We love to look great, stay healthy and push ourselves each day. Health and exercise is part of our daily routine and well, it’s OUR lifestyle. Doing it every day and staying committed to the gym can be tough when you find yourself stuck in a regular day to day routine. Coming from experience, I personally know the feeling, and it sucks! It takes away the excitement you once had, and instead of it feeling like a lifestyle routine, it begins to feel like a work routine. After seeing first hand, talking to members and things I find to be pretty effective, I have come up with 7 tips to get you engaged and find the excitement into your gym time….

Gym partner- Finding yourself that SWOLE-mate to lift and push you more than you normally do, can do more than just build a stronger relationship. A gym partner that is as serious as you about the gym, will hold you accountable and push you both mentally and physically to help you achieve results.
Change the environment- Changing the scene can make a huge impact. On nice days, take the exercise routine outdoors. When you have beautiful weather, take advantage. Go for a run and after every few miles, stop and do body exercises for a certain amount of reps or time. Rest after and continue. Most local parks have a fitness trail that you follow and gives you an exercise when you reach a check point.
New routine- If you prefer the weights and machines, try changing the way you train. Example, try switching cardio for strength training first and then finish with cardio. Another switch could be the machine or exercise that you do and the reps, sets and rest time. Play with your routine and see what works with you and gives you a challenge.
Playlist- We all love music, so why not create a playlist that you can pump iron with. Same with the playlist, add and change the songs from time to time.
Keep track of progress- Record every exercise you do. Write down how many sets, reps and rest time. Each week you repeat the same pattern, you’ll see where you are getting stronger and where you need improvement.
15 minute prep – Sometimes all you need is a quick prep. Warming up with a motivational audio. Or driving around and taking the long route to prepare yourself with a playlist or just the peace and quiet you have to yourself.
Rest- If you find yourself doing all of the above and nothing works, try taking one or two weeks off. Maybe your body just needs a rest and often times we ignore the warning signs our mind and body send. Listen to your body and rest, guarantee you’ll feel better when you get back.

"Empowered Training...Change your mind, change your body, change your life!"

Don't Lose Focus

September 08, 2015 by Jonathan Sorto in social life

As the summer vacation officially comes to an end, teachers and college students alike are preparing for a new year with new opportunities. Most students are excited for what the school year will bring, wondering what they will achieve in the end, and how far they will go. But how many of the students that start out with a plan actually follow through with it?

You know that hyped feeling on your first day with many new goals, ideas and excitement of what you wanted to get accomplished in the upcoming semester. You started the first day checking off all the things that you needed to do to start your journey to the new goals you set. The first day goes well and you go home feeling accomplished.

Before you know it, the first week goes by and you manage to check off everything you needed to do. Perfect. Now the second, third and fourth week pass by and what tends to happen? You slowly begin to fall off. Each week that passed by you found yourself not being able to check off everything that you checked off on the first and second week. Eventually you find yourself losing track and falling off course. Flash forward and it’s the end of the year. It flew by and all the motivation you gave yourself and at the beginning is no longer there. Why? Because everything you told yourself you would get done, never got done. You beat yourself up and begin to believe that it’s impossible to set goals.

I don’t blame you. I’ve been there.

I’ve had the same issue of thinking it was impossible to get anything done. I‘ve found myself repeating the same excuse “I’m too busy, and I just don’t have any time for it.” A favorite line that I would hear many of my friends and family say whenever they “failed” at getting something done. I encourage you to not think of it as failing, but rather that you haven’t yet found the solution. If you feel like you failed, reframe your mind to look at it as being temporarily stuck. Just like a exam: if you can’t answer one question, it doesn’t mean you failed. You can always go back to it when you have an idea of what the solution might be. With that in mind, let’s talk about solutions to help us stay on track with our goals.

Firstly, instead of saying that there is not enough, accepting it, and getting comfortable in that excuse, do your best to manage your time. The key to understanding time management is knowing how to use the free time you get to your advantage.

