Episode 4 - The Best Way to Get Fit Quick!

Joshua Delgado: Welcome to the Centennial College Fit and Healthy On Campus podcast, the podcast that gives you tips and resources on how to live fit and healthy on campus. Thanks for joining us for episode four, where we're going to talk about building your summer body, the best ways to get fit quick. I'm joined by a panel of guests. Let me introduce them to you. On my right I have Kristin Smart, a professor of fitness courses for both the fitness and health promotion and the police foundation's programs. Thanks for joining us, Kristin.

Kristin Smart: Thank you for having me.

Joshua Delgado: Next, we have Ron Simeon, who is a personal trainer here on campus, as well as a competitive athlete and Centennial alumni. Ron, thanks for joining us.

Ron Simeon:  Glad to be here.

Joshua Delgado: Another Centennial alumni, we have Jordan Tam, who is also a personal trainer and competitive athlete. Thanks for joining us once again Jordan.

Jordan Tam: Yes, I'm glad to be back, excited.

Joshua Delgado: Okay, we're going to get right into it, talking about building your summer body, the best ways to get fit quick. When should someone begin to make the change, if that is indeed their goal, to see a summer body, a summer ready body? When should someone begin to make that change?

Kristin Smart: Now is a great time. Whenever the motivation strikes, that's ideally the best time to start, but now is as good of a time as any. Especially it being January, the holidays just passed. Most people are setting New Year's resolutions and setting New Year's resolutions around fitness is a great way to get motivated, and hopefully create a habit that can stick with you.

Joshua Delgado: Right, agreed.

Jordan Tam: Yeah, just adding to that point, whether if you want a summer body goal, or just any other goal, you have to start right away because the time that you're waiting to get to that goal, you're already using that time to think about, you're contemplating, you're hesitating, of, "Oh, I should do this. I should do that," when you could start acting on that goal. For me, there's really no right time to start. It's more so you have to commit to it now, and how bad do you want that goal?

Joshua Delgado: Just getting started now.

Jordan Tam: Exactly.

Joshua Delgado: Regardless of the time of the year.

Jordan Tam: Exactly.

Joshua Delgado: Yeah. And we sort of touched upon that on the first episode, the New Year's resolution myth. Ron, do you want to add to that?

Ron Simeon: The New Year's resolution myth. So, a lot of people do fall off, so if you want to start now in January, you might be one of them. So, I agree with Jordan. There really is no best time.

Joshua Delgado: Right, just to get started. Awesome. So, if someone's building their summer body, someone's building their body for the summer, what are they doing for the rest of the year?

Kristin Smart: Maintaining, developing an appreciation and value for being physically active and being healthy through activity and nutrition. Finding new things that they enjoy, and being consistent.

Jordan Tam: Yeah, especially if you want to get that summer body, since it's January, and like Kristin said, the holiday's passed, you have to prepare ahead in advance. When I say prepare, so you have to prepare your nutrition. You have to prepare your sleep. So we have to get that in details. What am I eating that's making me not progressing towards my goal? So let's say if I'm overeating a lot of different foods, we're going to get into nutrition a few questions later, but what can I start now to make a good habit? So if I'm eating a lot more rice or I'm eating a lot more pasta throughout Monday to Friday, maybe I have to start cutting back maybe slighter portions, right? And with sleep too, it's like, am I sleeping enough? Because sleep is such a huge important factor, which I'm sure I'm skipping ahead at questions, but we'll get into that sleep later on. But it's just preparing your mindset, what your habits are, and just being aware of what habits you have, whether it's good or bad. It's good to have self awareness, because if you're self aware, you're already one step ahead because you know what's right and what's wrong, it's just now you have to kind of change that. So it's more about preparing... Let's say it's January, you have to prepare the next two months to get either your nutrition or your sleep better, or intake more water, or just exercise more, but it's preparing yourself

Joshua Delgado: Being prepared, right.

Jordan Tam: Exactly. Just to get the goal.

Ron Simeon: I think it's very important to be very honest for the whole year, because it's a long term process. You can't be beating yourself up over a small hump. Yeah. If you say somewhere in 2020, and it's January now, there'll be times where you get busy at work. Just make sure you plan ahead, just like Jordan said, and your chances of falling off will be a lot less.

