Let’s get straight down to it: losing fat isn’t easy. You’ve spent hours in the gym slaving away on the treadmill. Your diet consists of bird seed and a few sprigs of alfalfa. You’ve bought every diet book and exercise gimmick on the market, yet nothing seems to work. Don’t despair! There is hope! Arm yourself with these science-based fat loss strategies and keep it off for life!

First off, throw away your bathroom scale. It’s not your friend. Don’t focus on losing weight. Focus on losing body fat. Your goal should be to maintain or build muscle tissue and burn away stored fat. Muscle is very metabolically active and pays a higher caloric “rent” in the body just

to sustain itself. Fat is nothing more than a metabolic freeloader that burns very few calories to keep itself alive. If after four months your scale weight hasn’t changed but your clothes fit you magnificently, then chances are you changed your body composition for the better. THAT is your goal.

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1. VISUALIZE THE BODY YOU WANT BY USING YOUR INNER POWER

Many professional athletes practice visualization, which means picturing themselves going through the motions to achieve a certain goal -complete with sounds, colors, tastes and smells - and have seen it pay off big time. It really works. What you can conceive in your soul and create in your mind, you WILL EXPERIENCE with your body! During my 10 years as a professional athlete, I spent 10 minutes a day visualizing my body the way I wanted it to look and feel, the result that I mentally conceived in the visualization were experienced in my training sessions, making them tremendously intensive and effective. Now, whenever I work out,

I close my eyes and visualize whatever I wish to accomplish in my workouts.

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Starting a walking program is a personal commitment to fitness. Like many walkers, you may have started out strong and then your walking program disappeared in the hustle and bustle of life. You may be disappointed in yourself. You may play mental games with yourself as well and find all sorts of excuses for not walking: weather, job responsibilities, kids’ schedules, and more. How can you get back on the fitness path? Here are 15 practical tips.

1. Put walking on your calendar and think of it as an appointment you must keep.

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What is recovery from strenuous sports performance training about? People who exercise regularly and play sports often spend a lot of time preparing careful sports performance training programmes. These focus on positively building all the areas of fitness and technique important to the successful conduct of their favorite activity. Some enthusiastic runners, cyclists and triathletes plan their year s activities around participation in races (marathon, triathlon, etc) or hoping to perform maximally at each race. In the haste to go faster and stronger, an important aspect of training is often neglected: sports recovery. From the experience of successful athletes though (particularly those in endurance sports) more time spent on sports recovery leads to improvement in the quality of sports

performance training as well as optimal results in competition.

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Would you believe that your ability to provide quality customer service to your clients is at least as important as your ability to get them results from their training program? Did you even know that customer service was going to be part of your business model? After all, what does personal training have to with customer service?

The answer: everything. Remember that your clients are people first, and their status as one of your clients comes second. Knowing how to tend to the needs of your customers will literally make the difference between a long and prosperous career in the fitness industry, or a short-lived stint that leaves you wondering what career path you should try next!

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