Find some alone time to sit down for 30-45 minutes with a plank paper and a pen. On that plank paper, you want to outline your weekly schedule Sun.-Sat. Write down the days you go to school and the time you are in each class. Same for the days you work. Write down the days and time you are out with friends and for how long. Write down the days you dedicate to school work. Once you have everything written down, take another sheet or make a chart on your computer with 7 columns. Labeling the top of each column with one day of the week. On the left side make as many rows as you need, because this side will have the hours of the day. Make sure that the first row is the earliest hour that you wake up on and the last row is the latest that you go to sleep during the week. Now that you have your chart created, plug in the days and hours you wrote down in its rightful spot. Be sure you also add in the amount of time you spend traveling to and from school and work; when you wake up and go to bed. Once you have your chart filled in, you will be able to see all the free time you have in each day.

This is a system I have found works for me and that have worked on many of the successful people that we hear and talk about today. Think of all the free time you spend on social media. Why not put that time to good use to benefit you with what you want to accomplish? Fill each free time spot with something productive that will help you move closer your goals. Think of small steps and doable activities that you can start with. Eventually progress to bigger tasks. You will be shocked by how much you can get done.

The second thing that will help you stay on track of you goals is getting plenty of rest. Without the adequate amount of rest, you will be too tired to follow your plan. Each day should be planned with at least 7-8 hours of sleep. You will be shocked with how much you can actually get done in a day. Just imagine what you can get accomplished in one month!

It important to have control and stability with your day. With only 24 hours in a day, how much time do you spend actually getting work done and being productive? Plan out your day, write down your daily goals. Start out the day with 2 goals that are easy to check off and spread the rest of your goals through the day. Write no more than 7 doable daily goals and keep them in your pocket for a constant reminder of what you need to get done. Trying to keep it all in your head will eventually bombard your mind with too much information to process. Writing down your day allows it to get it off your mind so you can focus on one task at a time.

Don’t feel bad if one or two days don’t go as planned. It’s only natural. Things happen, but just make sure that when they do happen, you refocus and pick your planning routine back up every night before you go to bed. It will take some getting used to, but once you have control of your time, you’ll have more control of your life.

“Plan Your Work & Work Your Plan”

Look Around You

August 11, 2015 by Jonathan Sorto in Fitness

Motivation! One of my favorite topics to discuss about with clients and with friends. What would be the number one thing that motivates YOU? Truly and carefully think about it. Meaning what comes to mind the moment you feel defeated, but brings you back to your feet? Maybe its family? A friend? Or your dream career? What is it? If you don’t have anything that’s fine. Not all people can say they have something to keep them going when they are defeated. What I can say is, motivation starts with your environment and the people around you. Mostly speaking the friends around you.

When someone asks you who your friends are, who comes to mind? From that amount, how many of those would you consider to be the ones that push you and always have nothing but a great time with you? If the number stayed the same, congratulations. It’s safe to say you have found your true friends and you really don’t need to read much more. If you couldn’t find one person, then you should do a reality check and get rid of the negative people in your life. Or maybe consider changing your environment. We always hear the saying, “Friends come and go, but family is forever”, anytime an argument happens between friends. Arguments and disagreements can cause tension in relationships, and this ultimately leads to hurt feelings. The “friends” that constantly bring nothing but tension, stress, and mentally and/or emotionally drain you. I know this from seeing and hearing it from clients. I have and had the privilege to work with countless clients who came to the gym looking to get in shape because they are tired of feeling sad and are unhappy with their lives. Usually unhappiness and negative emotions that are a result of a stressful job, bad relationship with a significant other, death, or family problems. By working out, they are looking to find a way to better their health and find their stress reliever.

Every client walks in with the same expectation, to see physical change. What they are not realizing is with change they are not only going to see physical change, but also mental and a lot of positive emotional change. As a self-defense mechanism, most clients tend to be shy and stray away from people because they are not confident with themselves. What they are not realizing is that everyone who they think is or could be judging is actually doing the same thing as them, feeling shy and nervous. By saying a simple ‘Hello” and smile, you begin to create a new positive atmosphere around you because you are beginning to break away from that shyness that leads to meeting new people. People who could in fact share the same, or if not slightly different story on why they started working out. Once they see that they are not the only ones who have felt defeated, they begin to form a mutual friendship. The type of friendship that motivates one another to keep pushing and looks out for you. A friendship that gives you someone to help you on your journey to a better you.

