1. Realize that you are ready

You might not have everything you need to complete the journey, but you have enough to start RIGHT NOW. Don’t worry about the details – the journey will change you and you’ll find all the tools you need to reach your goals along the way. Just take some action, no matter how small, right now.

2. Embrace fear

Do you get anxious/scared when you go to take a shower? Hopefully not. What about before going to speak in front of hundreds of people, or before lifting a weight you’ve never lifted before? Fear will always be a part of your life, so instead of avoiding it at all costs, embrace it. View it as a guidepost that says what you’re about to do is important and meaningful to you, and then just do it.

Here is a fantastic free resource to help you tackle your fears: The Flinch

3. Consume less, create more

It’s near impossible to effectively consume and create at the same time. Try sprinting while reading a book, or jumping out a plane while doing your taxes (making sure to send the video footage to me) and lemme know how that goes.

The less time you spend consuming, the more time you have for creation, and creating is the only way to move forward.

Create movement. Create time. Create relationships. Create the life you want.

4. Get the #*(@ out of your life

Have you ever cleaned & organized your place after putting it off forever? For approximately 6-7 seconds after you’re done, the universe opens up and drops this knowledge nugget right into your head:  ”Damn this feels awesome! Why didn’t I do it sooner?”

This could be stuff that has been piling up forever, but it could also be negative people who just drag down at every turn.

Getting rid of stuff that only takes up space and adds no value makes room for things that do.

5. Be inspired daily

Read a book.
Have a great conversation.
Listen to a podcast (recommendations here, here, here & here)
Watch a dope movie clip.
Read some awesome quotes.

Pretty much do ANYTHING you can to get your mind right. Everything becomes easier to do with a positive mindset.

6. Make it fun.

‘Nuff said. If you don’t like doing it (or make it at least enjoyable on some level), you won’t stick with it.

7. Be a Toyota Prius, not a rocket ship.

The problem that often befalls people is not their actual goal, but the time frame that they set to achieve it. Losing 20lbs of fat ? Hell yeah – super possible! Losing 20lbs of fat in 30 days? Only if you have a chainsaw and are up for losing some limbs.

The more unrealistic the time frame, the more ridiculous things you’re gonna have to do to even have a chance of getting there. Even then, the chances of failure are pretty high.

A realistic time frame gives you more breathing room to find out what works and to play around the variables related to your goal, while still giving putting enough fire under your cheeks so that you don’t stretch it out into infinity.

Don’t burn out via a rocket ship-esque effort (aka an all out guts & glory approach with little to show for it when all is said & done). You’re in this for the long haul.

8. Chase failure like a cheetah chases…whatever it is that cheetahs chase.

No one fails by doing nothing; failure requires risk and action. Failure means you found a way that didn’t work – AWESOME!

And guess what? You didn’t die, the world didn’t come crashing down around you and you didn’t soil your pants.

You’ve lived to fight another day, gained valuable experience and are now one step closer to finding something does work.

9. Do something different

If you’ve been tackling a goal for some time with a lack of results, change something.

Expecting a different outcome by doing the same thing you’ve always done is like expecting a punch in the face from Mike Tyson (any era) not to hurt: no matter how much you want it to be true, it’s just not.

10. Never give up

If winning is the only option, how can you lose?

Bonus

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” - Dale Carnegie

“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” – Jim Rohn

“It’s always too early to quit.” – Norman Vincent Peale

“Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.” – Nido Qubein

“Opportunity does not knock, it presents itself when you beat down the door.” – Kyle Chandler

“Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.” – Peter Marshall

“The gap between ignorance and knowledge is much less than the gap between knowledge and action.”
-Anonymous

“The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.” – Confucius

“To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.” – Bruce Lee

A few months ago I wrote about one of the most effective strategies that I know for strength gain under any circumstance: reverse pyramid training. Today, I want to give you a few tips to ensure that your continue to progress for months and years to come.

The one draw back of RPT, or rather how people implement it, is that it’s fairly easy to burn out if you aren’t careful, which leads us to our first lesson: AVOID TRAINING TO FAILURE LIKE YOU’D AVOID EATING MEAT LEFT OUT IN THE BLAZING SUMMER SUN FOR 148 HOURS.

When I type in all caps, you know I mean business.

If you could only take away one delicious nugget of information, this would be it.

Think of your body as a car. Ideally, you’d be driving down the street at a normal speed and slowly braking at all traffic lights. Sure, there would be occasions when you’d have to stomp on the brakes to avoid a collision, but these moments are few and far between.

Now picture you’re another car, but this time you’re gunning the gas pedal every chance that you get, and when it comes stopping at a light you only know one way to do it: drop kicking the brakes at the very last moment.

Which one of these cars is more likely to fall apart faster?

