Last week’s ‘Thoughts from the Trenches’ was so popular with people
that I thought I should do another one, and if people keep enjoying
it then I’ll just keep on doing it.

A lot of people seemed to like it because of the randomness of it.

A little fitness and a little of everything else so I’ll stick with
that formula if it’s enjoyable for everybody.

Here’s a few of my thoughts for the week:

- Ever since I STOPPED doing a lot of ab work did I finally get a
six pack.

- To add to that. Ever since I starting sprinting 2-3 times a week
did that six pack really start showing up.

- Hockey playoffs have started up. Unfortunately I don’t see any of
it being in Virginia, but in retrospect that may be a good thing so I don’t
have to stay depressed about the Maple Leafs not making it….again

- The more I read the Fat Loss Lifestyle the more I like. The 12
week program in it along with the 298 pages of quality info is top
notch and Darin Steen should be extremely proud of the work he’s
done with all of his clients and this book.

- Are we just a bunch of safety freaks these days? I mean, when are
kids going to be allowed to have fun and play real games again?

- my new favorite blog I visit regularly is Nate Green’s…check it
out at http://www.thenategreenexperience.com

- quote of the week: “When making your choice in life, do not
neglect to live.” -Samuel Johnson

- Is fat loss training just becoming more and more complicated
by the day, or is it just me?

- Remember, you can have cheat MEALS, but never do cheat DAYS. Why
work hard for 6 days and just destroy your results on day 7.

- I’ve been guilty of too many cheat meals this week…damn baseball
and hot dogs…

have a great day,

Dan Grant

Here’s a story about the industry.

It’s all true.

I’ve written about it before.

Now these stories are the extreme ones but they happened and unfortunately will probably happen again.

I’ve seen the stupid stuff club trainers do with new clients. It’s ridiculous. They think they are all hardasses and that making a beginner go through an intense workout will show they know what they are doing.

Idiots.

I saw a lady one time with a trainer struggling to almost tears doing one legged (yep…ONE legged) squats with a stability ball between her back and the wall.

The trainer kept saying, “Come on, push through it”. This lady was in pain. I actually walked over and tried to distract the trainer so this lady could stop doing the exercise.

Anyways, before I go totally off, here’s the link to the story.

A lot of people don’t believe me when I say that I can show them how to get certified in less then a day. Well this clip from CBS show’s you how…so now you can believe me.

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3991584n

Dan Grant

I’ll be honest.

I’m not a big fan of The Biggest Loser show. I’ve actually written an article about all my thoughts about it so I won’t go off on another tangent.

In that article I did say the Jillian was the only trainer that I would trust in a real world situation. I don’t know, just something about her, I guess.

My thoughts about her as a trainer were further justified this week when she made comments about a program that actually makes sense for every day people who want to lose fat…and it WASN’T her program.

It was Craig Ballantyne’s Turbulence Training program.

I love the program. I’ve tried it out myself before. The reason it’s so successful is because it follows the rules of fat loss. The same rules I teach you in my 5day ecourse: OPERATION: Burn Fat FAST!

So if you’re looking to shed some more pounds before summer hits then I suggest you head over and take a look at what Jillian has to say at Turbulence Training.

Talk to you soon,

Dan Grant

PS - The Fat Loss Crew will also get you ready for summer. Oprah’s guest Lynn Haraldson-Bering’s interview is FREE right now, but only for a limited time. Go to www.thefatlosscrew.com to get it while you can.

here’s a new article I wrote for The Soko:

About a year and a half ago, I started training a kid (we’ll call him Johnny) who was 13 years old. He was around 250 pounds, not very tall and was in need of some help and fast. He looked like a mini obese adult, to be blunt.

He was quiet the first time I met him, but you could tell that this was a kid that really wanted this change to happen, and he would be willing to work extremely hard to get some life changing results. As you would expect, exercise was a struggle for this young man, off the bat, and his nutrition needed some definite tinkering.

Let me explain a couple things he had to deal with (maybe they are issues for you too) and what he did to get down to almost a third of his bodyweight.

“I Did NOT Want to Get Out of Bed This Morning.”

Have you ever said that to someone the day after a tough workout? Well, that’s exactly what he said to me. I hear trainers all the time telling people that they won’t feel sore or shouldn’t feel sore after a workout because it means you went too hard.

Personally, that’s a load of you-know-what. Now, I’m not telling you to sprint until you drop for your first workout ever. I’m just saying, for the first little bit of training, if you’re doing anything productive at all, you’re going to be sore.

So live with it.