Joshua Delgado: Right. So honesty, being prepared, and maintenance.

Kristin Smart: Yeah, and just to build on that a little bit, if people are thinking now it's January, New Year's resolution I want to build my body for this summer, that's great to use it as motivation, but the thinking should not end at this summer. So this is a great way to start and a great time to develop some other motivation and find some other levels of value and levels of enjoyment out of the entire process. If that is achieved, then that will be more valuable than what your summer body looks like, because that is what is going to carry you through the rest of the year in terms of maintaining healthy habits that you're trying to develop right now.

Joshua Delgado: Right, so building value beyond the goal.

Kristin Smart: Right.

Joshua Delgado: Awesome. So, when people reach out to you guys, you guys are the go-to fitness professionals, I'm sure you have a lot of friends and family and people at your workplace... You all work in different facilities with different backgrounds, I'm sure you've had a lot of people come to you for help with this specific goal throughout the years, so they're wanting to build their summer body in a short period of time. So if this is someone new coming to you in January today and this is their goal, where do you start? Where do you begin as a coach?

Kristin Smart: Begin by doing some assessments. So determining what's their fitness level now? More importantly, what's their activity level now? Are they exercising outside of this, or is this brand new? Is this walking into a gym and wanting to start? Gathering that information is so important because it will inform the decisions I will make about types of programming to use, frequency of sessions, and it will also help us determine a program of, to help them achieve their goal, but also to develop realistic goals. It's also really important to me to build a connection with a person so that they trust me and they value my opinion and they are willing to open up to me so that I can determine what actually motivates them, what's their why, and I can pull that in and I can point things out to them, aside from the esthetics that will hopefully keep them motivated even if the esthetic isn't changing as fast as they maybe wanted it to.

Joshua Delgado: Which happens, yeah. Yeah. Where do you guys begin with a client?

Jordan Tam: Yeah, so to give you an example, adding onto Kristin, assessment is really important for us as coaches because it sets the baseline of where we can compare down the road, six to eight weeks. Let's say for example someone comes into today and they ask, they want a consultation, we take them to fill out a form, just some basic information, and I usually take them through a movement analysis. Usually it's just the main movements like squat, deadlifts and core strength, things like that, and we go through some nutrition questions just to see how, to better understand from their point of view what they eat. So I would usually ask them, "So what do you usually eat through Monday to Friday and what do you usually eat on weekends?" Say if it's a student, take me through your full schedule. If you're a full time student, what do you do from your first meal to your last meal, end of the day? If you're a faculty member, I would ask them, "So what would be your first meal until," your 9:00 to 5:00 jobs, something like that. Assessment's really important for us to really understand the baseline in order for us to progress from there. It's like a starting line.

Joshua Delgado: Right. Assessing and reassessing.

Ron Simeon: Everyone does the assessments, that's for sure, but I'd like to add to what you guys are saying. I try to find out if they have any health concerns as well, because that could get in the way of some of the things that we're doing. Sometimes I even get to... Let's say they have an injury, have you been cleared to do exercise? I think that's very important just so nothing comes back to you after. And pretty much everything you guys have said.

Joshua Delgado: Awesome, yeah, yeah. I mentioned assessing and reassessing. We're sort of always assessing, either in a formal or informal way as coaches so that we're being as specific as possible when it comes to making the best recommendations for someone working with us. So after the assessment process is complete and now we're working with our client, let's say we're a few weeks into our programming, what sort of programming would we expect you guys to create for a client who has this goal of seeing results quick for the summertime?

Kristin Smart: In terms of programming, I'm going to get to that in a second, but I would also make sure to communicate with my client that there's going to be work that needs to be done outside of their time with me.

Joshua Delgado: Right. Homework.

