THE SCIENCE OF KNOWING WHAT TO DO BUT NOT DOING IT | 6 Mindset Hacks

Did you ever wonder why you know exactly what you should be doing to make your life better, happier, healthier, but you don’t do it? You keep saying next week, next year, in five years, but it never really becomes a reality. We have all been there but let’s talk about the science of why that happens and what you can do about it. To put it simply, we are humans and we all have emotion. With that, we are naturally going to gravitate towards pleasure and away from pain. Say for example, Friday night rolls around, and your spouse or significant other wants to order pizza. You’ve had a long week so even though you’re planning to have a salad, you go for the pizza. Another example is sleeping in versus working out in the morning. The reality is that we consistently overcomplicate things. We make them way too complex for what they need to be.

Your subconscious mind is 99 percent of your mind. This is the house of all of your past experiences. This includes your memories, beliefs, and unresolved emotions. This is the domain of your habits. Our conscious mind, however is one percent of our mind and is responsible for our thoughts, goals, awareness of self. For us to be able to set a goal and be able to succeed at it, we have to align the subconscious mind with the conscious mind. Even though we know what we should do i.e. our conscious mind, our subconscious mind is a million times faster and much more powerful. If those two are not aligned, then unfortunately we will not be able to meet our goals or set out to do what we said we were going to do. As it relates to habits, we run our day on approximately 45 percent to 95 percent on habits.  Our thoughts are actually part of our habits. We have about 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day. You can hopefully appreciate that if these conscious thoughts are overpowering our conscious mind, then we are going to default to whatever is easier. We are not necessarily going to move towards the pain, we are going to move towards pleasure, whatever is the easiest thing right now. Going back to that Friday night pizza, “I’ve had a long week and I’m tired,” so I’m just going to go back to what’s comfortable and what’s easy…pleasure.

Additionally, when we get out of our comfort zone, for example setting a goal to exercise every day, this signals fear to the body. Immediately we have chemicals released that are signaling fear and danger. So guess what happens? We also want to move towards what’s easy, what’s comfortable, and what’s pleasurable. We easily will revert back and not achieve our new year’s resolution to exercise every day.

So let’s talk about six ways that you can begin to align your subconscious mind with your conscious mind, you can begin to make your goals a reality.

1) Healthful habits

You want to develop healthful habits so that when your conscious mind gets tired from all those thoughts that are racing through your head, that your subconscious mind decides to take over and do the right thing.

2) Be aware

Be aware of your thoughts, inner voice, and most importantly the language that you are speaking to yourself. If you continue to say, “I’m never really going to get strong,” then you will not get strong. You will not necessarily work out like you’re supposed to in order to get strong. So, you want to make sure that you’re in tune with the language that you’re speaking and shift it to a productive language. “I am going to work out so that I am strong.”

3) Clarity

Have clarity about what you want, what are you striving to do, and the goal(s) that you are hoping to achieve. If you do not have clarity of your vision, dream, or goal, then it will be very challenging to allow that subconscious mind to be aligned with the conscious mind.

4) Take small action steps

This is extremely important to make sure that you are making small incremental changes, especially in your habits. Think of the first time that you were told you had to brush your teeth. Since you were a young child, you’ve been brushing your teeth every single day, at least we hope so. That’s a perfect example of how habits start.

5) Consistency

It is so crucial that for you to do what you want to do, to be consistent with your habits, day in and day out. Blocking time in your schedule, for example, to allow yourself the time to be able to perform whatever it is that you need to do. Whether that’s working out, meal prepping, or meditation. Be consistent with whatever you do so that it becomes a habit, just like brushing your teeth.

6) Celebrate

Celebrate your successes! This is where we can have serotonin and dopamine responses that can improve that feeling of happiness, as well as reward and motivation. It keeps you motivated to keep doing what you’re doing to keep this habit going to make sure that it’s truly part of your life.

There are six different ways to help you align your subconscious mind with your conscious mind, allow you to achieve your goals, and do what you say you are going to do.

If you need help on your journey to better health, contact drarianne@staging.movementparadigm.flywheelsites.com to schedule a FREE 15 minute virtual consultation.

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How to Start a Fitness Program or Step up Your Game

Who’s excited for the New Year? You may be thinking “new year, new me,” so you want to either start an exercise program or step up your game. I am here today to help you with that! This is a time when so many people get injured because they are trying to start a fitness program for the first time or they’re trying to step it up too quickly. And nearly 80 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail.

Let’s take this as an opportunity to help you think about some different aspects of fitness, so you can prevent injury and get the most out of your fitness and your health this year.

Know your baseline

The first and most important thing is knowing your baseline. Are you a beginner, intermediate, or advanced fitness enthusiast? Do you have any pain or discomfort, or any potentially old injuries that you’re dealing with? What is your mobility/ stability, or functional movement, baseline? Working with a qualified professional to properly screen and know exactly what your starting point is highly recommended.  