The first workout Johnny and I did together consisted of teaching him the proper way to do a bodyweight squat and testing how many knee push-ups he could do in a minute. Grand total was somewhere around 14, I think.

Other than that all we did was the warm-up, where I taught him some functional stretches to get him ready and the cool-down, where he learned some static stretches.

His muscles just weren’t used to working or being stretched, so he was sore. Plain and simple. From my experience I know you just have to push through it for a week or two. Your body is an amazing machine and it knows how to adapt to the newfound stress.

“It Says I Gained a Pound This Week…What’s the Deal?”

Ever have this happen to you? Heartbreaking, isn’t it? When you bust your butt all week and the ‘truth-teller’ (also known as the scale) tells you that you gained.

Yep, it happens. One thing you’ve probably heard before and you will hear a lot from me (so be prepared) is that the scale doesn’t matter.

There are many reasons why the scale might be off a little bit at the moment in time when you decide to weigh yourself.

Johnny gained a little bit of weight the second week of training with me and was a little confused, so he asked me why that happened. Maybe he gained a little muscle, maybe he weighed himself at night and not in the morning, or maybe he was retaining a little extra water because he had been eating some high sodium foods.

Did his pants fit better? Yep.

What are you worried about…your pants fitting better or a silly scale that’s going to tell you if you’ve succeeded this week or not?

He Had a Vision

I have to give a lot of props to Johnny. He made the commitment to change and change he did. He wanted to learn everything from mental training to nutrition.

Now there were workouts that he just wasn’t feeling up to, but he did them anyway. There were times when he really wanted his favourite drink in the world, iced tea, but he didn’t. There were times when he really wanted to sleep in at a friend’s house, but he chose to have me over at 10 a.m. on a Saturday so he could get his workout in.

He knew what he wanted. He had a clear vision of 75 pounds dropping from his body. As I write this, he has achieved around 78 or 79 pounds of weight loss. He now has a 33-inch waist and is finding new things to enjoy with his old friends (and new ones who have started to notice how great a kid Johnny is since his fat loss).

________________________________________
the journey is always worth it

There is always a burst of motivation when you start going after new and exciting goals that are going to change your life. Sometimes the struggles that come along with those new goals make it really hard to stick with them though.

Johnny was sore, tired and frustrated at some points throughout his body transformation, but he made it, and I know he’d tell me he’d go through it all again because the results he got were worth it.

Make a commitment to yourself, learn what you need to do, be prepared for both the ups and downs and look forward to the great results you’re going to be getting from all your hard work.

What are your thoughts? Send me a line at dan (at) thesoko (dot) com.

Dan Grant

PS - The Fat Loss Crew is ‘on fire’. Reviews are coming it on Oprah superstar Lynn Haraldson-Bering’s interview. It’s available for FREE right now…but probably not for a whole lot longer so if you want to hear it go to www.thefatlosscrew.com.

Here’s some of my random thoughts for the week.

- The women with the best figures in the gym are always the ones
doing heavy weights and doing it with intensity, even if they aren’t
doing an optimal program

- I was reading a copy of The Fat Loss Lifestyle the other day
and it said that the hours your sleep BEFORE midnight are twice as
valuable then the hours after. Something to do with the gravitational
pull of the earth…This book is one of the best I’ve seen in a long
time by the way. (298 pages of raw info).

- why is it that so many people who do a lot of long cardio ask me
why they can’t lose any weight?

- why are so many people busting their ass in the gym right now to
get ready for summer and then once summer comes just go out and
drink all their efforts away?

- nice to see the Toronto Blue Jays at 4-2 to start the year…GO
JAYS!

- why is it that every time I watch an infomercial on the latest
ab product I feel like vomiting?

- I think John F Kennedy said it best when he said “There are so
many people standing disappointedly on the corner waiting for the
street car called Perfection”

- Try and incorporate some type of grip training in your programs.
A stronger grip makes everyday activities A LOT easier.

Have a GREAT week,

Dan Grant

PS - Thank you for your support. If you don’t know what I’m talking
about it’s explained here.

PPS - The Fat Loss Crew is a lot more popular early on then I
thought it would be. You can still get your complimentary interview
right now at http://www.thefatlosscrew.com

I’ve been getting question after question lately dealing with fat loss. I don’t know if you’ve been asking any questions or not (if you haven’t been, please do), but this question was asked the today and I thought I should share it with you.

The question was:

Will the “industry” ever get to the point where there is agreement on the best way to get rid of excessive body fat?

That’s a great question.