Kristin Smart: Homework. There are things that they're going to need to do outside of that two hours, three hours a week, whatever it is. Some of that's going to be nutrition related, which we're going to cover shortly, but also this includes things that they can just start doing in their daily life that are going to contribute to their success. Because at the end of the day, even if you spend an hour every day in the gym, you spend 23 hours not in the gym, and the stuff that you're doing outside is going to either contribute to your success and speed it up, or slow it down. So things like if you live close enough, walking to campus. Things like taking the stairs instead of the elevator whenever possible, especially if you're just going up one flight. Things like packing your lunch and your food and bringing it with you instead of, or choosing the healthier options on campus and preparing ahead of time. Things like if you have a long break in between classes, use that time to go for a walk. Not only is it going to be good for your activity levels, but it's going to be good for your mental clarity, your levels of productivity as well. There's something called NEAT, which is an acronym, N-E-A-T, and it stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis, and I would want clients to understand that how much of that they're getting, which is essentially how much energy burn not related to specific exercise are they getting in a day. That would be one of the first things I communicate and I build into their programming is that you need to start maximizing this. And then turning the focus to what I would do with them, as fitness professionals we all know that building muscle is the key to long term fitness, health, success, results, injury prevention, quality of life, et cetera, but building muscle by nature is a slower process. So I would make sure that my program focuses on progressive overload to build muscle, and I would make sure I communicate with my clients that that is not going to happen quickly, but it will have the highest payoff, and then in the meantime I would sprinkle in some more interval training or high intensity anaerobic cardio. Things that give people that sense of instant gratification, even though I know that what they really need is the long term consistency to progressive overload.

Joshua Delgado: Good stuff. That's a well rounded answer.

Jordan Tam: Yeah, pretty much Kristin nailed the point in terms of doing the homework right. Just because you come to this training session, it's only a quarter of it. You have to do the homework, you have to do the small little things in order for you to achieve. To give you an example how I... My perspective as a coach, how I would program for my clients, let's say a beginner who doesn't know anything. Bare bones. I would give them the very basic exercises. Usually a program is anywhere from four to six week blocks, and obviously with training programs, everyone's going to be individualized. So each program is going to be completely different. You'll never see a cookie cutter program.

Joshua Delgado: You shouldn't, no.

Jordan Tam: Let's say person A has never been to the gym. They don't know how to squat, they don't know how to deadlift, they don't know how to do a plank. They don't know any of the basic movements. So I would give them at least, anywhere between three to five exercises to begin off, and obviously depending on how many times they can come see me and how many times they can come on their own, their frequency, based off of that I would program four to six week blocks. The reason why I program four to six weeks is because it's enough time for the body to adapt the same movement. It's important for them to do the same movement for at least, minimum I would say four weeks, because if it's less than four weeks or two weeks, they're always changing their movements, they're not going to be able to pick up the patterns. So they come in, they pick up the program, it's anywhere between three to five exercises, and it's really basic in terms of from a beginner's standpoint. Four to six weeks just so they understand the basic patterns, and from there, just with the sets and reps, just depending on the person, but if you want to build muscle, anywhere between I would say eight to 12 reps, I'm sure you guys can add onto this, would be a good way of building muscle hypertrophy. Another thing I have with me right here is I printed out an article. The article is named "Effects of Resistance Training Frequency on Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systemic Review and Meta Analysis." For those who don't know what hypertrophy means, in simple terms it's just building muscle. So it's not strength, it's not building super speed, it's just plain just building muscle. This article concluded that in optimal amounts for frequency for a muscle group is twice a week. Twice a week to maximize muscle growth. What that means is, let's say person A comes in, he wants to get bigger arms. Instead of training arms once a week, he trains twice a week. Now, if you compare twice a week to once a week, you'll see that difference between the muscle growth. This is pretty much what the article summarizes interesting terms of how many times you're able to train a muscle to really maximize the efficiency of the muscle. If you're planning on maybe building strength or maybe want to get more core strength, or getting that six pack, think of maybe adding one more session if you're training once a week to kind of maximize that muscle growth.

Joshua Delgado: Awesome. And it's important to note, too, that twice a week, like the research suggests, also means to avoid overtraining. You don't want to do abs four, five times a week.

Jordan Tam: Yeah, for sure.

Ron Simeon: Well, if you're trying to get the programming and you're trying to get it quick, you've just got to make sure, so like Jordan says, if you're doing about three to five exercises, make sure they're an efficient exercise that works on someone's, a beginner's movements. Especially if they've never squatted before, they've never done a push up before. Those are things you're going to do. You're not exactly going to program a bunch of ab crunches because that's their troubled area. That doesn't exactly build out someone's foundation, especially someone who's just starting out.

