Client Profile – John Cutting: "Finding time for a fitness adventure"

(aka 2 years of Contemporary Athlete)

Before CA – Way back when

Raising kids, daily lap swimming and watching sports can take up a lot of one’s day and even make one believes finding time for anything else seem unlikely.  However, in the grand scheme of things, staying healthy should be high up on your list of daily priorities.  As a parent this became painfully evident while watching my son rehab his way through a sports-related back injury.  The upside to his journey into and out of competitive soccer was his decision to be a health and wellness major in college.

CA 101 – The early months

Based on my son’s incessant pleading and logical arguments to do something else other than swim laps, I drank his youthful Kool-Aid and entered the world of CA.  Overcoming the fear to walk into CA was step one and step two was participating in my first CA session.  Crawling, stretching, box pushing, running, twisting, jumping, squatting, inch worming, rowing, and burpees are not life threatening but they sure do make you question the logic behind completing steps one and two.  If sore muscles and creaking joints are a sign of doing good work then I must have a perfect record.  CA humbles you but it doesn’t knock you down.  Everyone shares the same fun!

John Cutting: Finding time for my real life adventure into fitness"

CA – The middle months

Some might say that drinking the Kool-Aid is easy and buying into the whole exercise regime isn’t rocket science and they might be correct.  However, most of the fitness advertising touting a perfectly sculpted body through the use of this device or doing that exercise routine fails to mention that without a personal commitment you likely won’t achieve anything beyond a growing sense of frustration.  Perceptible change isn’t achieved overnight but with continued work and CA helping me I can attest that it does happen.

 

John Cutting: Finding time for my real life adventure into fitness"

CA Today – Believe

Although a medical issue created a three month gap in my routine, not returning to CA did not enter my mind.  One problem with an exercise routine is not really knowing how long it will take before you start feeling fitter and looking better.  Hearing those encouraging words during sets of burpees or kilometers of rowing made me a believer in the CA experience.

John Cutting: Finding time for my real life adventure into fitness"

CA Tomorrow – keep doing it

If life is just another terminal disease, you can either let it slowly kill you or you can get out of your chair and do something positive for yourself.  I am about to turn 62 and my CA adventure is certainly not over.  I survived the early months, the middle months, today and I will be there tomorrow!

The # 1 easiest fitness hack!

Are you tired of having NO gains?

Working your butt off and NOT losing any weight?

Feeling the pressure of eating ONLY rice cakes and celery?

Hating your stair-mill because you aren’t getting anywhere fast?

Well, I have the easiest solution that NOBODY is talking about, and it makes me kind of annoyed. Most of my day is spent working with hard working youth athletes who have homework, and silly exams, and deadlines, and 4 practices a day. Do you know what is different about them in comparison to you? (I mean other than the 10-20-30-40 years between you?)

Nothing. Not one single thing. We all have jobs, we try to maintain our families from imminent meltdown, eat reasonably healthy, workout, maybe train for a 5k, and not crawl to deeply into a bottle of wine or bourbon once a week. The only difference is this.

 

SLEEP

 

As an adult we look at sleep as OPTIONAL

As a youth, sleep is MANDATORY (Thanks parental units 1 +2!)

Sleep is where we recover, and we clean out our brain of stress, and toxins, and all of the other things that keep us from losing weight, progressing our bodies where we want, and keeps us from being rational people with generally good intentions toward other humans. ( I mean even I get cranky on a 16 hour day on the gym floor.)

If you don’t believe me take a few minutes to watch this video put together by people with PHd’s and stuff!

When you are done watching the video. If you think there is somebody who should read this article to really help them succeed with their New Year’s goals please send it along and ask them to subscribe to our newsletter for my epic material! Or better yet the CA Youtube channel where we post a new workout and training tips weekly!

 

 

 

Patience is the answer

Training is a lot like life.  In both, the roads towards progress and success are full of obstacles. Most of the time patience is the answer.

In life this could mean a surprise company move, being laid off, even the death of a pet or a loved one.

In training, there are often weeks filled with injuries and accidents that prevent you from optimal training.  There are often months spent at a plateau, perhaps even in conjunction with those life events that all conspire keep you away from the gym for longer than you’d like.

One thing that will keep you going is understanding and practicing patience.

The dictionary definition of patience is “The capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.”

It is important to understand that health is a lifetime commitment and fitness is a lifelong work in progress.

In between mastering new movements or hitting new PRs there will be times when you get discouraged by a perceived lack of progress.  You will get knocked down and scraped up.  You will get caught at or called in to work, but the only way to guarantee you’ll stop making progress is if you stop working.

As long as you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you will be further along than if you quit and stop moving altogether.  Sometimes you get slowed down, or get thrown off track, or hit bad weather, but you keep going.  The only way to make sure you keep on the right track is to keep going.

Practicing patience means recognizing that you won’t be able to walk in to the gym each day and absolutely crush everything you do.

Practicing patience means accepting that sometimes things will come up, and when they do, you do the best you can until you can resume working the way the way you’d like to.

Practicing patience means seeing the bigger picture.  You will experience ups and downs, you just have to keep going.

Work hard, roll with the speed bumps, treat obstacles as opportunities, and learn from every experience

Patience has power, and learning to use it will help you keep moving forward.