Monday, September 28, 2009

London Personal Trainer | Another Amazing 4 Minute Fat Burning Workout!

Hey,

Looking to kickstart your fatloss, turn up the heat and see some serious improvements in fitness, strength and muscle tone?

Try out this all new fatloss workout that I shot whilst on location in Thailand.

It's only 4 minutes but I promise you, it'll give you a great little workout!

Try it out and leave me a comment to tell me how you got on : )



Believe me, this can be really tough if you go for it.

So go for it! : )

Truth, joy and love

Dax Moy
London's Leading Personal Trainer

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Taking Off The Brakes For Fat Loss Success Part 3: Is Cortisol Keeping You Fat?

Ok, we're now at the 3rd instalment of taking off the brakes that are holding you back from serious fatloss so today we're going to start addressing brakes that are rarely, if ever, addressed by most people who are looking to get into great shape... and stay that way.

I'm talking about the endocrine system that produces and controls the flow of those ever-important hormones throughout your body.

Hormones that tell your body when to slow down, when to speed up, when to burn sugar, when to burn fat and, important to you of course, when to STORE fat.

You see, contrary to what you've been told, weight gain (and fat gain in particular) is not a simple mathematic equation of calories in vs calories out.

It's not just about burning off more than you eat and you'll somehow get thin.

If that were the case then most of the people who've spent a lifetime struggling with their weight on low calorie, high protein, low fat diets would already be stick thin, toned, strong and vibrant but, as we already know, they're not.

Some of the people you know can seemingly eat as much of practically anything they want whilst others merely have to gaze at a cookie and put on a pound. The math just doesn't add up.

Calories alone can't and don't explain why so many people are struggling to lose their body fat and keep it off. But hormones do!

You see, whilst we call food by common names that describe what they are like 'apple' or 'chicken' or 'cake', those words mean nothing to the intricately complex system of the inner world of our metabolism. All it knows of are chemicals.

Get the right chemical balance in your body and everything runs perfectly. You absorb nutrients from your food, those nutrients go to where they're most needed and the rest are either stored or expelled but nothing goes to waste and nothing
causes you any problems in how you look, feel or perform in day to day life.

Get the balance wrong though, and everything changes.

Nutrients can't get to where they're most needed, biological stress goes up, hormones are released to cope with the stress and before you know it you're losing muscle, slowing your metabolism way down and piling on the pounds.

Sounds familiar, right?

I bet it does!

But it's not JUST through your nutrition that hormones come into play, they're also affected by your lifestyle, your sleep habits, your activity levels and how you cope with stress, meaning that if any these are out of whack then you'll have a greater chance of losing muscle and piling on pounds as a result.

This is serious stuff.

In fact, inability to create a positive hormone profile is one of the major brakes that are keeping people fat, unfit, depressed and in pain.

That being the case, let's investigate how we can release the brakes in this area and start speeding up our fat loss results before we even consider joining a gym or starting a dietary regime. Just a few tweaks toward positive hormone balance can have a major impact on fat loss without any other changes taking place and, once you add even a few diet changes and some exercise, can help you to achieve quite startling results.

Sound ok to you?

Let's start today with Cortisol.

Now, I'm not going to bore you with in-depth endocrinology here, I know you just want to know how this information will benefit you so I'll keep it simple.

Cortisol is, your body's primary stress hormone and is responsible for, among other things, the 'fight or flight' response that you've heard so much about.

It works this way; when a stressor affects you in day to day life, such as being cut up in traffic, arguing with a spouse, being under a tough deadline or being chased by a wild tiger, your adrenal glands on your kidneys secrete cortisol directly into the bloodstream where it causes us to release amino acids from our muscles, glucose from the liver and fatty acids from our fat cells into the bloodstream for use as 'emergency fuel' to help us fight or flee.

So far, so good, right?