Kristin Smart: And building on that, you said efficient exercise, which I was just thinking about myself. Making the most of the time that you are in the gym. Something else I would recommend to people, or an area I would start with them is looking at... There's a time and a place for more isolated strength training or isolated muscle training, so using machines and using single joint exercises. But when we're trying to be efficient and get as much bang for our buck as possible, I would want to have the focus be on compound movements. On movements that are going to train multiple muscle groups at once, are going to require more focus and more energy from my body to complete. Because ultimately that's what exercise is. It's expending energy. So if I can use more compound exercises, I can expend more energy in less time.

Joshua Delgado: For sure. And definitely keeping the more complicated exercises under your supervision as a coach, and simple things to add to homework, like you were mentioning earlier. Just reminds me, I had a client who worked their butt off in the gym for a long time, but for the rest of the day, they were sitting at a desk and they would try to avoid walking around too much because they wanted to save their energy for the gym. I didn't find this out until later, but those habits build up a lack of mobility in the hips, and things that were stopping us from moving forward, which we can get to self sabotage in a second. But definitely including homework. You're not going to spend all your time working on those hips in the gym when you know that they can do some of the homework on their own.

Jordan Tam: Yeah, just adding to Kristin's point, which she really made a good point, is compound exercise compared to isolated. Isolation exercise has it's own little department, but compound exercise, which are the main movements which are the squats, deadlifts, lunges, anything... To keep it simple, think of it like this. If you do a bicep curl, you're only working the bicep. So compound movements, you're working more muscles at the same time. So if you're able to vary your movement into these, include compound movements. Again, like Kristin said, you're able to utilize more energy expenditure. You're burning more calories as opposed to doing a simple bicep curl, as opposed to doing more muscle groups at the same time, which Ron mentioned, which is an efficient exercise. So that's something that I like to encourage a lot of people, because when we go up to the Athletic Wellness Centre, a lot of people do biceps curls, oh, I'm doing back, I'm doing rows, but they're not doing enough of the compound exercises first before they do the isolated exercises. Essentially how I program, going back to the programming, is I always start off with the big movements first and then we break things down, all the way down to the isolation. That way they use the most energy first, and then they can serve their energy reserves for the least amount, which they can burn out, essentially. Having fun, doing sled pushes at the end, doing more bicep curls, more triceps, so that way they're not burning out from the beginning.

Joshua Delgado: Right. There's definitely more benefits involved in compound or multi-joint movements. We're always going to be encouraging those movements into our programs. Moving onto nutrition, if we're talking about the same client, he's come to you in January and they're looking to build that summer body for, let's say, June. What sort of changes are we making to that person's diet?

Kristin Smart: If I was to give three general, simple and easily accessible recommendations to a person who has that goal of a summer body, or has that goal of weight loss or fitness improvement, number one would be drink more water. Number two, to keep it simple, would be focus on, or focus your meals around lean protein and vegetables, and then add other things as necessary, but make lean protein and vegetables the base. And then the third thing would be to minimize eating food that you have not prepared, or that is highly processed. I think those are three very simple and easily accessible tips that most people could benefit from.

Joshua Delgado: Awesome. And can you give some examples for listeners who might not be aware of lean proteins, for example?

Kristin Smart: Chicken, chicken breasts, turkey, lean ground beef.

Joshua Delgado: Awesome. Awesome. And for you guys?

Ron Simeon: Well, when I get a client, I ask them for a food journal, and from there, who knows, they might be eating very well already, but I try to teach them what a calorie is just so they can educate themselves if I'm overeating or not. Because a client could have a really, really well balanced diet, but if someone replaces a cup of rice to a cup of quinoa, they're actually almost doubling their calories. So that's one of the things I try to get them to watch out on. There's a lot of foods out there that are deemed to be, let's say super foods, but then anything that's a super food, they're pretty much always high in calories. Especially when someone's a binge eater, I think that's something that they've really got to know.

Joshua Delgado: Right, all of a sudden you say eat more avocados because they're good for you, and all of a sudden they're eating a dozen avocados a day and then they're gaining weight because avocados are high in calories.

Ron Simeon: Or almonds.

Joshua Delgado: Good point.