Approach your training sessions with a sense of long term vision if you’re interested in long term progress. If you’re grinding out reps each every time you pick up a weight,  you better put on your chef hat because you’re creating a recipe for burnout, both physically & mentally.

Rep range first, weight increase second.

For reverse pyramid training, you first want to set up a rep range and let that guide your sessions. For a nice blend of strength and size gains gains I recommend a 2-5 rep spread using compound movements (think bench press, squat, overhead press, dips, rows & deadlifts). From here, and this is where the beautiful simplicity of this system comes into play, you stay at that weight until the you get to the top of the rep range.

Example:

Session 1: 225 x 2
Session 2: 225 x 3
Session 3: 225 x 3
Session 4: 225 x 4
Session 5: 225 x 5

Only after the last session where you hit 5 reps would you increase the weight by 5-10lbs (even smaller increases work as well) in order to bring yourself back down towards the bottom of the rep range, starting the process all over again – milk this for all it’s worth.

One note about the above: there’s nothing wrong with taking your time to hit the top number. In fact it’s much better to do that then grinding your way to the top just so that you can increase the weight, only to end up stalling soon after.

If you get to the top range and feel like you could’ve done one more rep, that’s a good sign that you’re ready to increase the weight. If you barely got that last rep, stay there for a week or two (or however long it takes) until that last rep doesn’t feel like you’re going to pop a brain vessel. Although it may seem like it sometimes, you’re not in any rush. Success takes time.

What you don’t want to do is this:

Session 1: 225 x 2
Session 2: 225 x 4 (grinded out 2 more reps with questionable form)
Session 3: 225 x 5 (grinded out 1 more rep – super difficult but upped the weight anyway)
Session 4: 235 x 1 (epicly hard)
Session 5: 235 x 1
Session 6: 235 x 1
Session 7: 235 x 1
Session 8-9: Skipped, didn’t feel like training.
Session 10: 230 x 1

By letting the rep range dictate when you increase your weight, you take yourself and your emotions out of the equation while also keeping yourself from training to failure.

The best thing about weights is that they’re completely objective. They don’t care what kind of day you had at work, nor do they care how heavy you think they are or how many reps you want to get – 300lbs will always be 300lbs. When your body is ready and capable of lifting a certain amount of weight a certain number of times, it will happen because you have trained for it, and not a moment sooner.

Have you incorporated reverse pyramid training into your workouts? If so how freakin’ awesome have your results been? If you have any questions, or just want to share how well it has worked for you, please do so in the comment section below!

I often get emails asking how to boost protein intake throughout the day,  so I wanted to share a quick low-tech/high effect recipe that takes less than 2 minutes to put together that address this problem directly. One bite of these apples and you’ll slap yourself for going through life up until this point without them.

Now on to the free stuff!

My review of the Quest Protein Bars (check it out here) was a big hit, and for good reason: they taste like love feels.  I don’t want to keep all the yum yums to myself though, so I’m going to randomly send readers a bar from my own private stash until they’re all gone – my loss is your delicious gain!

There are 3 ways to be eligible (doing each gives you 3 total chances to win):

1) Leave a comment below.

2) Share this post via Facebook or Twitter, making sure to include me in the loop (@RogLaw on Twitter and here on Facebook).

Let me know what you think of this recipe!

In this diet game, there are rules. Now sure, if you break these rules a referee won’t drop out of the sky and blow a whistle all up in your face, but by following them you’ll increase the likelihood of sticking to your caloric deficit, emerging on the other side looking and feeling a lot better.

1. Secure home base

There is a tasty killer lurking in your house, and he is out to desexify your body. The most disturbing part of all is that you’re the one that let him in. A lot of the damage that occurs during a diet happens right at home – late night binging, mindless tv snacking, etc – and often involves all of the comfort foods that are mighty delicious, but pack a ton of calories and are easy to devour with reckless abandon. If that’s the case, it makes sense to avoid this pitfall entirely by getting those foods out of the place where they’re most likely to be eaten.

The first rule of Rogonian Law is that if a food is in your house, it will eventually end up in your stomach. Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang wrote a great op-ed piece for the New York Times discussing how will power is a finite resource and that while demonstrating zen-like will power on one task, you “deplete” your reserves and are therefore less likely to display that same amount of self-control when performing another seemingly unrelated task.

I don’t say this to give you a reason to obliterate the cookie jar when stressed – quite the contrary, because with practice our will power reserves can be bolstered. The best way to avoid eating something is not to have it around at all. If you’re not ready to make this plunge just yet, you can always slowly get these foods out of your house, first by reducing the portion size. Instead of buying the huge carton of ice cream, keep one or two of the single serving cups in the house – think of it as preemptive damage control. If you eat both of them, you’ve done much less harm than if you crushed an entire pint.