Well, normally that would be fine. Especially if those stressors are few and far between but that's not the case for most of us. Most people live in a continual state of stress where cortisol is being released time and time and time again leading to permanently elevated cortisol both in the bloodstream AND in the cells themselves.

Trouble is, whilst short exposures of cortisol are useful and can be beneficial, longterm they're downright destructive leading to:

- Increased appetite and food cravings
- Decreases in lean muscle mass
- Increased Anxiety and Depression
- Decreased libido
- Increase of PMS symptoms
- Increase in menopausal side-effects
- INCREASE IN BODY FAT


And guess where cortisol-created body fat wants to live?

Right up there on the belly!

(In later articles I'll explain how each of the hormones creates its own 'fat dump' in a different location on the body)

This means that if you're carrying a excess fat in your abdominal region that's stubborn to shift, you're more than likely to have chronically elevated cortisol causing the problem. And again, it may not have anything to do with the total number of calories you're eating.

In fact, those people who have drastically cut calories from their diets may actually be at MORE risk of gaining abdominal fat as the body tends to treat either extreme or long-term calorie restriction as a stressor and secretes (you guessed it!) cortisol in order to deal with the stress.

Strange but true!

So it's pretty clear that we need to remove this hormonal brake if we're serious about shifting fat from our bellies and keeping it off. But how?

Well, there are numerous ways in which we can re-establish normal cortisol levels in the body and start burning fat but the best are simply 'natural cures' that can be applied almost immediately and with very little expense.

In fact, the first one is absolutely free!

It's called SLEEP.

That's right, sleep is one of the most important factors in cortisol control as a lack of both quality and quantity of sleep leads to elevated cortisol and a depression of other important metabolic hormones (that we'll talk about in a later article). Fail to get enough sleep and at the right time and you'll be doomed to struggling with your bodyfat forever. Conversely, make even a few moderate sleep habit changes over the next few days and you'll start to see the fat shift.

Because cortisol is related to sleep and wake cycles and is triggered by light, you should aim to spend the last few hours before bed in a dimmed or dark room and aim to be in bed by 10pm and sleeping by 10.30pm.

It sounds too early, I know. Especially with late night TV and those emails you have to do before bed but hey, your hormones don't know about TV and email, they know stress. You want to lose fat? Then get to bed! In fact, bright TV's and bright computer screens are the last thing you want just before you hit the hay. They keep your cortisol pumping through both the light they emit and the potential for stress they evoke (Ever read a bad news email just before bed and tried to sleep?)

Sleep is one of the most under-rated fat cures there are. Many of my own personal training clients here in London have 'spontaneously' dropped 7lbs or more in a single week just from getting to bed earlier. Apply a good sleep protocol for just 7 days and you'll have all the evidence you need to become a believer.

(Note: 8 hours from midnight to 8am is NOT the same as going to bed by 10. I'll explain more when in my in-depth sleep article)

You can also help reduce your cortisol through a simple supplement strategy that provides your body with the full spectrum of nutrients required to better tolerate stress.

These should include the vitamin B family, Calcium, High dose vitamin C and magnesium.

In addition I'd recommend taking a cortisol controlling supplement like Magnolia bark and Theanine which you can get from your local health food store and have been shown to be very effective at helping control cortisol release during stressful periods.

Nutritionally, eat plenty of apples and onions which are high in quercetin and can help with reducing intercellular cortisol and grapefruit which does the same through its active substance Naringenin.

Hopefully, it should be clear that the best way to cope with stress is to avoid it altogether or at least reduce it.

Try identifying high-stress situations in advance and working out coping strategies to deal with them as they arise. Add exercise (though minimise aerobic exercise which releases more cortisol) and relaxation techniques and eat a clean and healthy diet and your cortisol levels will soon come under control.

Once they do you'll see the fat disappear faster than easier and with far less effort than ever before.

Go ahead, release your cortisol brakes today!

Start by getting some good sleep for just 7 nights and see what happens.

