This week in review

I've neglected this blog slightly due to working on some other stuff.

Quite probably the most interesting thing that happened this week is that I received my "Team DaveHPT : Flexible Dieting" silicone wristbands in the mail. I'll be mailing some of these out to clients / fans who want to represent me, early next week.

I thought I'd have some fun with advertising too, as follows:

Post by Dave Hargreaves Personal Training.

I had plans for a more elaborate ruse but you don't get to put much text on these things. You can see that this ad leads to a new page that I set up earlier in the week, trying a different format that I basically stole from more successful marketers. Of course, unlike most similar pages I actually talk a lot of sense so who knows if it will be as effective or not. We can only hope!

Over on my main blog I wrote a new entry about Vegetarian Health & Fitness, and another one about How Unhealthy Foods Can Help You Lose Weight.

I guess that's all? Also we're two weeks out from FitX which is pretty exciting.

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CRAZY Personal Trainer shares entirely sensible method to produce amazing results exactly as you'd expect.

Studying up on marketing techniques over the weekend, and I UNEXPECTEDLY learned this one WEIRD TRICK that produces UNEXPLAINABLE results... I'm AMAZED that everyone isn't doing it this way.

Uh... that's the trick. Talk about how it's something "weird", "unexpected", "unexplainable", and "amazing" and so on. So for my online coaching system it might be "CRAZY PT SHARES ONE WEIRD TRICK FOR UNEXPLAINABLE AMAZING RESULTS IN WEIGHT LOSS" or something like that.

Except there's one problem applying this to what I do. There's nothing weird about it, it is entirely explainable either by the laws of science or just common sense, and the results are exactly what you'd expect. Amazing I can still use because people usually are amazed at how easy they find it, when they are actually armed with the right strategy. Also crazy cos I'm somewhat eccentric.

When you eat the right amount to maintain a goal weight, you end up at that weight. When you train constructively rather than just to burn calorie, you build your goal body type. In due time you arrive at your goal weight, in your goal condition. Very simple!

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A little music to training analogy

Some of you might or might know I was quite an accomplished musician earlier in life. If you watch my training videos there's usually some of my music over the top of the sound of weights clanging and grunts being grunted.

Now, some musicians play by ear. This means they don't really know the theory but they do know to play. Sometimes this might mean their repertoire is somewhat limited, but on the other hand some of the worlds most acclaimed musicians fit this category.

When I played, I had a reasonable knowledge of theory but got to the point where I could kind of ignore the theory and just play what I wanted to hear. My good friend and now online PT client Dean Gaudoin who's talent and knowledge of theory greatly surpasses my own would be able to hear what I was playing and tell me "oh you're playing the minor seven with the added fourth, so I'll play this to accompany it"... and I'd have to look at my fingers for a bit and then think "wow he's right, that IS what I'm playing".

Now then. For some reason  I can remember many years ago reading an interview with guitarist Joe Satriani, and the interviewer raised something about a particular player "not using scales". In other words, playing by ear. And Joe explained "whether he realises it or not, what he is actually playing is the pentatonic blues scale".

So... just because you're not aware of the theory, it doesn't mean that what you're doing is not explained by theory.

Training... or more specifically, dieting for weight loss and body composition goals is very similar. If you are successful it is because you have hit suitable total calories, fibre and macro ratios. You might not be tracking your intake or setting targets, you may not agree with or believe in the "If It Fits Your Macros" concept, but that is still what you are doing.  The only difference is in actually determining those nutritional targets and having a plan to ensure you hit them, rather than just happening to get it right by eating random amounts or random foods.

I see a lot of industry types and assorted know-it-alls scoffing at the concept of Flexible Dieting or IIFYM, interpreting it as "you're saying you can just eat as much as you want of whatever you like?" Clearly that's the opposite of what it really is. What it really means is having targets corresponding to your requirements for energy, protein, dietary fats, fibre and so on, and then choosing appropriate amounts of different foods to meet those requirements. 

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Cognitive dissonance in estimating calorific intake.

This is rather a great video and there is a possibly epiphany inducing part just a few minutes in. He's talking about how the brain kind of just takes in little pieces of information, and fills in the gaps with what it EXPECTS to come up with the big picture. Often enough, what it comes up with isn't accurate or correct.