2. Don’t roll solo

Once you leave the comfort and safety of home base, that’s when it gets real. Not just real, but realer than real. You’re away from your usual foods and now you’re venturing out into a world where you’re rarely more than 5 minutes away from something you can eat. This is where will power is critical, but it’s best to come prepared regardless. Bag up something non perishable and keep it in your bag or car – think a piece or two of fruit (beef jerky is also an option, but you may lose friends if you eat it in close quarters) or protein powder. In those moments of dietary weakness, the simple act of getting something in your stomach helps you think more clearly and reduces the likelihood of an emotional eating episode.

By employing this strategy, you don’t have to go through the whole mental rigamarole of deciding between a piece of fruit or two ginormous slices of pizza with a piece of chocolate cake in between – you’ve already made a choice that will keep you on track towards your goals.

3. Prepare for battle

When on a diet, one fact that you’re going to have to accept is that you’re going to be hungry. Maybe not all the time, and not ravishingly so, but you and hunger are going to be homies during this process. You’re going to have to interact with other people while in a state of hunger, and this is where it becomes easy to fall off the wagon. If you create a caloric buffer or eat in line with your goals before you head out the house, you can drastically decrease the chances of overeating food at a get together only to feel like crap about it later. A social gathering with food is just that – a gathering where food just happens to be. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to eat a lot.

This rule applies for grocery shopping as well. I’m sure that we’ve all gone grocery shopping while hungry at least once, and the result was madness on a grand scale. That list probably snowballed from 6 simple items into pretty much anything within arms reach that looked like it might make your stomach smile with delight. Once the beast within takes over, everything starts to look like it could taste good and you make purchases that you never would under a more sane state of mind. And lets be honest here, do you really want to get home only to find out that 5 cans of Spam managed to find their way into your cart?

What are you dietary survival tactics? What has worked (or hasn’t) for you in the past? Leave your answers in the comment section below!

Aristotle.

Confucius.

Plato.

Throughout the ages, philosophers have gone to great lengths to demystify the human condition. Brilliant books have been written, grand speeches have been given, but I argue that none of these men have had more of an impact on the world than the great sage Wesley Snipes.

You’ve seen his movies – Passenger 57, White Men Can’t Jump and the Blade series to name a few – you already know that Snipes is as manly as a man can be. Today I share with you just a few words from his vast cinematic archive, but after you experience and absorb them into your being, your gym performance (and life) will be changed forever.

“Some motherf*ckers are always trying to ice skate uphill.”

As we pass through our time here on Earth, we naturally encounter two sets of people in the gym: the epic hard workers and the ultra slackers.

The hard worker typically trains at least 4 days a week (sometimes 6-7), trying to fit every exercise imaginable into their session before heading off to do their cardio. Marathon gym sessions are common place, as are injuries, weakness and a general sense of wheel spinning.

The slacker makes it to the gym 2-3 times a week (many times less frequently). Showing up in the first place is commendable, but often their time spent actually training is minimal and the effort that’s put in while doing so is lacking in the intensity depart – they’re simply going through the motions. This group is highly susceptible to fad diets and gimmicky fitness devices.

What do these two groups have in common? A lack of results. One because their hard work is misdirected and the other because they’re simply not working hard enough, looking for shortcuts that will hopefully fast track their success.

This is the very definition of ice skating uphill.

Oh Wesley, the duality of your profound statement rends my mind!

Take home point: Lackluster effort won’t get you there, and too much effort will ensure that you burn out before you do. Don’t make the pursuit of your goals more difficult than it needs to be. Sure you could drive with your foot on the steering wheel, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. I too was an uphill skating mofo at one point, so it can be rectified, and life at the top of the hill is beautiful.

Creating the physique that you desire won’t happen in days or weeks, but months and years. You’re in it for the long haul, so approaching it with that mindset makes the road far more enjoyable.

“You can put a cat in an oven, but that don’t make it a biscuit.”

Every gym has that person who has been going there for years but looks exactly the same as they did when they first started. Pure stagnation As much as I hate to admit it, I used to be that guy and it sucked – it was the equivalent of training purgatory – so I’d like to help save everyone I can from that same fate.

Just because you’re following a certain exercise or nutrition program doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be successful. It must be appropriate to you, your goals and your situation. Measurements along the way to see if you’re progressing are a must.

Right from the start, make sure the information you’re getting is from a quality source and that you’re focusing only on things that matter.

Don’t waste time majoring in the minor things – it’s only an illusion of progress.

 “You can either smoke, or you get smoked.”

Once you have all the above locked in, the only thing left to do is to act.

Consistently.

With purpose.

Knowledge alone is not enough, and the only difference between success and failure is the willingness to take action, and fortune favors those who do so.

“Always bet on black.”