If you don’t have that opportunity, then you really want to be able to seriously reflect on your true baseline, your starting point, so that you know how to systematically progress safely from there. Once you figured that out, now we can jump into what to include in your fitness program.

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1) Warm-up and prepare

This does not mean jumping on the treadmill for five minutes to get your body warmed up for your workout. It means taking the time to tune into your body. Notice what pain or tension you might have that day. Are you tired? Did you eat well that day?  Really take a deep inward look to see how you are feeling that day and how that will affect your workout. Once you’ve established that, then you can think about how can you prepare yourself best for the demands of the activity that you are about to embark on.

If you are going to do strength training for example, then doing some static stretching, ie holding a stretch for 30 seconds, is not beneficial. Instead, think about how you can prepare your body for the demands of the activity. For example, instead of jumping on a treadmill and walking for five minutes, you could do lunges with a reach. This will help to activate and wake up your whole body and nervous system, so you are fully prepared for your workout. 

2) The systematic progression of your activity.

For this to be successful, it is vital to have a preparation period. One to three months preparation time is recommended to prepare for it so that you can just go into it with ease. The last thing you want it to do is to create stress, ie. Inflammation, on your body.  You’ll want to make sure it is the right time in your life and things are relatively calm. It is extremely challenging to eat out when you are on the Elimination Diet. Lastly, it’s often easier if you slowly work out one to three foods at a time and find replacements for them before you begin. You want to be fully prepared, which is why it is strongly recommended to work with a professional to guide and support you through the process.   

How to do this for a running program

If you are just starting out with a running program, running for 30 minutes three times a week is unrealistic, especially if you haven’t done that in months or years. That will set you up for injury. When, starting a running program, or any program for that matter, you won’t put stress on your body, and then take it off, put stress on your body, and take it off, and so on. This will create an adaptation, which means you are getting your body familiar with a certain exercise or training program through repeated exposure. This will help to create fascial elasticity in our body, like a rubber band, which can really aid in preventing injury.

If you want to start a running program, make sure that you can walk for 30 minutes three times a week first without any symptoms before you progress to running in any capacity. You encounter 1-1.5 x your body weight in force with walking and almost double that with running.

When you’re symptom-free and ready to progress, you would slowly start with a walk-jog interval. You could start with one minute of walking and one minute of jogging. I would suggest starting at five minutes total, so it’s only a few minutes total running time. Once you feel comfortable with that, then you can slowly progress to 10 minutes, and then 15 minutes, and so on. This is going to take weeks to months to get you to 30 minutes of running.

On the other hand, if you’ve already been running, and you want to step it up you could follow the same protocol, but you would just have a different baseline than a beginner does. For example, if you want to go from 20 minutes to 30 minutes, then every other day you can add a few more minutes to your run assuming there are no symptoms, pain, discomfort, or injuries. You can continue to progress that way to achieve whatever goal you have.

How to do this for a strength training program

If you’re strength training for the first time, I would suggest starting at two sets of eight to 12 repetitions two times a week. Then you can slowly progress that towards three sets of 10-12 repetitions three days a week.

How to do this for a yoga program

There are a lot of different yoga classes out there, but you need to make sure that it’s a yoga class that you can do safely. For example, a Hatha yoga class may be more appropriate for a beginner as opposed to a power yoga class. It doesn’t mean that you can’t ever do that, it just means to start with something where you can learn how to control your body and coordinate your movement with your breath first before you go into something more advanced.

How to do this for a HITT training program

Please reference the video for the pros and cons of HIIT training here or read the blog post here. For the intermediate to advanced fitness enthusiast, this can be a great way for you to step up your program. Beginners have a higher injury risk because they really need to develop a basic fitness or strength baseline before they move into something more advanced like HITT training.

3) Cool-down

A cool-down is different for every person. It could be a short walk, stretching, basic breathwork, or even meditation. It can also be a great way to reflect on what happened in that session. That means reflecting on what went right and what didn’t go as well.  Does your body feel energized and revitalized or does it feel kind of worn down and sore? Did you work too hard or not hard enough? Use this information as an opportunity to change your next session.

Summary

Fitness is a journey, no matter if you are a beginner, intermediate, or advanced. You are always fine-tuning, and reflecting on how to maximize what you are doing.  Do you need to add yoga in because you’re doing too much strength and HITT training? Do you do too much yoga and need to add in strength and power exercises? I definitely encourage you to reach out to a professional that can help you reach your goals while staying injury-free. It is important to take ownership of your health and movement to be able to continue to stay pain-free for a lifetime.

If you are interested in feeling your best and need help, reach out to schedule an appointment to get you started on your journey.

Reach out for a 15-minute FREE discovery session to see how we can help you on your journey.