Dax Moy
London's Leading Personal Trainer

Friday, September 11, 2009

Taking Off The Brakes For Fat Loss Success Part 2

Dax Moy Personal Training London










In my last post I spoke about how most of us have 'brakes' applied to so many different areas of our lives that it's next to impossible to get any real headway and break the fat loss inertia that we're under.

Despite trying ever-stricter diets, ever-harder workouts and every new fatloss and fitness fad that comes on the market, it seems that few, if any, are able to see any real progress and even those that do tend to get caught up in the old fatloss 2-step of 1 step forward, 2 steps back where they lose a bunch of weight and gain it all back again.

Often with interest.

Now, it would be easy to say that it's because the diets themselves don't work or because the workouts aren't effective but that's not the case. In fact, every single diet and every single workout you've ever heard of will work for a time before coming to a grinding halt. So yes, while it's true that some workouts and some diets work better than others, the truth is they ALL work.

So, why aren't they working for you?

It's because you haven't taken the brakes off, plain and simple.

And that's a shame because it's so easy to take them off and start seeing some very real progress almost immediately but, of course, for that to happen you need to know what those brakes are in the first place, right?

So here's the first brake you need to remove to start seeing results.

You're Unclear Why You're Here.

It's true.

Most people talk about 'getting in shape' or 'losing some weight' or 'toning up' because they don't have the slightest clue about what they really want to look like, feel like or what they want their body to be able to do. So instead of clarity of focus which, of course, will lead to clarity of action, they are 'fuzzy' about what they want

to accomplish from their exercise and diet efforts.

The trouble is, fuzzy don't cut it when it comes to achieving amazing, spectacular, jaw-dropping results.

In fact, fuzzy kills them dead before they even start.

You've no doubt heard the expression 'you can't hit a target you never hang' which means, of course, that if you don't know what you're aiming at you stand no chance of achieving it and this applies building as much to building a great body as it does to anything else.

Simply put, if you don't know EXACTLY what 'getting in shape' 'losing some weight' or 'toning up' means to you, then you're never going to achieve any of these things, let alone stay that way.

As I'm always telling my personal training clients, you've got to be clear why you're here.

Without this clarity you're left to the mercy of chance and, worse still, willpower.

If you don't know what you want to accomplish then it's a roll of the dice as to whether you'll accomplish ANYTHING at all. This is why you often here people complain of having gone to the gym for years yet getting no real results.

It's because their efforts aren't focused.

It's also why you hear of people falling off their diets, dropping out of their training and trying again and again and again through willpower to get back on track. They'll never do it though. Not if they don't have something to apply that will to in the first place. Without a clear goal to aim at, they'll be caught up in a perpetual battle with their willpower and hoping against hope that 'this time, this one time...' they'll finally achieve the breakthrough their hoping for.

So that's the bad news!

But before you go thinking this is all sounding a bit 'doom and gloom', think again.

As powerful a brake to fatloss success as fuzzy focus can be, it's easy to remove it and see some pretty amazing

results in super-quick time.

It's as simple as choosing.

Choosing what you want to achieve, why you want to achieve it and what you're willing to do to have it come true for you in your life. It can be summarised in 4 simple steps that you can apply right away to start seeing results.

They are:

1. Know what you want to achieve and by when - Be clear why you're here. What does the perfect you look like...

EXACTLY? Picture your thighs, your butt, your stomach, your chest, your arms and anywhere else that you'd like to see a change. What do you want them to look like? Do you know the weight you want to be? The clothing size? Specific measurements?

Write them down.

If you don't but you know what you want to look like then write that down instead.

"I want Jessica Alba waistline, J-Lo butt, Jennifer Aniston Arms..." is a good way to get focused on the outcome you most desire from your efforts and definitely more inspiring than the vague goals that most of us set for ourselves.













Regardless of what your goals are, once you've set them, set a date for achieving them. Make sure the date excites and motivates you so that it feels close enough that you know you'll have to work for it but far enough away that you believe it's possible.