Always bet on yourself. If you don’t believe that you can achieve it, then it doesn’t matter what anyone else says because you’ve already counted yourself out from the start. Even in the face of great difficulty, know that success is inevitable if you continue to push forward and adjust accordingly along the way.

This is an homage to an article found here.

You have a day to make $100,000 or you’re dead – literally – what do you do?

A) Start selling old paperback books on Ebay for $1 and have a garage sale to get rid of clothes you haven’t worn in years.

or

B) Sell your car. Sell house. Sell your kidney. Sell your neighbor’s elephant while he’s at work (gotta do what you gotta do).

Any of the above will bring you closer to your goal, but the first option ensures that you’ll never eat another piece of delicious birthday cake again while the second keeps you on this side of the dirt for at least another day because it gives you the biggest return on your time investment.

Let’s take this out to the gym. You have a year to radically change your physique for the better and can only choose two exercise:

A) Chinups and deadlifts.

or

B) Bicep cable curls and leg extensions.

When it comes time to train, look around the gym and you’ll see people using all these small rocks (aka choice “B”), day after day, with very little to show for it – these are the people who will look exactly the same a year or five from now.

Big rocks are big for a reason – they’re damn awesome, make things happen, and accomplish far more than small rocks alone. They’re all about synergy and multiple parts working together. Want big arms? Chins ups and dips will get your far better results than bicep curls and overhead tricep extensions, plus you’ll receive a better looking back and pair of shoulders as a bonus for your troubles.

Big rocks give you room for growth, for expansion, for year after year of becoming better than you were the day, week, month or year before. Are there limits? Absolutely, but the average person is so far from them that their time and energy is better served not even thinking about limits and more about what actions they can take to reach their goal.

Small rocks are isolation exercises, little ideas and obsession over the minutiae that doesn’t matter - they’re self-limiting and self-defeating by nature. You’ll have to work long and hard – much more than you would if you were employing big rocks – to make progress. You need a helluva lot more small rocks to equal the impact of just one big rock.

Small rocks asking nothing from you at all. It’s easy to stay within your comfort zone, do what you’ve always done and get what you’ve always gotten.

Big rocks don’t ask – they demand – that you become better.

Big rocks are also big because their potential for growth is ginormous. You may start bench pressing with just the bar, but after a few years of consistency and dedication to pushing yourself further and further, you’ll be far beyond that; you’re giving yourself a fighting chance from the start.

Tricep extensions? No matter how strong you get, you’ll always be limited by the amount of weight on the machine; your potential is capped at a low level. It”s like being the world’s smartest ant: no matter how much if a genius you are, you’re still an ant.

As much as I love training I have other interests outside of the gym, so I like to limit my time to 2-3x a week for between 45 & 60min. I also want to get the biggest bang for my time invested, which only leads me in one direction: towards the big rocks.

Very rarely does my training change. 3-5 exercises each training day, 2-3 sets with no more than 10 reps depending on the exercise. Variety isn’t a factor because boredom comes from a lack of results, and I have a small victory every session that keeps me going.

I’m not alone in this Eric Cressey, JC Deen, Martin Berkhan, Nia Shanks & Tony Gentilcore are just a few other fitness professionals walking the talk and filling the majority of their training with big rocks. I’ve yet to meet anyone who focused on what mattered in terms of training & nutrition and didn’t look good while doing it.

If you’re not on track, then you’re about to be. Here’s a quick rundown of what matters in terms of dieting and training. Focus mainly on these (throw a few small training rocks in there if it makes you happy, but they’re not necessary), be patient enough to see results and you’ll be rewarded by lifting yourself above the herd and actually achieving the Sexification goals that you set.

Training

Big Rocks: Chinups, Pullups, Squats, Deadlifts, Bench Press variations, Overhead Presses, Dips, Leg Press, Pushups, Hip Thrusts, Lat Pulldown variations (pretty much any compound movement that you can add a lot of weight to in the long run).

Small Rocks: Cable Fly, Tricep Kickbacks, Calf Raises, Wrist Curls, Lateral Raises, Hamstring Curls, “inner thigh” machines, crunches x infinity (pretty much anything you’re not able to add a significant amount of weight to in the long run).

Diet

Big Rocks: A caloric deficit/surplus. Adequate protein intake. Consistency to the deficit/surplus. Movement.

Small Rocks: “Fat burning foods”, meal frequency, fad diets requiring you to swear religious allegiance to certain foods, excuses.

Questions? I’m here to answer any that you may have, so let me know!

Sexification Note: Martin Berkhan dropped a bomb of a post recently that I know you’ll definitely get something out of. Check it out here.

Photo Credit: GorillaNut

We’ve all had one of those days. You know, the one where it takes every fiber of our being to make it to the gym and all we want to do is get in, throw around some weights, and get on with the day. On days like those, even dedicating 10 minutes to warming up can snatch the wind right out of your sails – what is a homie to do?