I don’t know if you’re confused about fat loss training, but A LOT of people are. The “industry”, unfortunately, sucks at its job to be honest.

I don’t think there will ever be an ‘agreement’ on the best way to lose fat. One of the main problems, i think, is that it’s so easy to become a personal trainer these days. Some people can get it by paying a couple hundred bucks and taking a weekend course…online!

That drives me nuts. Especially because these are the trainers working in the gyms where most people go and workout.

The “industry” does have a lot of high quality people. If you’ve read my newsletter for a while you know that I’m a big fan of Craig Ballantyne, of Turbulence Training fame.

He’s did a chapter on cardio training for me in The Degrees of Change Fat Loss Plan. This guy has great incite on this stuff. And the reason he constantly produces such great results for so many people is because he is constantly learning and improving his programs.

That’s what I do too. I’m always trying to learn. I spend thousands of dollars a year on fat loss and fitness information to keep improving and produce better results for my clients.

Hate to say it but some trainers just stick with the textbook they were given for their certification course or they’re still in the 80’s and refuse to change. Either way, it’s not helping the people paying them large sums of money because they are lead to believe that because they are a ‘certified’ personal trainer they know what they’re doing.

I don’t know. There’s a lot of angles I could take to say the the “industry” will never be on the same page…but I could be wrong.

What do you think?

Are you fed up with the ‘industry’?

I am, and I’m apart of it!

I don’t even call myself a personal trainer anymore because it almost seems embarrassing to be called one. But maybe that’s just me.

I guess that’s my mini rant for the week :).

Talk to you soon,

Dan Grant

PS - The Fat Loss Crew is extremely popular right now and so is my baseball comeback attempt. Check ‘em out yourself.

People often come to me asking if the current program they are following is good and worth doing. As with almost any type of fitness program, some will help people and some won’t. There’s always a program out there that will work for you; sometimes it’s just a challenge to actually find it.

I know people who have shed a good amount of fat doing the old school body building workouts. I know many people for whom that method just didn’t work. I know people who have lost a lot of weight going on jogs every morning. I also know people who actually gained fat while doing long, slow cardio everyday.

Throughout my days as a trainer and through the trials and tribulations of finding and creating a fat loss system that works for most people, I have come up with five points that you should understand and apply to your fitness program if you want guaranteed fat loss success.

Know the Goal of Fat Loss

The goal of successful fat loss is to get your metabolism as high as possible for as long as possible throughout the day.

The goal is not to burn as many calories as possible during a workout because that can only take you so far. You have to look at the time you aren’t in the gym because surprisingly enough that’s when you’re actually going to be burning all that fat away.

So understand that the goal for a successful fat loss plan is the focus when you create or review your program.

A Nutrition Plan We Can All Use

If you sit back and think about it, this whole nutrition thing really shouldn’t be overly complicated should it? The easy answer would be to simply stop eating processed food and eat more veggies.

The realistic response for most people is, “That ain’t gonna happen.” At least not overnight, anyway. The fact is that some of those diets out there are actually pretty solid. Another fact is those diets cause too much of a dramatic change in people’s lives and they have a hard time sticking with it.

Most people succeed with gradual change, so why not make your nutrition plan a gradual one. The goal of this would be to cut out processed food and increase your vegetable and lean protein intake…just not overnight.

Let’s say you eat out for lunch twice a week and it’s always fast food. Why not cut out one of those fast food meals a week? Plan on buying something healthier or making your own healthy lunch. I remember a trainer telling me once that he had a guy come to him for advice on nutrition. This guy ate two Big Macs at lunch three times a week. The trainer told him to only eat one Big Mac for a few weeks and then they could re-adjust his nutritional plan. The guy came back four weeks later about 30 pounds lighter, just from one change.

Frequency

That’s only the first step regarding nutrition, however. The second step is to figure out how your nutrition plan can follow the goal of successful fat loss. How can you ramp up your metabolism throughout the day when you eat?

Eating smaller meals five to six times a day helps your metabolism stay at high levels during the day, so it makes a lot of sense to do that. If three meals is what you have to do then in between meals, try ‘grazing’ (as my clients say), and eat a handful of nuts or a piece of fruit.

This plan of gradual change and increasing the frequency of meals has proven to be successful with all my clients, and I guarantee it will work for you, as well.

________________________________
how’s it looking so far?

If you are consistently struggling with your nutrition, maybe it’s because you try to change too much too soon. Try making gradual changes and see what happens. It’s actually a foolproof plan. If you cut out something that’s not good for you and don’t add anything else, then you literally have to lose weight. People might disagree with this, but in the game of long term successful fat loss, slow and steady wins the race.