Jordan Tam: Yeah, for sure. To give you a little example of myself, since I'm a competitive weight lifter, a full time athlete, I wanted to hone in my nutrition. Since me being a strength coach, my knowledge is, can only take me so far into my own nutrition where I need to seek help from other professionals. I'm seeing a nutritionist. Her name's Michelle Gasperado, she's one of the nutritionist professors for Centennial College. I recently started with her, just to really work on my nutrition in terms of maintaining at a certain weight, because right now I'm about 83 kilos. I can't do conversions. If someone has a calculator. But I'm trying to maintain at least 80 to 81 kilos, so that's my goal. What Michelle told me to do was to track my calories for the first week. As Ron said, it's pretty much my food journal. So it's really important for me and herself to really understand what I'm eating on a day to day basis for the first week, just to get a glimpse of how the body reacts to my food. So I'm logging my journal for foods, and then at the same time I'm logging my energy. So how I'm feeling on the day of my training, how am I feeling at breakfast, lunch and dinner, just to get the gist of my day to day performance. For me to really track calories, it's really tedious. So I wouldn't recommend it to the general population, but I would encourage people to try it first, just because, again, not everyone knows how much a cup of rice, or how much a cup of pasta, how many calories are in that. Once they put that information in that MyFitnessPal, they'll be shocked. I guarantee it. The portion size in the control, we see the food there, but we don't know how much calories is in that until we actually see the actual number per serving. That's something that kind of really opened my eyes in terms of nutrition, is trying to track your calories, and then you get to actually see how many calories, how many grams of protein is it, how many fats. That's something I definitely encourage a lot of people to do is to track their calories. It doesn't have to be a week, just two to three days just to kind of understand how many, what their macronutrients are.

Joshua Delgado: Absolutely. And you mentioned MyFitnessPal. What is that exactly?

Jordan Tam: MyFitnessPal is an app. It's free, obviously you can go pay for a premium version, but it's free for the general population there. It's a food tracker, essentially. It's really useful. You can scan the barcodes on the back of the food and it'll tell you what the macronutrients are, the fats, carbs, things like that. Although some foods may not have a barcode, so you have to do your research on that, but it's a really, really convenient app in terms of tracking your water intake, your food, your energy, your exercise. Even has some exercise in there to track how many calories you burn. There's a catalogue of exercise. If you go to the gym you can go to the catalogue and you can type in what exercise you've done and it'll have it there to incorporate how much calories they burn too.

Joshua Delgado: Yeah, awesome. And counting calories either in or out is a lot of work for a lot of people, but maybe in short periods of time it can be very educational for people. For our clients as well I wouldn't recommend calorie counting long term for anyone personally. But like Jordan said, I think it's definitely a great place to start for people to start to learn how much a calorie is worth, and it's a real eye opener, for sure. Just building on that, I want to know where you guys stand on nutritional supplements. Are these things that you guys our clients need? Do you recommend them? Nutritional supplements.

Kristin Smart: The short answer is no, but the longer answer is that there are kind of three reasons that I feel that way. One is that often when people are looking for a supplement they're looking for a quick fix. They're looking for something that is going to make them get fit fast or lose weight fast. That just doesn't exist. And often, if you start looking at the ingredients of something that does claim that, you probably would be a little bit shocked by what you would find. It may do some other things to your body that you weren't anticipating. So I think number one is that, the bottom line is if you want to get healthier and you want to get more fit, you have to put in work and there is no quick fix. The second reason is because I think the goal should always be to get your nutrients and your benefits from the food that you eat.

Joshua Delgado: From foods, yeah.

Kristin Smart: You should choose to eat high quality foods to get the nutrients that your body needs. Now, of course in some scenarios people have medical conditions or histories where they do need to supplement with something, but the third reason is that any sort of supplement protocol should come from a medical professional who's done a workup and has identified your personal deficiencies and then recommends the supplements to kind of support that. With that being said, there are a couple supplements that maybe don't fall under this category and maybe are approved for general consumption, but at the end of the day, I think the goal should be try to do things as best as you can without that help, and then seek those extra things in the extenuating circumstances where they are necessary.

Joshua Delgado: Right. Agreed. 100%.