Have no fear, The Rog is here!

I’ve put together a quick full body warm up that will get you ready to roll out in less than 3 minutes (double the time if you’re feeling particularly sassy and want to run through it twice). Give it a try the next time you’re in the gym and feel free to send me a video of you panting and slobbering like an overworked horse once you’re done.

Photo Credit: JD Hancock

Ah yes, the weekend – the magical time between Friday (or Thursday if you’re awesome like that) and Monday that’s filled with excitement and endless possibilities.

Oh yeah, and dietary debauchery as well, and it’s absolutely killing your fat loss results.

I hear it all of the time: “I was doing so well during the week but fell off hard during the weekend.” I don’t know what it is about weekend that leads to many people looking in the mirror Monday after Monday wondering what the hell happened over just a few short days, but I do have a few Einstenian theories.

Let’s face it, dieting can be hard, so it’s helpful to know that on Wednesday you just have to last a few more days before you can ease up on the gas pedal a bit and get your mind right before jumping back onto your diet on Monday. I completely understand it. It’s nice to be able to go out with friends without having to worry about your intake as much as you do during the week.

You also have the untamed Wild West nature of the weekend. Unless you’re Beyonce or a travelling assassin for hire, odds are your weekdays have a pretty consistent level of structure. You know you’re going to be at home for a certain amount of time before going to work, and once there you know roughly how long you’ll be there before heading somewhere else and so on until you end up back in bed. With these variables in place it’s much easier to keep your diet in check as opposed to the weekend when the normal structure of life disappears and the likelihood of going buck wild with your food intake increases.

Then finally we have the scenario where you become your own worst enemy.

The way that a lot of people structure their diet is based entirely around the deprivation mindset and the belief that there is no room for treats and “non-diet” foods – a Spartan-like rigidity and adherence tends to accompany this style of dieting.

I don’t have any issue with this way of doing things if this is just how that person rolls, but what often happens as a result is that when the weekend rolls around they feel like they deserve to eat those foods that they’ve blacklisted (and eat more food in general) because they stuck to their diet so well during the week.  So they eat, and because they’ve deprived themselves for so long and they know that they won’t be eating like this again for at least another week they eat a bit (read:a lot) more of it than they otherwise would have.

So how does the weekend slow down fat loss in the real world?

First we’ll start with the optimal scenario. Let’s assume that during the week you’re crushing it like the boss you are and by Friday night you’ve been in a deficit of 3,500 calories (roughly a 700 calorie deficit per day), earning yourself 1lb of fat loss. Awesome!

Now Saturday and Sunday roll around. You plan to stay the course, but you end up eating 500 calories over your maintenance each day. Because of this, you can go ahead and subtract 1,000 calories from that 3,500 calorie deficit you created during the week, putting you at 2,500 calories burned in total which will net you a little more than half a pound of fat loss for the week.

Not bad at all.

Now let’s talk about what usually goes down.

Let’s assume that during the week you think you’re crushing it diet wise, but due to not moving as much as you think you are and not tracking your intake as well as you should, sneaking extra bites of food here and there, by the time Friday night rolls around you’ve only accumulated a 1,750 calorie deficit, which is half a pound of fat. That’s cool though, because you still have two more days to put in work, right?

Mmmmmmhmm.

It’s weekend time, and once again you end up going over your maintenance by 500 calories on both Saturday and Sunday – go ahead and knock 1,000 calories off that 1,750 calorie deficit you already created, putting you at 750 calories for the week which ends being a face-palm worthy .2lbs worth of fat loss. This becomes even more painful once you do the math and realize that at this rate it would take another 4 weeks before you even saw 1lb of fat loss.

This is the very definition of 3 steps forward/2 steps back, and there is only one thing to say about that situation:

How To Not Become Another Weekend Statistic

1. Be extremely diligent during the week in preparation for the weekend.

If you’re one of those people that no matter how much sense it makes to change your weekend eating habits but isn’t going to actually do it, then this option makes the most sense for you. If you know you’re going to be in food heaven during the weekend, then the only other variable that you can control is to hit your deficit hardcore during the week and make sure that you’re on top of tracking your intake.

Think of it as preemptive damage control.

This way, even if you end up going over your calories a bit on the weekend, you’re still in a pretty decent deficit for the entire week. Strength training on the weekend helps a bit as well in the sense that you have nutrient partitioning on your side (some of the additional calories going towards muscle repair).

Just know that this strategy alone can only take you so far and at some point, depending on your results and if you want to speed them up, you’re going to have to bring change to the weekend.

2. Rock out for 5 days, maintain for 2.

If you cant handle an aggressive deficit during the week, then this is a good option that gives you the best of both worlds: you can choose a less harsh deficit Monday-Friday and then on Saturday & Sunday you can simply eat at maintenance. This way you can still accumulate a pretty decent weekly deficit which is great because you’re eating to maintain on the weekend and therefore you aren’t backsliding and erasing any of the gains that you’ve already made.