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Pros and Cons of HIIT

With the holidays coming around, many of you may want to get fit as fast as you can. We all know deep down that’s not the best solution. But, part of improving your fitness quickly probably includes some kind of speak of high intensity interval training (HIIT). As with anything, there are pros and cons of HIIT and I’d like to educate you on making an informed decision of whether or not it’s appropriate for you.

What is HIIT?

You may be asking yourself what is HITT ? It is essentially a vigorous activity, followed by a low to moderate intensity activity in an interval format that is often done between five to 30 minutes, and the intervals can range from 15 seconds to two to three minutes. There are many options to perform HITT such as using bodyweight, calisthenics, free weights, or even a machine like an elliptical or stair climber.

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Pros

First, it can help to decrease body fat, as well as improve overall metabolic rate. Metabolic rate is really important because it helps you to burn more calories throughout the course of the day when you’re not working out, which is really powerful. Second, it can help improve oxygenation, which is the muscles ability to use oxygen. This means if you do 60 minutes of HITT training versus 120 minutes of steady state cardio you can have the same benefits. This leads me to my next point, which is that you get maximum benefit for decreased time investment. Since we are all super busy and stressed for time, and can’t find the time in the day to exercise, this can be very valuable. It has been shown to also increase muscle growth, however, that is not the gold standard of muscle building.  Strength training always wins. Even though there has been shown some benefit, it’s not the most valuable way to build muscle.

Cons

Let’s shift gears now and talk about some of the disadvantages. First, it can lead to a higher injury risk. Some of the reasons why I think this happens is because many people that choose to do HITT training are often deconditioned at first and they think ” this is a fast way to get in shape”. So, they begin doing it at a high volume, high intensity and often do not have a solid movement foundation, or even a fitness foundation to support it. This is why I would recommend starting out slow and then gradually building yourself up. Second, recovery time is always important in exercise, but it is especially important in HITT training. This is because it is a physical stressor on your body, so you need more time to recover. HIIT four to six days a week is extremely high because the it may take two to three days to recover from a session.  I typically recommend my patients and clients do it no more than two to three days a week if they are an appropriate candidate. Lastly, if you are training for a sport or a movement skill, you need to make sure that you’re really focusing on the specificity. HITT training is not geared towards specificity whatsoever. It is general conditioning, so you may want to consider that with your training goals.  

Other considerations:

  1. Stress? Are you experiencing a tremendous amount of acute or chronic stress in your life. If so, I do not recommend HITT training, because again, it is a significant stressor, a physical stressor. This can contribute to a constant cascade of stress hormones which also can further impact hormonal and immune health.
  2. Beginner? If you are a beginner, I do not recommend HITT training. Learn how to develop the proper movement patterns, learn about your body, and really understand what’s happening to be able to recognize if you are feeling discomfort or pain. Tune in through mindful movement and develop a basic level of fitness first before volume and intensity is added.
  3. Intermediate to Advanced? If you have been working out for a while and you want to take things to the next level to really boost your cardiovascular fitness and fat loss, then I think HITT training can be really valuable.

Summary

Nothing is black and white. It’s really about understanding the different pros and cons of this or any other fitness program to see if it is appropriate for you at this time in your life. If it is not appropriate for you at this time in your life, then just hold off and revisit it later.  It will always be there.  Movement is a skill that you keep refining your whole life. There’s so much to learn. You really want to continue that journey forever, so there’s always room for improvement.

If you are not sure where to start, please reach out to schedule a private session to begin your movement journey.

3 Simple Informal Mindfulness Practices

Let’s chat about some informal mindfulness practices that you can do in your day to day life to become more aware, more present, and more connected. Often times we think about meditation as sitting in a meditative seat for 30 to 45 minutes. You might think, “how on Earth and I am going to do that?” I want to reinforce how important that practice can be in an overall mindfulness practice, however, that’s not for everyone. There are many things that you could do in your daily life to become more present in your own life, become more connected, more aware and hopefully help you to live your best life.

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Three Informal Mindfulness Practices

  1. Find an anchor.
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How to decrease sugar cravings in 3 days

With the holidays in full gear, many of us struggle with those darn sugar cravings. Some people suffer with some type of sugar craving or even a so-called sugar addiction all year long.

We know that sugar cravings cause a dopamine response as well as other neuro chemicals that ultimately creates a biochemical and neuro chemical response in the body. The addiction of sugar can cause a similar response in the brain as in drugs, alcohol or cigarettes.  However, there’s a little bit more to sugar cravings than just that.

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Sugar Cravings and Gut Bacteria

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Movement Asymmetry: Are you overpatterned?

Did you know the body is actually very asymmetrical in its structure? This is due to the organs which are oriented in a very calculated way and separated from the right and left sides of the body. We have our liver and gallbladder on the right, and our pancreas, spleen, stomach, and most of our heart on the left. We have different functions of the hemispheres in our brain, too. So, there’s so much asymmetry in our body, and it’s really powerful.

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Asymmetry in athletes

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