Jordan Tam: Yeah, for sure. Just adding onto Kristin's point, as coaches we're strength coaches. We only have such capacity where it's out of our scope of practice to recommend certain supplements to our clients because we're not... It's out of our scope of practice. We don't know how to take their bloodwork, things like that. So we can only do so much, but the basics, like Kristin said, is to focus on the small little things. Something that I kind of tell my clients is there's three pillars of health. Pretty much your sleep, your nutrition, and exercise, and water, because water is essential for us. The four main pillars there, and I believe sleep is the number one supplement. If you don't get enough sleep, there's tons of research on here, you can go on Google, type in Matthew Walker, M-A-T-T-H-E-W, Walker, W-A-L-K-E-R, for those who can't spell. If you search up Matthew Walker, he's a British researcher. He did a study on sleep. Don't quote me on this, but he did a research saying that for the population who gets less than at least six to seven hours of sleep, your function and your performance decrease by almost 25 to 50%. So sleep is a huge, huge, huge factor in terms of just performance and just your daily physical health and your longevity. A lot of people like office jobs, faculty members, students, if you guys are staying up late and study and working all night, then you have to make sure that sleep is... You have to prioritize sleep. If you don't get enough sleep and you're pulling an all-nighter, it's going to effect you in the long term in terms of productivity, mental health, and just high energy overall. So sleep is one of the most important, I would say supplement if you would say supplement, but it's the most underrated research topic that, not a lot of people do it because nowadays technology is such a huge advance now that on Instagram looking at the next fad.

Kristin Smart: And sleep is when you grow. It's when your body recovers and regenerates. If you're trying to build muscle, sleep is when that muscle is actually built. So I agree with the representation of sleep as a supplement, because it is something that supports and encourages and promotes your achievement of your goals. But too many people sacrifice it.

Joshua Delgado: Yup, yup. And did Mr. Matthew Walker give an ideal number to aim for?

Jordan Tam: Yeah, anywhere between seven and nine hours of sleep a night is optimal. Seven to nine. If you get less than seven hours of sleep, then it might be borderline. I definitely recommend searching him up on Google and listen to his podcast. It's definitely worth doing, because it gives you a lot of insights of how sleep is such a huge function to our body, but half of us don't even sleep.

Joshua Delgado: Right. We won't get into it too much, but it's probably important to note that too much sleep is also not a good thing. So that seven to nine range is important. You also don't want to be sleeping 12 hours a day, same as you don't want to be sleeping three to four hours a day.

Ron Simeon: Yeah. To build up on the best nutritional advice, I don't take any supplements, to be honest, because I find that the best supplement for everyone to take, especially beginners, is to build on their lifestyle first. So that goes with sleep, nutrition, and honestly, best habits. I tend to save the nutritional advices for the actual professionals, so nutritionists, dieticians, and if you are going to go that route, it tends to go to people who are a little bit more on the very athletic side, so someone like a full time athlete like Jordan. I'm more of a casual athlete, so someone like me could use more of the other stuff. Build on that first before you even think about supplements.

Kristin Smart: It is also important to note that there are some people, and maybe all of us have had a client like this in the past, that do all the exercise things right, and maybe do do the nutrition things right, and still struggle, and still don't see the progress that maybe we think they should or they think they should. And it is important to note that in those situations, there often is something going on nutritionally inside their body, whether it's with their digestion, absorption, and that is well beyond our scope of practice. So referring out in that scenario is really your only option because they need to go to somebody that can actually get the deep down individual information in order for them to progress.

Joshua Delgado: For sure. We don't want people to be wasting their money either, focusing all their time in one area, when really they need help somewhere else. Help beyond what we can give. So having a healthy network of people that we can refer out to is important, but also people who are listening, it's important to know that they should keep an open mind that the one person they're going to for help won't help them with all the areas that they need. So I want to ask about the idea of self sabotage. A lot of our clients go through hard times and they're maybe holding themselves back, whether it's on purpose or by accident, towards reaching their goals. The idea of sabotage. What do you guys do as coaches to help prevent this from happening?

Ron Simeon: Me personally, I try to tell the clients to stay away from social media, especially Instagram, because they see a lot of things from there. Let's say someone they really admire. They could be listening to you, but then looking at that person and they could be trying different types of programs every single week, and next thing you know you catch them and it's going to ruin their progress.