I would also make sure that you include some delicious, traditionally “non-diet food” into your meal plan during the week so that you don’t feed into that sense of deprivation, decreasing the chances of you going wild with such foods on the weekend. This is something that I suggest implementing during any diet.

3. Use Intermittent Fasting

I’m a huge fan of intermittent fasting as both a diet strategy and a long term lifestyle choice, but it  can also do wonders in the short term. For example, you would eat a sizable meal on Friday night before bed and on Saturday go about your day, holding off eating your first meal for as long as you can. If you have to eat sooner rather than later, turn it into a game and see how little food you can get away with until you go out to dinner; make your first meal a small portion of your overall calories (I.E. if your caloric budget for the day is 1800 calories, eat a 200-400 calorie meal with lots of protein and fiber for satiety which will help hold you over).

By doing this, at the end of the end of the night you’ll still have room for another 1400-1600 calories which is an amazingly satisfying amount of food, unless you go out of your way fill that quota with crap, but that’s another issue entirely. Rinse and repeat on Sunday.

Does it suck to have to watch what you eat on the weekend while everyone else around you eats whatever they want? It all depends on your mindset. It sucks more to have an entire weeks worth of results crippled by two days worth of dietary weakness. It also sucks to have it take 5 months to lose only 5lbs because you kept repeating the same weekend errors over and over again.

At the end of the day an uncontrolled weekend can absolutely ruin a good week, and if you think otherwise then you need to get your head checked. This is America, baby, home of the Luther Burger! Life is full of compromises, and if you want to lose fat at any appreciable rate of speed you’re going to make some one way or another.

Get in there, make it happen, and get on with the rest of your life.

“Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”
- Muhammad Ali

 Photo Credit: Naomi Ibuki

Alright folks, I busted out the video camera for this one, so you KNOW it must be business time.

For those of you who frequent my site, you know I like to throw down a serious amount of food, which more often than not leads to both inner shame and public embarrassment. I’m a big fan of sweets – pies, cakes, and more specifically MAN’S GREATEST INVENTION (formally known as the Cinnabon), so when I found out that there was a protein bar on the market that supposedly tasted like apple pie, I had to check it out.

This bar is a big ‘ol bucket full of win for several reasons.

1) Taste & Quality Ingredients

It’s pretty safe to say that if you look on the back label of most protein bars you’re going to be hit with a bunch of words that you can’t pronounce and don’t know the meaning of. For all we know know, they could be talking about our moms, and that just ain’t right!

As an example, here is the ingredient list of another apple pie flavored protein bar on the market:

Soy Crisps (Soy Protein Isolate, Tapioca Starch, Salt), Apple Layer (Apple Puree Concentrate, Deionized Apple Juice Concentrate), Sugar, Glucose Syrup, Glycerol, Vegetable Fat, Cornstarch, Wheat Fiber, Malic Acid, Calcium Lactate, Natural Flavor, Sunflower Lecithin), Yogurt Coating (Sugar, Palm Kernel Oil, Nonfat Dry Milk Solids, Yogurt Powder (Cultured Whey Protein In Concentrate, Cultured Skim Milk, Yogurt Culture), Soy Lecithin, Salt, Natural Flavor),, Corn Syrup, Crystalline Fructose, METAMYOSYN® VXP Protein Blend (Whey Protein Isolate, Milk Protein Isolate, Whey Protein Concentrate, Dried Egg White, L-Glutamine), Maltitol Syrup, Dried Apples, Palm Oil, Glycerin, Water, Canola Oil, Ground Cinnamon, Natural Flavor, Fructooligosaccharides, Vitamin And Mineral Blend (Ascorbic Acid, Tri-Calcium Phosphate, D-Alpha Tocopheryl Acetate, Niacinamide, Zinc Oxide, Copper Gluconate, D-Calcium Pantothenate, Vitamin A Palmitate, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid, Biotin, Potassium Iodide, Cyanocobalamin), Xanthan Gum, Di-Potassium Phosphate, Salt, Soy Lecithin, Wheat Germ, Peanut Flour, Almond Meal.

Compare this to the Quest apple pie bar ingredient list:

Protein Blend (Whey Protein Isolate, Milk Protein Isolate), Isomalto-Oligosaccharide* (100% Natural Prebiotic Fiber), Almonds, Water, Apples, Natural Flavors, Sea Salt, Cinnamon, Lo Han Guo, Sucralose

* Isomalto-Oligosaccharides are 100% Natural Prebiotic Fibers derived from plant sources.

See the difference? High quality ingredients, no crappy fillers (such as soy lecithin), and no sugar alcohols, which commonly give people the farts – not a good thing if you want to eat these in the company of those you care about.

