I know you are busy. I know you work long hours.

I also know that you want to lose a bit of weight, live a healthier lifestyle and balance the modern demands of the busy professional.

But how do you do it?

Here are my top 5 skills that will help you achieve all your fitness goals and still have the energy and the drive to be successful in your career.

1.Learn to cook some basic meals. 

This is a crucial step. It is important that you learn to grocery shop and prepare your own meals instead of blindly following a meal plan like a robot until you cannot follow it any longer.

If you don't like cooking, get a healthy meal delivery service order each week. At least the meals will be calorie controlled as you will not have a clue if you eat out consistently. It also saves money and time for you to focus on work, family and other life events.

2.Tune in to your own physical signs of hunger. 

If you keep eating snacks and grazing you are never going to feel hungry. If you eat out of boredom you will not learn to listen to your internal hunger cues and you will look for external cues for how to eat.

Hunger is not the enemy. Hunger is a natural state when your body is telling you to fuel up. Do not fear getting hungry.

3. Practise exercise as a regular habit. 

This is important as many of you leave it too late and then suddenly panic and believe you have to go into a 12 week transformation program where the personal trainer will "beast" you in the gym.

Learn to exercise consistently so that you don't start something drastic and constantly injure yourself.

4. Measure the most important variables to ensure continued progress.

I know you have KPI's or quarterly targets for your job and business, yet many of my clients have no idea what their fitness goals should be and what they should be measuring.

At the very least measure the following.

• Your resting heart rate.
• Blood pressure.
• Body fat %
• Weight.
• Waist Circumference.
• Daily steps.
• Weekly increases at the gym.
• Your clothes and tape measurements.
• Picture progress.

By tracking these each week or month you can work out if your plan is working or if it's time to troubleshoot and change.

Remember, data is useful. It should not be used as a judgement exercise.

5. Realise that change is incremental and slow and there are no quick fixes and no instant gratification.

A university degree takes 3-7 years to complete.

Promotions in your company can take years. (I want it now).

Meeting the right partner takes years.

Building a successful business takes years.

Do not think it is any different for training, getting in shape or overhauling your lifestyle.

I hope these 5 skills resonate with you.

​Trust me, if you can stick to at least 2-3 of these you will succeed and change your lifestyle in a much more positive direction and for the long term.
​

I know that sometimes you are too busy to go to the gym so here is a quick 20 minute home strength workout.

This is brilliant for working a lot of muscles and getting a whole body workout.

Warm Up:

• Jog on the spot for 60 seconds
• Warm up by performing 10 repetitions of each workout

The Workout:

• Set your timer for 20 minutes.
• Round 1: Perform the 4 exercises one after the other for 10 repetitions each.
• Rest if needed.
• Round 2: Perform the 4 exercises one after the other for 11 repetitions each.
• Rest if needed.
• Repeat for 13, 14, 15 or whatever you can do with perfect form for 20 minutes.

Cooldown:

• Stretch all the major muscle groups used.

How to progress the workout.

I usually don't like to increase the speed of repetitions for strength workouts as it encourages inertia and momentum to perform the exercises and this leads to poor form and injury.

The best way to progress this home strength workout is to add in one extra exercise for 2-3 workouts and then potentially one more exercise.

Or, you could increase the length of time for the workout as you get fitter. For example 20 minutes for 2 weeks, 25 minutes for 2 weeks and 30 minutes for 2 weeks.

​Hope you enjoy the workout.

Every week we put up a free workout on the Human Design blog. If you missed any - sign up here and get the free workout delivered to your inbox every Sunday.

http://www.northsydney-personaltrainer.com.au/HUMAN-DESIGN-WEEKLY-WORKOUTS.html

This weeks workout is a cardio sprint interval workout. See the video below for an example of how to do the intervals.

I would only encourage you to do this workout if you have at least 3 months of base cardio fitness. This means that you can bike, run or swim for 30 minutes straight without stopping and you do some kind of cardio fitness 3-4 times per week.

If you are out of shape and you want to do this workout, please scale back the intensity to about a 6-7 out of 10 on the hard sprint parts.

Warm Up:

• Warm up for 5 minutes at about 50% of your best pace.
• Warm up for the next 5 minutes at 50% of your best pace but mix in some 10 second sprints at about 85-90% of your best pace. This primes the body for the harder sprints to come.

The Workout:

• At minute 10, perform a high intensity max effort sprint for 30 seconds. Make sure the resistance is heavy enough to allow 90-110 RPM as it will feel too light otherwise.
• Recover for 2:30minutes at an easy pace, 30-40% of your best pace.
• Repeat for 3 more sprints

Cool Down:

• Ride at an easy pace for 5 minutes to cool down.

This is a low impact but high quality fitness workout designed to improve your aerobic fitness, deliver oxygen to your muscles to burn more calories and increase your overall weight loss attempts.

​Enjoy.

This weeks workout is a mixed home fitness workout. I wanted to combine some cardio and strength to help you improve your overall fitness.

This workout is quick but you will work up quite a sweat. It can be done at the park, in a hotel room or even at home.

See the video below for the exercises and technique.

Warm Up:

• Warm up by performing 1 minute of skipping + 10 bodyweight squats + 10 push ups + 10 paused crunches + 30 mountain climbers + 50 punches.

The Workout.

• Round 1: Alternate between the skipping rope and the bodyweight squats. This part is tough on the legs.
• Round 2: Working on strength. Alternate between push ups and paused crunches. It starts with 10 reps of each. Then 9 reps of each, and keep going until you are down to 1 rep of each.
• Round 3: Alternate between the mountain climbers and the shadow boxing to work on your cardio again.

This is a simple workout with enough variety to make you sweat and make it move fast so you don't get bored.
​

Here is a quick observation about food intake because I know you are busy.

I have been training busy professionals to lose weight and improve their health for the past 15 years and I have received numerous food diaries and the one big thing that sticks out is the SNACKING.

The average food diary from a personal training client has far too many 'feeding times'.

This has to be managed if you want to lose weight.

Snacking completely messes up your biological hunger mechanism.

You have no idea if you are hungry or not if you keep putting bits of food into your mouth consistently.

Your body will never access it's stored body fat if you keep providing more fuel multiple times throughout the day.

I ask our busy clients to eat just 3-4 times per day with nothing in between because it teaches your body to eat when you are actually tummy rumbling hungry.

This means your body is most likely tapping into stored body fat to provide you with energy and it is telling you to eat because it needs fuel.

The constant snacking will mean you are simply burning the snacks you are eating.

Give yourself a chance.

Most of you work long hours and sit at a desk and you are not a professional athlete so there is really no need to be snacking at all.

It also means that your main meals are too small and not filling you up if you can eat within an hour or two of that meal.

This big habit is crucial for those wanting to manage your diet and health.

It is not good doing KETO, PALEO, FASTING or whatever if you cannot manage this habit.

I encourage you to really focus on NOT EATING between meals.

For the first few days you will struggle but then you will realise how many little bites, licks and treats you are having and how much it is having a detrimental effect on your weight loss and health.
​