Joshua Delgado: Right, so has this happened for you?

Ron Simeon: All the time.

Joshua Delgado: Social media diets are important too, yeah.

Jordan Tam: To give you my example, just small little habits, like not drinking enough water. So I have a client that they, full time student, always studying, and pretty much they don't know what the time is because they're so busy. It's like, how much water did you drink when you came to this training session? Maybe less than a 500 mL bottle. I feel like small little things like these, they kind of sabotage them over time because small little habits... As I mentioned before from previous podcasts, we're creatures of habits. We're always craving a habit, whether it's good or bad. So if you're not drinking enough water constantly, it's a bad habit. So with that in mind, it's like sleep too. If you're training four to five times a week at a very high intensity, you're going to be burnt out by the end of the week because you're not resting enough. You're not sleeping enough. So maybe take one or two days off in between each day of workouts to really recover and regenerate. If you over train, you're just not going to have that high intensity reserve for the next session.

Joshua Delgado: Right, so building habits, you're saying, can help prevent sabotage? For sure.

Kristin Smart: I think something to help connect back to something I talked about earlier, something that can lead to self sabotage is not moving enough outside of your workouts. But remembering that NEAT acronym that we mentioned before, and remembering that just because you spent an hour or 90 minutes in the gym, it doesn't mean that that can erase another ten hours of being sedentary. So I think that's an area of self sabotage. The second thing I think is really important in terms of preventing self sabotage is having a positive support network. So enrolling the people around you in the goals that you are trying to achieve and in what your values are so that they can support you in your decisions. And those can be things around social situations involving food and alcohol and peer pressure, but if you enroll your support network in and you say, "I'm trying to achieve this goal and I would like you to support me and I would like you to encourage me to make positive decisions," I think that really helps. Then the third thing I think that can be very sabotaging is negative self talk. I create an environment whenever I'm doing training sessions where negative self talk is not allowed, and anytime I hear it, we immediately reframe it into something positive. My hope with that is that they will get in the habit of doing that and they will take that into their self talk outside of the time that they're with me. But negative self talk is definitely a problem in terms of sabotage, because it makes people think, well, why am I even bothering? I ate one bad thing, I may as well throw my entire day off the rails. I missed one workout, so I may as well write the entire week off. I think it's really important to reframe negative self talk into positive self talk.

Joshua Delgado: Absolutely. And the mental aspects of training and reaching goals, we can do a whole podcast on that topic itself, but very important, I'm glad you brought that up. Let's say you have a client now that's been with you working and reached their goals. It's now summertime and they have the body that they want. How do people maintain these results year round?

Kristin Smart: Consistency, I would say is number one. Consistency and enjoyment. Make sure that you're getting... Actually, I'll say three things. Consistency, enjoyment, and value. Make sure you have a program or a schedule that fits with your life and your schedule so you're setting yourself up for success to be consistent, and make sure you're doing things that you enjoy. You don't have to enjoy every single minute of it, but when it's over you have to feel like it was valuable and like you accomplished something and like you want to do it again.

Joshua Delgado: Right. I think for the most part when people leave the gym... I've never heard someone say, "Oh, I regret that workout. I regret getting a little bit stronger today."

Kristin Smart: There's a meme that floats around on Instagram, well I guess I don't know if it's a meme. It's a quote I've seen, and I know we're talking about social media diets and everything, but a quote that says, "You're just one workout away from a good mood."

Joshua Delgado: I like that.

Kristin Smart: Maybe it's corny and we're all fitness professionals-

Joshua Delgado: Not corny.

Kristin Smart: But I think it's really, really true. And scientifically, exercise releases endorphins, and endorphins make you feel good.

Joshua Delgado: Yeah. Adam touched on that in a previous podcast, so I'm glad you're relating back to it. Definitely does a lot for your mood.

Jordan Tam: Yeah, just touching base with Kristin, you just have to enjoy the process. If you're doing the same thing through the year round, you're just going to get burnt out. An example, I train Olympic weight lifting. I have to train year round, but I don't want to get burnt out, so that's why I have to add in maybe small little things that I don't usually do that I used to like to do, like maybe play a little soccer with a couple of my friends here and there, or play a little table tennis, or things that kind of spice things up, but obviously just to kind of refresh your mindset. Exactly, you have to enjoy the process as much as you want to get to that goal.

