized salesman. The top producers live by systems”
- Dan Kennedy
I bet everyone reading this has had a hamburger that tastes better than anything on the McDonalds menu. So it’s fair to say that McDonalds may not have the best hamburgers in the world right?
So why then do people invest several million dollars in a McDonalds franchise?
I’ll tell you ….. It’s not the hamburgers. It’s not the fries. And it’s not the special sauce.
It’s the SYSTEM. The fastest way to results is to follow a proven system.
The word system is essentially an acronym for
SAVE
YOUR
SELF
TIME
ENERGY
MONEY
You see McDonalds has developed an absolutely perfect turn-key business SYSTEM. You don’t have to know how to make a hamburger, how long to cook the fries for, how much salt to add — you just need to follow the system. It’s done for you.
Now sure – you can invest your efforts, time, energy and money and maybe — maybe – several years from now you’ll have come up with a better method.
Or you could learn their system now and save yourself years of frustration.
The fitness business is the same. when we added a shake/smoothie bar to our gym we looked for an established company with a proven system. When we added kettlebell training and group classes we looked for a company that already had a tested, proven system.
In this economy – one of the key things to focus on is your ability to change and offer new services. Clients needs and desires are changing rapidly – so as business owners, we need to evolve our offerings and introduce new services.
One of the fastest growing markets for fitness professionals right now are bootcamp classes. Bootcamps are a low cost program for the client, but can be very profitable for the business just due to the sheer numbers that you can work with.
Provided your programming is excellent. It all falls apart if you don’t get great results.
But just like the McDonalds example – starting from scratch and trying to figure it out on your own is waste of time, energy and money. You need a system.
If you haven’t run bootcamps or large group workouts before, the one thing you DO NOT want to spend time doing is trying to figure out how to design the workouts, what equipment you’ll need, how to adjust your current one-on-one programs to bigger groups etc etc.
And the good news? You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It’s already been done.
Turbulence Training founder Craig Ballantyne has just launched a complete Turbulence Training Bootcamps product that includes 21 done for you bootcamp workouts to help you make more money in less time – all based on the proven, time tested Turbulence Training Fat Loss Bodyweight only workouts. That’s right – you don’t need any equipment to start these programs right away.
If you are interested in expanding the offerings in your business or getting into larger group training — then this product is definitely for you.
=> Turbulence Training Bootcamps
Seriously -this is as close to “done for you” as it gets – other than Craig actually showing up in your town to run the session for you.
Your only other option up to now has been to invest in a 5-figure franchise or “Wing-it”. This investment is a lot less expensive and a lot smarter than just improvising.
Check it out here : Turbulence Training Bootcamps
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AC
PS – Adding group programming to your current services is a fantastic way to create additional income to your business, offer a great new service and reach more clients. But make sure your programming is top-notch.
You can pick up 21 done-for-you bodyweight workouts perfect for bootcamps here: Turbulence Training Bootcamps
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AC
My good friend Todd Durkin did a gust post for me last week (check it out HERE) where he challenged us all in 2011 to be the most positive person you know.
I think that’s a great goal and one I’m going to really strive for. I think I’m a positive person overall, but maybe not the most positive person I know (which is tough because I know Todd – he’s the most positive person I’ve ever met!)
That said – it’s really easy to write a blog post slamming the Biggest Loser show. There are probably a zillion posts out there from fitness professionals talking about how bad it is, and how Jillian can’t swing a kettlebell properly.
It’s EASY. They make it easy to do, but that’s not what this blog post is about.
I’m accepting Todds challenge and am only looking at what the show does well.
So let’s look at the positives…
There are some good things about the Biggest Loser show that smart trainers can learn from:
- They train people in a group and show how valuable small or large group training can be (it’s not just one-on-one)
- Whether you like the methodology or not — the contestants on the Biggest Loser get great results (100lbs in 6 weeks is the shows average result – which is better than most any trainer or gym out there).