The addition of all these additives and such usually give the bar a fake, chemical taste. Quest bars, though? No such taste, and if you look at the ingredients you can see why. They’re also gluten-free to boot.

2) Caloric Intake

There are certainly a lot of protein bars on the market to choose from, but a majority of them are just glorified candy bars: tons of fat and sugar pumped into the bar to make it taste palatable while containing inferior protein sources. If you get any fiber, it’s usually a measly 1-2 grams, which is nothing to write home about. All of these additions usually increase the calorie count to at least 350-400 calories per bar.

Quest bars on the other hand contain between 170 & 210 calories (depending on the flavor) and all of them contain at least 17 grams of fiber, and at most 24 grams of carbohydrate. Do you know how incredibly dope that is? Let me break it down for you:

24g carbs – 17g fiber = 7 grams of actual carbohydrates = AWESOME!

At 20 grams of protein bar, they pretty much fit into any scenario that you can imagine without breaking your caloric budget. They’re also great to have in a pinch if you need something quick on the go or need to take the edge off before you end up going on a wild food binge and blow all of the progress that you’ve made.

So, if you don’t want to watch the video review or look at my pretty mug, here is the verdict: DELICIOUS! If someone created a gun that used these bars as ammo instead of bullets, I would willingly put my face in harms way just to try and get a bite of them as they whizzed by.

If you’ve been burned by crappy protein bars in the past, you owe it to yourself to give these bars a try. You can find them at Quest Protein Bar in a wide variety of flavors (I’ve had 3 so far myself, all delicious), and you can even try a free sample before you commit to purchasing a larger order.

If you want to go that route, I suggest buying a single bar and paying for the shipping because it may take awhile for them to ship out the free sample due to popular demand. Also if you type SHIPFREE in the coupon section of your order, you’ll get free shipping on your first order – don’t say Rog Law never gave you anything!

Just in case you were wondering, I have no affiliation with this company at all. I don’t get any sort of kickback from this review or if you end up purchasing anything – I just want to share some incredibly tasty bars with you all.

You get no sexy or witty introduction from me today – we’re jumping straight into the thick of it!

1. Move beyond passion

You’re going to need passion in order to get started, but passion is just a prerequisite, a starting point;  passion alone won’t pay the bills. I wish this weren’t the truth, but it is, and it’s something that I wish someone had told me when I was getting started in this industry. In both the commercial gym and strength & conditioning setting the hours can be long and the pay won’t be great initially, so it’s very easy to get burned out before you make any significant progress if you’re fueled only by sunshine & rainbows, which leads me to my next point.

2. Level up consistently

One of the most important life lessons that you’ll ever learn is from a little known movie called Napoleon Dynamite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5wmParkppw

Skills pay the bills. If you have them, the world is your oyster, but if you don’t (or at least work towards getting them) you’ll become easier to replace as time marches forward, which is the whackest thing known to man. Luckily for you though, you have one fact working in your favor: The internet is awesome.

There is so much great content out there to be found on the internet that it boggles my mind. Most of it is free if you have the time to do the required digging, yet some of it you’ll have to pay, but even then it’s an investment in yourself and you’ll come out way ahead because of it.

Whatever you do, PLEASE never stop investing in yourself. Read research journals and blogs, purchase educational products, go to conferences and whatever else you have to do to step your knowledge game up. If you’re just keeping up then you’re actually falling behind everyone else.

For example, I graduated with a degree in English Literature with plans to go on and become a teacher, but during my senior year I decided that I was going to pursue my passion and try my hand in the health & fitness industry. At this point I had two options: I could change my major to exercise science, delaying my graduation by a few years and incurring more debt or graduate then and get my education through alternative means (aka the real world) afterwards.

I chose the latter option, and it was the best choice that I could have made. Because of my passion, I devoured anything that I could get my hands on and learned more on my own through experience than I ever would have in school, plus I received this education at a fraction of the cost and got to choose what I studied – take that, Sallie Mae!

Here are some resources to get you started on your way. Make sure to check at your local library and see what you can find before spending big bucks.

http://ericcressey.com/resources

http://www.tonygentilcore.com/resources

Don’t forget to develop other skills such as writing, public speaking and business skills (i.e. sales and marketing) along the way as well.

3. Commit to excellence

I was lucky enough to get my start at Cressey Performance, one of, if not the best, gyms in the country. It was a fantastic experience that I cherish to this day, but as a newbie who never experienced anything else, it completely ruined me because of one undeniable fact: that place rocked. The clients were self-motivated, the variety of equipment was amazing, and the staff, get this, actually cared about their clients, doing anything in their power to help them achieve results, both in and outside of the gym.

Now step into your standard commercial gym -what do you see? Most likely the opposite of what I described above, with the most important missing element being this: the trainers don’t give a hot damn about their clients or their results.