Dan Grant

PS - Want to follow my comeback. If so go here: www.dangrantcoaching.com

Guess what?

This is only for this blog and no one else. If you’re here right now you get to take advantage of something pretty cool.

It’s called the Fat Loss Crew.

It’s a series of interviews I did with 5 people who have conquered their fat loss struggles and I got them to share everything with you.

You can now go over there and get Lynn Haraldson-Bering’s interview for FREE.

You might not recognize the name, but she’s actually pretty famous.

I mean she was on OPRAH….and CNN featured her weight loss too.

If you want it, just go to www.thefatlosscrew.com and get it.

Have a great weekend,

Dan Grant

PS - If you want the all the interviews I have it at a dirt cheap price right now, because this is the unofficial launch of it and I love my blog readers so you’ll always get a special deal with me.

PPS - Unfortunately that price won’t be like that for very long. Remember you get Lynn’s interview FREE by going to www.thefatlosscrew.com.

I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people regarding my baseball comeback. So I’ll briefly answer the main one’s here.

Why? - Well, because it was a dream of mine when I tore my hamstring practically off the bone, which put baseball on hold big time. And I also want to lead by example. I talk so much about doing what you want, I need to practice what I preach.

What are you doing to get ready? - Training in the gym 3 times a week, speed and agility work 2-3 times a week. And I’m throwing at every opportunity I can. It’s a little challenging to get swings in, but I’m working on it.

What supplements are you taking? - Fish Oil, Whole food multi-vitamins, and Prograde Workout and creatine.

What about your fitness business? I am still going to do phone and email consults, and all the internet stuff will run as normal as possible. It’s going to be a journey where lessons will be learned and I want to share it all with you. I am probably going to start another blog about it so I can stick with fitness on here (what it was made for in the first place).

Everybody has dreams right? I know you do.

What are yours?

Do you dream of a slimmer figure?

Maybe you just don’t know how to go about it?

Taking the first step is usually the hardest one to take…maybe you just need that little ‘nudge’ forward.

I’m going to give you an answer to all that Friday. And it will only be for this blog only so it will be worth it to check back.

Think big, baby!

It’s all worth it,

Dan Grant

Right now I’m reading Get In The Game by Cal Ripken Jr. and I’m loving it so far because I get to read stories about what he went through and what he had to do to get to the level he eventually acheived and continues to acheive. I love finding out what successful people are actually doing in their everyday life. What makes them so successful or fit.

I get emails or have people come up to me sometimes asking what I actually do as far as a program.

I coach high school varsity baseball here in Winchester and about 4 weeks ago things to busy. Tryouts, practices, decisions, more practices, scrimmages and finally the games came. Because I love baseball so much, I get really involved in it and helping the kids learn.

I actually miss my playing days so much (I used to play at Parkland College, which is a Junior College, and University of Northern Iowa, with is Division 1 NCAA) that I’m actually training right now to get back into pro baseball.

There’s me ‘back in the day’ playing college ball

But anyways, as the past few weeks have gone on and how baseball is starting to take up a lot of my time, I started noticing my workouts were slipping and my nutrition has been doing the same. If you’ve ever been around a baseball field for any lengths of time you know that the nutritional choices aren’t exactly the best….especially on the road when choices are really limited. That’s one reasons I carry some Cravers with me and some fruit.

I also noticed last week that my stomach was a little ’soft’.

So this week I did 2 workouts in the gym for a total of 50 minutes (both workouts COMBINED) and I did 2 sprint sessions. I did 4 60 yard sprints last Saturday and 3 30 yard sprints and 4 60 yard sprints this afternoon. I also did some agility work today as well.

And there’s nothing magic about 60 yards, if you’re wondering. It’s just the length of the speed test in baseball (why…I have no idea).

My last workout looked like this:

Kettlebell Swings x15
Kettlebell Front Squat x6
Kettlebell Swings x15
Kettlebell See Saws x10 ea. arm

As many rounds as possible in 10 minutes

1-leg squats x 8 ea. leg (standing on a box)
Pullups x MAX
Mountain Climbers x 25 ea. leg
Squat Jumps x 10
Power Pushups x 10

As many rounds as possible in 10 minutes

So my workout took 20 minutes and my metabolism was cranking afterwards.

So that’s a mini look into my world and I’ll be telling you a lot more about it on this blog.

Do you have a workout that you do when you’re short on time?

If you do, feel free to share it with everybody.

Happy Easter!

Dan Grant