Yes I know they get multiple hours of training per day, but rather than focus on the “why that won’t work for me” let’s focus on the “what actually happened” - The trainers on the Biggest Loser train people HARD – very hard — and overweight people are a demographic that the fitness industry has traditionally babied…
In fact, one of the leading fitness certification organizations has a recommendation that overweight people begin with 20mins of walking at 40% of maximum heart rate (e.g. 72bpm for a 40 year old). That’s REAL advice from a reputable fitness certification! I think most sedentary people could get their heart rate over 40% of max just watching a sporting event or a scary movie? - The Biggest Loser contestants use high intensity circuit training, kettlebells, battling ropes, the prowler, the TRX suspension training, sandbags and free weights.
This educates the general public that it’s not about fixed axis machines, supplements, acai berry juice or, as I stated above – walking slowly…. - They use circuit training and resistance training on the Biggest Loser – not just low intensity cardio
I know it’s easy to talk about how bad the show is (it’s actually hard for me NOT to talk about how bad it is…..) – but I’ve accepted Todd’s challenge to be positive.
There are a lot of things about the show that I dislike, but it’s also fair to point out that there are good things too.
If we learn one thing from the show it’s that we can train overweight beginners harder than we traditionally have.
Instead of immediately slamming the show – try to find something positive from it.
Maybe we can all focus on being positive.
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AC
The Tao of Mike Boyle was written by Nate Green and originally printed on TMUSCLE.
38 years of under-the-bar experience, the best exercises, and why back squats still suck.
“… Tao is often referred to as ‘the nameless’, because neither it nor its principles can ever be adequately expressed in words.” Aw, what the hell, we’ll give it a shot.
No questions, no time limit, and no stone unturned. Training? Nutrition?
A little piss and vinegar? It’s all here.
The following is what happens when you get on the phone with a top-level strength and conditioning coach and hit “record.” -Nate Green
Mike Boyle Speaks
• I might be the most criticized guy in this profession. If not, I’m certainly close.
• But I get results. We’ve had Olympians, national champions, professional athletes–you name it. All those guys come through our gym. And people think I don’t know what I’m talking about?
• When people come and watch my athletes train, they’re always surprised. They can’t believe they’re as strong as they are. They fully expect to come in and see the Richard Simmons show, like I’m going to be wearing a jump suit and headband and making my athletes stand on Bosu balls.
• I’ve got girls doing chin-ups with a 45-pound plate around their waists. How many guys can do that?
• I’ve been lifting weights for 38 years. I started when I was 12 years old with a 110-pound set of barbells in my basement. I grew up on muscle magazines. They were my early education, you know? Man, I remember seeing Boyer Coe guest pose in 1979. Steve Reeves, Gladiator, Hercules…that stuff really got me into the lifestyle.
• People look at me and say, “He hasn’t been under the bar.” Yes, I have. And, frighteningly, I was pretty damn strong.
• Right now we’ve got training experts who don’t train anyone and strength coaches who’ve never competed in anything. Would you take business advice from someone who doesn’t have a business or isn’t making any money?
• You have to keep training people to stay fresh. If you don’t keep learning, you’ll get to a point two years down the road where you won’t know what you’re doing any more.
• The better the athlete the more self-impressed you are. They learn everything so easily and you start to think it’s you. “I’m an awesome coach because I can get that guy to do exactly what I want him to.” Listen, when you’re training a guy who’s projected in the first round, getting him into the first round isn’t a big accomplishment. That’s where he was supposed to go.
• Last year we had four guys make teams–three un-drafted free and one seventh-round pick–who all stuck with NFL teams this year. I was more proud of that than any other thing we’ve done.
• A lot of what people tell you isn’t true.
• First, I didn’t say the “people shouldn’t squat” thing to be controversial or sell DVDs. That clip was pulled directly from the DVD set by a marketing guy who watched the entire presentation and said, “This is the hook.”
I had no idea how crazy the backlash was going to be. I even got some pretty harsh emails from some respectable people. Well, people I used to respect. Apparently they don’t have time to think.