Losing 3olbs in the next 2 weeks may sound great but you know you're unlikely to achieve it so you won't even start.

Losing 30lbs in the next 2 years hardly lights a fire under you either, right?

Challenge yourself, stretch yourself with what you really want to achieve and by when. This will do more for remving your brakes than practically any other step you can take.

2. Know why you want the goal - It's been said that those of us who have a strong enough WHY can deal with almost any HOW. In other words, if we know why we want something, we'll overcome practically any barriers that are keeping that thing from us.














Stands to reason then, that if you've had trouble staying on a fat loss diet and exercise program that you probably don't have a strong enough why. If you did, you'd already have the results you want, wouldn't you?

Getting clear on why you're here means being honest about why you want to achieve these new goals. Honest with yourself. Most people aren't.

They tell themselves that they just want to look good on the beach or fit into their old jeans but the truth is, most of us want much, much more than that. We want to feel more confident, feel more sexy, attract or keep a partner, be around for our kids and, as strange as it sounds, we want to like ourselves again. Most of us don't like ourselves very much at all.

Knowing why you're doing what you're doing makes the efforts worth while. You can see the benefits of passing up that chocolate bar or giving up alcohol for a few months if you know what it's all for and you believe that you'll get there. You won't give up anything for more than 5 minutes if you don't have a real, compelling reason for doing it.

So, why do YOU want these goals?

3. Know the price - Everything has a price and you simply have to pay it or you don't get the goods. A great body is no exception. It costs time, effort, lifestyle changes, commitment and yes, evene a little money. If you're willing to pay these then the body of your dreams is yours, guaranteed. If you aren't then...













Trouble is, most people never truly ask themselves what the price is going to BEFORE they set out on their new diet and exercise program. So they do ok for a week or two then get sidetracked by the office party or the temptation of alcohol over dinner at their favourite restaurant or that tub of icecream that they've always had on a Friday night to unwind.

They'd never get sidetracked in the first-place if they'd taken some time to think about the price they may have to pay to get what they want. For example, if you know in advance that for 30 days you committed to not drinking alcohol, eating wheat or having sugar then it's far easier to plan your life and remain motivated than if you simply say that you're going to 'cut back' or 'do your best to eat healthy'.

Knowing the price in advance means that you're not going to be tripped up by the unexpected events and temptations that will undoubtedly come your way while you're working toward your goals. NOT knowing the price get you what you've been getting up to now... frustrated!

What price will you have to pay to achieve your goal?













4. Be Willing To Pay The Price - So you know what you want, why you want it and what it's going to cost you. That's great. You've come further than most people ever will to removing the psychological and motivational brakes that hold them back from their weight loss goals but that's still not enough to guarantee your success.

In order for that to happen you need to ask yourself "Am I willing to pay this price?"

Perhaps not surprisingly, few people really are. They say they are but they're not.

What about you?

Given the goals you've set for yourself, the deadlines you're working, the reason you want to achieve them and the time, effort and lifestyle changes you're going to have to make to make your fat loss and fitness goals a reality, are you still willing to pay that price?

Don't mess around here, this is important!

If you've realised that you're NOT willing to pay then either amend the goals or change the timelines so that you get to a point where you ARE. Don't, whatever you do, start out on a goal that you know in advance you're not going o see through. It's disheartening and leaves you feeling frustrated and like a failure.

Only work on goals that you're 100% committed to seeing come to life, if not change them.

If you ARE 100% committed to your goals then great! You've accomplished what so few people ever manage to do. You've

made a true decision to have your body and your life the way that YOU want it.

The word 'decision' shares its roots with the word 'incision' and it means that when you decide you 'cut off from all other possibility'. A true decision is a powerful thing and it's the surest way to guarantee that the major brakes holding you back from looking and feeling the way you want to will be removed and that you can finally make get over even the most stubborn obstacles that that have been keeping you from your goals.

None of what I've shared here is exactly rocket science is it?