It doesn’t have to only happen in the gym. I used my clients because they are an example on how changing your environment leads to making the right friends and helps you find the positive motivation that you have been looking for. It can happen in anyplace. Just make sure to choose a place that you find to give you the happiness that you seek. Eventually the positive people that belong in your life as well as the right motivation will begin to fall in place. Trust me, it feels great to have 5 loyal, motivating friends than to have 25 “come and go” friends.

“Once you learn how to be happy, you won’t tolerate being around people who make you feel anything less”

You Will Never Know, Until You Try

Muscle & Weight Loss Made Simple

July 18, 2015 by Jonathan Sorto in Fitness

Why do we stop working for what we want? Why are we so quick to give up before actually investing time into something worth investing? Well one word comes to mind, Frustration. Frustration from things never going as planned. Frustration from constantly having setbacks that makes us feel like failures. Frustration from the thought of all the hard work you must invest to get to where you really want to be. Frustration can really push you or break you. It may set you in a negative state of mind that causes you to quit. Any frustration, big or small can stop you from thinking clear on what you want to get accomplished. It could also be the other way around. Frustration can be the reason why you achieve the success you want from any goal that you set. In other words, you find the opportunity in a negative situation.

Everyone wants to get to their end goal as quick as possible, right? It’s like driving a car. You start from point A and you drive until you get to point B. You estimate a 45 minute drive if you leave early to avoid any major traffic. You decide to play it safe. Making it an easy and stress less drive. Just like you planned, no traffic and arriving at the time you estimated to arrive. Awesome! You’re happy you got their safe and everything went as planned. Often times, goals can indeed be very similar like the car example. Everything goes smoothly because you decided to play it safe and planned ahead on how you would reach the end goal. But sometimes destiny has its own plans and well, everything can go out the window, despite how much effort you put to avoid any obstacle.

Let’s take that same example and add a twist. So, you start from point A and plan to arrive at point B in 45 minutes. On the way, your car gets a flat tire. You’re 30 minutes into the drive and your destination is only 20 minutes away. You are by yourself, cell phone reception is low, the nearest gas station is a few miles away, and you never changed a flat tire in your life. So what do you do? You change the tire any way you can, despite never doing it a day in your life. Why? It’s either find the solution in yourself or stay there longer until a miracle happens. You realize you are almost to your end goal, turning back will be pointless. If the tire can be replaced, its common sense to keep going forward until you get to your point B, or nearest help. Once you get the spare on, you slowly drive with precaution. Now you’ve arrived to the nearest gas station, found someone to fix it and got yourself back on the road.

With all that talk about cars, I want to make it clear that all goals can be very similar to that of the flat tire. How? Why? Well in the scenario, the flat tire represents the obstacle. Fixing the flat tire is best solution. You know you are not far from your goal and if you decide to quit, then you will never know how long you will have to wait until help arrives. Once you let the frustration pass, you take the time to think clear and find the solution within yourself. You not only begin to find various solutions, but you learn to be stronger and more confident. Once you take your solution idea and put it into action, the results only move you forward. Taking every step along the way with precaution, until you’re confident enough to move forward with ease.

We shouldn’t be too quick to give up the moment frustration comes into play. Obstacles are inevitable and you can only have control over so much. Do not allow frustration to overcome you. Let it pass, take the time to cool off, or even sleep on it. I guarantee results will come when you have a clearer mind and begin to brainstorm. Treat each obstacle that comes your way as a flat tire, the only solution is to fix it and once its fixed, keep moving forward. I’m sure you wouldn’t abandon your car and begin to walk home. Fix the solution and with every step along the way, you will realize more about yourself then when you started the trip.

“To conquer frustration, one must remain intensely focused on the outcome, not the obstacle.”