Between trainers texting on their phone while their client teeters on the edge of face planting from some goofy exercise or giving them a cookie cutter program that doesn’t take into account their goals, experience level or time commitment, you would have thought that shares in the FCK corporation were selling for $88339857 billion dollars because you’d be hard pressed to find anyone looking to give one.

The bar is set low. How low? We’re talking Flo Rida, subterranean gnomes digging towards the center of the Earth with rocket-powered shovels low. Pretty much imagine any horrible scenario that could happen in a gym, and odds are that there is someone out there that you haven’t even heard of that’s making it happen (or worse).

So with expectations already set low, this is an awesome time to be you. Why? The fact that you’re reading this shows that you’re at least interested in becoming better, so imagine what would happen if you took the action steps necessary to make it happen? You’d blow those around you out of the water – it’d be like Salvador Dali entering a 1st grade art contest.

By getting involved in this industry, you’re placed in a unique position where people pay you to help get them to a place that do by themselves. Respect this bond and you’ll be in demand, but take advantage of it and fail to deliver results and you’ll be dead in the water.

It takes just as much effort to suck at something as it does to be awesome at it, so make the commitment to become an absolute beast at what you do and you’ll be far ahead of the game.

4. Get your hands dirty

Filling your head with information is great, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t apply it. Before my internship, the most experience  that I had with coaching and leading a group was coordinating raids in Everquest, which doesn’t really translate well into the real world all that well. As a requirement for bringing me on, I had to volunteer as a coach in some capacity to show that I actually possessed the skills that would be required of me during the internship.

So, what does the guy who has no interest in sports,  other people’s unruly kids, or catching balls volunteer to be? A assistant coach for an after school flag football team. Sweet!

The experience served its purpose though: I became more outspoken and a lot more comfortable with coaching than I was before, all of which carried over into my internship experience. Besides, after coaching a huge group of kids who are hopped up on juice boxes, coaching athletes and adults was a piece of cake, and Rog loves cake.

Whether you know for sure that you want to get involved or are still on the fence about it, an internship is a low-cost way to test the water and see if this is something that you want to commit to for the long term. Find a local gym or school in your area (or outside of it if you’re willing to travel) and see if they have any internship or volunteer opportunities. The worst that they can say is no, but people love free help, and the learning experience is worth it in the long run.

If you want to forgo the internship route for the time being, at the very least you can contact professionals in the field via e-mail and ask them questions, or ask if you can stop in and visit their facility for a few hours to see how they do thing. Just ask – there are a lack of jerks in this industry and people are more than willing to help you if you reach out to them.

Do anything that you can in order to see if this something you want to turn into a career, or of it just sounds like a cool idea.

5. Get Certified

I put this one last because out of everything else I’ve found that it is the least useful factor of all.  Yes, it’s important as far as getting your foot in the door at a commercial gym or as a strength & conditioning coach since the best ones usually require that you hold at least one nationally recognized certification. Aside from that though, it only shows that you can prepare for and pass a test.

A certification is a way of showing gatekeepers that you’re not just some random off the street and that you possess a certain level of knowledge as well. It is only that – a starting point. If you’re going to stop learning after you obtain a certification then you won’t last long at all.

Many of my biggest influences in the fitness industry don’t have any kind of formal certification, which goes to show that you don’t need to hitch your hopes of success solely paper credentials. If you can help your clients get the results that they desire, then I highly doubt they’ll care whether or not you’re certified.

If you have a gym in mind that you want to work at, call ahead and see what certification(s) that they require. Here are a few of the big ones out there:

NSCA
NASM
ACSM
ACE

6. Start a blog

This is entirely optional as you don’t need a website or a blog in order to be successful, but I’ve found it certainly helps. Think of the gym that you work out of as your physical platform and your blog as your virtual platform. With one, your influence is extremely limited – you’re only able to affect the people who are physically able and willing to come to you (unless you’re a rock start like, then people will come from all over the world) but with a blog your reach isn’t limited at all.

A blog is also a great tool to use in order to gather and put down your thoughts on e-paper everything that you’re learning during your journey, which is not only helpful to you but for others as well. Odds are if you blog consistently the likelihood of meeting a ton of other awesome fitness professionals is quite, leading to a wealth friendships and professional relationships.

7. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Initially you may be overwhelmed by everything that you have to learn, but take solace in this fact: you’ll never know it all. Don’t put that burden on yourself. What you don’t know will always outweigh what you do know and success won’t happen overnight, but as long as you keep grinding forward and learning, you’ll be eons ahead of your peers.

So, how are you feeling – feeling good, feeling great? Did I leave anything out? If you have any questions about specifics or something that I didn’t cover here, send me an e-mail or leave a comment below and I’ll get right on it.