Winning the Fitness Game

At our annual Fitness Challenge is in full effect. Whether you’re a member of ours competing in the contest or you workout on your own competing against yourself, how you go about "winning" is exactly the same.

I know that not everyone will actually follow through on my advice which is why I don’t hesitate to spell it out for anyone who wants to know. Those that do employ the strategies I'm about to layout will certainly hold a huge advantage over those that don’t. In fact 8 out of the last 10 place winners of our contests have applied these strategies and I’ve used them myself and with those I've coached for bodybuilding and figure contests to achieve their all-time best condition and earn top placing.

The best approach is often times the simplest. For some reason we try to make things harder or more complex than they need to be. Perhaps it's because the simple approach requires us to do things that are tedious or calls for more sweat equity and attention to detail. It’s just not fun!

Winners don't concern themselves with "fun" they concern themselves with winning. As it relates to your fitness pursuits winning is not necessarily tied to making the top three in this, or any contest. Winning is taking yourself from where you currently are to where you want to be or at least making significant strides in that direction. So even if you don’t make the top three, or even the top ten for that matter, but lose the 5 lbs that you’ve struggled with for the last four
months then you won.

The strategy that time and time again works without fail is tracking your food intake. I'm not just talking about writing down what you eat, but actually weighing and measuring your food so you know precisely how many grams of carbs, proteins, fats and calories you are consuming. It doesn't matter that you eat healthy, don't have treats, or don't drink alcohol. At the end of the day it takes going just 1 calorie over what your body actually needs for you to store that extra calorie as fat. I know most of you are probably going more than just one calorie over which is why it’s that much more important to start tracking. When you know specifically how much you're taking in it becomes much easier to determine how much needs to come out in order to start burning body-fat.

Reinforcing this point' last year's winner of The PP Fitness Challenge, as well as my girlfriend and myself in preparation for our last bodybuilding and figure competition, performed no cardio. All of us achieved our all-time best condition by tracking our caloric and macronutrient intake and consistently performing 2-4 weight training sessions each week.

Next, you can't miss workouts. If you need to move to a different time, a different day, fine, but you can't miss. There is a certain degree of consistency that is necessary in order to keep your metabolism working at its highest rate and your strength and muscle development at its peak.

Lastly, you must approach each workout being 100% focused and work to your greatest capability. There cannot be any holding back, no whining, no complaining, NO EXCUSES, just hard work all the time.

There is certainly nothing sexy about the above strategies but they are tried and true. I will not attempt to fool you into thinking that any of them will be easy to apply because they won't be. But I will tell you this...if you make a truly valiant effort and apply all of these strategies you will find yourself achieving success beyond your wildest dreams.