Relative to us people trying to manage our weight and see great results from training... very often people are certain that they're hitting a particular calorie target, but they're not actually logging / otherwise keeping track of their intake. Just like in the example in the video, it's a lot like flying blind. If you don't use the instruments available and trust in them even if your intuition is telling you other wise... you could soon find you're spiraling out of control.

Relative to calorie targets I had an interesting conversation a week or two back with some industry people.... and I won't drop names but there would few you may have heard of who are rightly quite well respected and influential. We were discussing the idea of INCREASING calorie targets for weight loss, rather than just slashing them lower and lower. It was one of those sort of "we agree that it is the right approach, but we disagree on WHY it works out like it does" conversations. I talk a lot about how if your calorie targets are too low, you don't have the resources available to get results from training, and your body just wants to store energy. The point the other (more experienced and better educated, if i am honest with you) guys made was that in their experience and also according to research, in such cases the problem is with dramatic under estimating / under reporting of calorie intake. So, we have a calorie target which is too low anyway, and we think we're hitting it but in actual fact we're still way over our required intake.

I'm humble enough to accept the possibility that from time to time I might give the wrong target to someone, but I was told there's really not much variance from one human being to the next... assuming their physical statistics (height, age, activity level and so on) are the same. Aka the mathematical formulas don't lie, and if you really test it under clinical standards you'll find without exception people's actual intake corresponds quite precisely with what you'd expect to maintain their body weight. Well... that's the expert opinion but in my observation and experience, I still think you can throw that off by restricting to dangerously low calorie intake, forcing your body to compensate.

Either way, I like to think that my approach of setting targets as MINIMUMS will address both of these possible issues. By being focussed on exceeding a minimum target, I feel we're more likely to report our intake accurately... "hmm I'm still below target, oh wait i just remembered that snack", that sort of thing.

Still, I want people planning ahead to ensure success rather than just tracking retrospectively to explain why they're not seeing progress. And if you're STILL not seeing progress... consider the possibility that your perception of how much you're really taking in might be a little skewed.

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Too disorganised to train and eat right?

How many people out there are  failing on their diet / training / weight loss plan because they're too disorganised?

I was thinking about this. Its a common complaint.

i think people... well... some people are pretty fkn hopeless. I'm thinking of a few people I know (and have kinda filtered out of my life) who are 20 minutes late to anything and always show up 10 bucks short of the cost or whatever else... and they just think that's normal and they're not even embarrassed about doing it EVERY TIME, and don't understand why people get frustrated with them. Just fkn useless cunts who need to fkn get it together. In my experience usually drummers.

Those are actually a minority though. You're probably not one of them. If you screw up once in a while you think "bloody hell, I won't slip up like that again" and generally speaking, you get to school / work on time, you get your laundry done before you have to resort to sniffing your socks or undies to find the least smelly pair because you ran out of clean ones 3 days ago, you get your bins out on bin night... if there's concert tickets on sale or something like that you're damn sure you'll get that shit sorted... every day things and occassional things, you get that shit DONE.

All of that takes organisational skills. 

Probably something you've never thought about before, and quite possibly right now you're thinking "oh but that's different though... that doesn't really count". But it does. You're perfectly able to organise your daily activities and even add some special stuff that needs to be done at a precise special time (concert tickets the minute they go on sale, for example) because it's important to you.

And for the day to day stuff, you don't even make a big deal out of it. You just do it on autopilot without even weighing up the option of NOT putting your bin out on the right night, for example.

You just get it done.

Training can work the same way. Not that you should see it as a chore, but it's simply a matter of deciding where it best fits into your schedule, and then doing it simply because it is a part of your schedule. Dieting... especially flexible dieting, works the same way. Schedule your meals where it suits you, choose the foods you enjoy in amounts to suit your requirements.

Since we're not on a restrictive diet that leaves us hungry, and we're not forcing ourselves to eat anything we don't enjoy, there is really nothing difficult about this. You just need to get it organised and get it done. Fortunately, getting things organised and getting them done is something you are actually very good at.

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