Joshua Delgado: Awesome. Great tips on how to maintain those results year round. On campus, what resources do you guys know that are available to staff and students that can help people who have these types of goals who want to reach them on campus?

Ron Simeon: Well, there's a couple things. We have an Instagram handle, actually. It is AWC.ccsai

Jordan Tam: .ccsai.

Ron Simeon: .ccsai.

Joshua Delgado: Okay, new Instagram account.

Ron Simeon: Yeah, that's actually new, we just started that. It's run by all of us. There's a fitness facility in each campus, So here at Progress, Ashtonbee, I think they're getting one at Downsview and the Story Arts Centre. Over here at Progress we do have a fitness team, so starting with Josh, Ron, me, and Jordan.

Joshua Delgado: And let's not forget Mary Lou. She couldn't join us today, but she wanted to be here. Great female trainer on the team.

Jordan Tam: Yeah, another service we provide is a free consultation, 45 to an hour consultation in regards to the person's goal. What we do is we have them do an intake form, personal information and make sure they're able to move a Par Q form, and then from there we kind of break down into different assessments. One part that I do with my clients is that I do a movement analysis just to make sure that there's no previous injury that might be a limiting factor in certain movements. Basic stuff like squats, planks, lunges, very, very basic movements just to screen them if they're able to exercise, and then we go through a nutrition intake question, just to ask them what they eat day to day so we understand where their nutrition from a day to day standpoint. From there we have an in-body scale, which is a fitness standard scale. It measures not just your weight, it also measures your total body of water, your muscle density, and your fat.sorry. I'm going to keep continuing. So at the Athletic Wellness Centre we have an in-body scale, which is a fitness standard measuring scale. It's not like your home scale where you weigh and it just shows you the numbers. The in-body scale weighs in your muscle mass compared to your body fat mass, it measures also your total body of water weight and your weight. Another neat thing about this machine is that it measures your basal metabolic rate relative to your height, weight and age. It prints out a paper, it shows all the data. What's really cool about this machine is it shows the basal metabolic rate, so BMR. If you don't know what that is, you can Google it, but it's pretty much your baseline calories, what you need in order for you to maintain that weight. So if someone comes in and they have, they're weighing 178 pounds and then their calories is 1,700, that's their baseline without exercise. If someone exercises, then their calorie intake would be a lot higher. So that's really cool about this machine, and we kind of reassess anywhere between four to eight weeks with this sheet of paper to see if they're progressing or regressing.

Joshua Delgado: Awesome. And having all that data in a printout can be very valuable, more so with the reassessment. Let's say you had your body fat percentage and your muscle mass, body water and all this great information measured, it won't mean so much on it's own, but once you've been exercising for a few months and you've been eating cleaner and you can see the reassessment and the actual changes it made to your lean muscle mass and your decrease in body fat, it's a lot more significant. Definitely hit up one of the trainers to get your free consultation done. And if you are looking for some guidance on campus, at Progress and the Athletic Centre, the personal training rates for staff and students are extremely competitive. We made sure to do so compared to local gyms. The facility is great, and all staff and full time students get a free membership to the Athletic Centre. I also want to mention on campus another great resource. There's lots of them. Healthy place to eat. If you listen to episode three, healthy eating on campus, we go through a ton of great advice when it comes to healthy eating and we touch on all the hot spots around campus and why they're the best places. We're so blessed at Centennial to have some amazing food options on campus. So definitely give episode three a listen to.

Kristin Smart: I think one other thing that all faculty, employees and students have access to on campus that's really awesome is through the AWC they run fitness classes, which are great if you aren't ready to commit to personal training but you want to accountability of having to be in a specific place at a specific time and someone else to do the thinking about what you're going to do in your workout, then going to one of these classes is definitely a great option. I believe there's yoga, spinning, more athletic interval style classes.

Joshua Delgado: Yup, for sure. Tons of options. It's more social, too, for those who prefer that setting. And definitely more affordable. Yeah, group training on a budget, for sure. Thank you for joining us for season two of the Centennial College Podcast. Join us next month for season three, and make sure to listen and subscribe to the Centennial College Podcast on SoundCloud, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, and Spotify.