In fact, you could say that it's all commense sense stuff really, but then, it's not really that comon to see this level of sense applied to most people's goals. Except those who are actually achieving them, of course!

You should join them.

Take 10 minutes today to sit down and remove the brakes around this area for yourself. You'll feel more focus, more passion, more purpose than you have in ages and when you do, amazing things will start to happen for you.

I guarantee it!

Truth, Joy and Love

Dax Moy
The UK's Leading Personal Trainer

P.S - In the next instalment of 'Releasing The Brakes' I'll be telling you about the little known nutritional brakes that are practically guaranteeing that you'll retain fat, mno matter how many caloires you cut from your diet.

Keep 'em peeled!

Friday, September 04, 2009

Take Off The Brakes For Fat Loss Success Part 1

Well, I'm finally back from my month-long family vacation to Thailand, The Land Of Smiles, and have come home to literally thousands of emails from my readers asking how they can get back on track with their fat loss and inch loss goals after a summer of too much drinking, too much eating and far too little exercise.

It seems that the summer flab-monster has paid far too many people a visit this year : )

Now, you might expect that my first advice to you would be to simply jump on the diet and exercise bandwagon and 'just do it' as the famous Nike slogan says but it's not.

You see, as much as we all like to think that 'just do it' will, well, just do it in terms of our fat loss, the truth is it won't.

You know this already.

You know that whenever you've thrown yourself in at the deep end of a new diet and exercise plan that your best intentions very soon fall by the wayside and you end up back at square one disappointed, disillusioned and more frustrated than ever, right?

Right!

So this time we're going to take a different tack.

We're going to do what I call 'releasing the brakes' to absolutely guarantee that your journey into fat loss and inchloss will go smoothly, surely and faster than ever before.

Now, you may never have heard of releasing the brakes but it's something we've done here at my London Personal Training Studios for years and we explain it to our clients this way;

Dax Moy Personal Training Studios

Imagine jumping into your car and getting ready to drive to work. You pop the key in the ignition, turn it and the engine roars to life.

You check your mirrors, signal and get set for your manouver out of your parking space but instead of smoothly pulling away from the kerb, the engine screams out louder and louder still, the car vibrates and you go nowhere at all.

You give the car more gas and more still, yet stubbornly, it still refuses to move despite all your efforts.

You have one last attempt, put the pedal to the metal, engine roaring louder than ever and slowly, grudingly, the car starts to roll forward.

Just then, you look down and realise the silly mistake you'd made.

Your park-brake was still on and you had your foot on the footbrake.

No wonder it had been so difficult to get started!


Of course, this scenario sounds ridiculous when you read it here doesn't it? You'd never make such a stupid mistake with your car, right?

But are you aware that this is the exact mistake you're making time and time and time again with your efforts to lose fat and keep it off?

Just like in the car scenario above, it's likely that your attempts at fat loss have been focused on doing more and more and more or 'giving it more gas' when it comes to your workouts, your nutrition and your lifestyle changes and, also like the scenario above, it's likely that you're using up tons of your 'fuel' in the form of energy, motivation and enthusiam without ever really getting much of a result.

Yet think about this; if you take of the brakes that are keeping you from your fat loss results you'll get there with far less effort in far less time and achieve far MORE of a result.
You only have to take off the brakes.

But what ARE these brakes? What do they look like and how can we take them off?

Over the next week I'll be exposing each of the 5 major classifications of brakes that are keeping you from achieving spectacular fat loss results and sharing with you exactly what you need to do to release each one in turn.

All YOU have to do is release each brake as we identify it and you'll see, feel and experience a far faster level of fat loss than you've ever known before.

Tomorrow I'll be sharing the first and most important brake of them all and sharing a simple yet seriously effective way of removing it immediately and for good.

Til then!

Dax Moy
London's Leading Personal Trainer

P.S - What do YOU think are the 5 main brakes that hold you back from achieving YOUR health and fitness goals?