-Since then, I’ve had people forward me information about the bilateral deficit. All of a sudden, they’re saying, “You’re really right.”
• The bilateral deficit? Well, they’ve found, particularly as it relates to the lower body, that you’re clearly stronger when you train with one leg versus two.
Let’s say you’ve got a guy who can deadlift 300 pounds for reps, but can’t squat 400 pounds for reps. More often than not, he will be able to single-leg squat with 200 pounds on each leg for reps. So what does that tell you? He’s at less risk because the load is lighter, but he’s getting more work out of each leg.
• The thing I always hear is, “Well, if they have weak backs, why don’t you just get their backs stronger?” Hold on. We’re not talking about having a weak back. We’re talking about the back being a limiting factor. That’s very, very different. A guy who hang cleans 300 pounds doesn’t have a weak back. The simple fact is that when someone fails in the squat it’s not because they don’t have any more juice in their legs. It’s because their back can’t handle the load.
• I wrote an article called “An Apology Letter to Personal Trainers. “I’ve been telling them how to do their job for years and never trained a single non-athlete. Over the past few years I’ve started to, and it’s hard work.
• I think personal training is much more difficult than working with athletes. We’ve got 2 hours per week to counteract the other 166 hours of the week. It’s not a good ratio to try and make changes.
• Still, some trainers just suck. Like the ones who just tell their clients to go for a walk. That’s the exercise equivalent of calling yourself a nutritionist and telling your starving client to go steal sugar packets from Dunkin Donuts.
• Or the flipside, you have the Crossfit guys who are just going to shit kick you until you can’t move. That’s just as bad. We’ve got uneducated trainers who don’t challenge their clients and uneducated trainers who try to kill their clients.
• All the guys who get mad at me on the Internet, I just want to say, come talk to me when you’re 40.
• I have the huge value of hindsight. I was just like you. I was a meathead. I wanted big muscles and to be strong as hell. If my shoulders hurt after benching, I’d ice them, take Advil and bench again five days later. If my back hurt from deadlifting, well, my back is supposed to hurt from deadlifting, right? I came to realize over time that I was wrong.
• Take a look at all these guys with surgeries. It’s insane. How can they still be espousing the same principles when they’ve gone under the knife so much?
• Experience is wasted on the old.
• Everyone squats ass to grass? Where are they? I go to gyms and I don’t see them. When you live in the Internet world there are thousands of guys doing heavy squats ass to grass with no problems. Call me skeptical. By the way, I’d love to see all these guys “laying it on the line.”
• The best way to learn is to find someone who’s doing what you want to do, and read everything they write, watch everything they’ve put on DVD, and hopefully get to talk with them in person.
• The close-grip hang snatch is the best power movement you can do. But you have to do them with a clean grip to spare your shoulders. The only reason guys do it with a wide grip is to use more weight, since it decreases the distance the bar has to travel.
• Why from a hang instead of the floor? Size differences. Olympic lifting favors shorter people. Suddenly when you’re teaching the snatch to a football lineman, they have a hard time addressing the bar on the floor. It’s also more practical to do it from the hang since it spares the back.
• I always take the original exercise and try it out. If it doesn’t work to my standards, I modify it. If that still doesn’t work, I drop it completely.
• If you’d have asked me a year ago I would have said the Turkish Get-up was a gimmick. Now I think it’s probably the best total-body core exercise you can do. And that’s part of the learning process!
• I can remember reading the early kettlebell stuff and being decidedly unimpressed. I had a million reasons why I didn’t like it. But then I started watching my athletes get up off the floor. Nearly every one of them did a Turkish Get-up without even knowing it. I think it’s a skill we lose as we age. Have you ever seen an old person try to get up off the floor? It’s very difficult for them. I think it’s an exercise everyone needs to be doing.
• The trap-bar deadlift is probably the best lower-body exercise. I think it’s clearly the best bilateral exercise, since you’re engaging your erectors and your traps much more than in a squat.
• Programming is an art. You can’t just mix a whole bunch of stuff together and expect it to taste good. That’s called shit soup.
• Everyone who foam rolls gets hooked on it, and everyone who doesn’t thinks it’s stupid. Do me a favor and spend seven dollars and buy a 12-inch foam roller. It’ll change your whole life.
• And another thing: stretching doesn’t have to take that long. You don’t need to go to a yoga class. Just stretch your major muscle groups like your hamstrings, groin, hip flexors, lasts, and pecs. Shouldn’t take more than ten minutes. When you realize later on that all the injuries you’re going to get are because certain muscles get too tight or get knocked out of alignment, you’ll thank me.
• After you stretch, do some kind of dynamic warm-up and mobility. I remember watching old-time Olympic lifters warm up before their training session, but I had no idea what the hell they were doing. They’d roll their wrists around, drop down into a deep squat and rock from side to side. Now I know they were doing mobility work.
• After all the warm-up stuff you have strength. My only major rule here is that for every pushing exercise you should have a pulling exercise. It’ll shorten your workouts and save your shoulders. Same thing for your lower body. For every quad-dominant exercise, make sure you’re doing a hip-dominant exercise. Throw in some Turkish Get-ups and you have a decent strength program.
• I end all my sessions with conditioning. TMUSCLE readers aren’t doing enough of it, either. If you’re comfortable, or are doing long, slow cardio you can pretty much conclude it’s a waste of time. Any young, fit guy should finish his conditioning and have to lie on the floor thinking, “God, that was awful.”
• People should think and investigate more. Anthony Robbins has always said that success leaves clues. I’m a big believer in that. Whether I like or don’t like someone, I’m going to watch what they’re doing if they’re succeeding. I’m willing to say when I’m wrong.
• I’m searching for the perfect training program, the Holy Grail if you will. I can’t just suddenly stop searching.
• I’ve been there and done that. But the important thing is I’m still doing it.
To learn more about Mike Boyle’s functional strength training approach visit Functional Strength Coach
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AC
Today is January 19th. That means a little over 5% of the year has passed already.
So let’s do a quick “goal review” or a Resolution recall.
Are you 5% towards your goals?
If your goal was to lose 50lbs of fat – you should be down 2.5lbs right now if you’re on track. If your goal was to increase your income by $10,000 this year – you should already have made an extra $500.
Now I know goals are not always achieved linearly – particularly not fat loss or financial goals — but you’ll hopefully see my point. Track everything.
An easy goal that I always set is just a specific number of workouts that you are going to do. Then you just mark them off. One goal for 2010 was to perform 250 workouts. I ended up a little short.
In 2011 I plan on doing 211 !
I also set a goal of twenty training sessions in January (as my facebook followers know).
So to be on track – I need to have performed at least 14 or so training sessions right now.
I am also planning to launch a couple of new product and services this year. The fat loss programming manual is already available exclusively at the Perform Better events, and very soon we’ll be launching a new Results Fitness Programming seminar.
For one of our business projects – as of yesterday we’re at 5.5% of my annual goal. For another I’m at about a 4% increase over the same point last year (which is slightly behind schedule).
And I’m WAY behind on my newsletter schedule :)
The point is – you need to constantly assess where you are in relation to your desired outcomes.
Are you on track?
Are you headed in the right direction?
Have you even moved off the starting line?
Yes? Congratulations – 2011 is shaping up to be a great year for you.
No? Don’t worry – just step up your ACTION a little bit and catch up.
If it’s your fitness business that needs an overhaul – then check out the Results Fitness Business Mentorship. We have designed the course that we wished were available when we opened our facility eleven years ago.
If your own goal is to get leaner – get on a fat loss program
If it’s to gain muscular size then check out the Muscle Gaining Secrets Program.
Remember – even if you’re off course – you can still get there. A plane traveling cross country is off-course 80% of the time and still makes it to it’s destination because the pilot knows where the destination is, and makes constant corrections.
5% down – 95% to go. You’ve still got time to make some major changes in your life this year.
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AC
PS – Don’t forget to follow me on facebook…
