How To Fire Your Coach

And no, I'm not talking about your personal trainer or fitness coach. I'm talking about that pesky 5am coach (or the coach who appears whenever your alarm clock goes off). That piece of mind that comes about and tells you a million reasons (when of course you know you just need one good one!) why you don't need to get out of bed and exercise. The 5am coach may say things like the following:

"You're not really feeling like bringing it, are you?"
"Listen to your body. It says to take a rest day."
"Ok, it won't be a rest day. You can just work out later this evening and make it up"
"You look great already. You don't need to work out. One day off won't kill you. You can make it up later."
"It's gonna be cold when you get up and you're not gonna like it. You should just stay in here under the covers"

Sound familiar? If so, you need to take steps to get rid of your 5am coach. So here's how.

1) Plan for the morning at night Lay out your clothes, get your snacks/food/drinks together for the morning. Charge your personal electronics when you get home from work so you can put them away for the morning before you go to bed. Decide what you're going to have for breakfast so you know how much time you need to make it.

2) Decide firmly what time you want to wake up
DO NOT account for how much time you'd like to push snooze. I'm talking about what time you want to get out of bed and put your feet on the floor and go work out. Once you've decided, set your alarm on whatever PDA you use. If you do not use a PDA and use an alarm clock, find a PDA and use it to set your alarm. You can set your alarm clock as well but set your PDA (i.e. cell phone) 5 minutes later.

3) Sleep in your workout clothes The trick is to limit the amount of fumbling around in the wee hours of the morning. And I'll make a deal with you - if you sleep in your workout clothes, you can set your alarm for 5 minutes later :)

4) Put your PDA across the room or in another room The trick is so that you have to get up out of bed to turn it off. I put mine in my bathroom. It worked. I also turned the volume way up so that I actually woke up 5 minutes early and was afraid of it going off. I also didn't want to feel guilty about waking Joe up.

5) Envision your goals Sometimes you don't only need a physical push, you need a mental push as well to get you out of that bed. Now that you're awake, take a few seconds to envision your new body, what your goals look like. For me, I know I'm down to my last 10-15 pounds so I always envision myself at the beach in July and how I made a promise to myself to be 10 pounds lighter than I was last year (I've got 7 pounds to go). If you're working out just to work out, think of how great you feel post-workout or at the very least, how many extra calories you can eat during the day (I mean...burn ;)

6) Start slow Pull the covers off gently and slide your legs slowly out of bed. When your feet touch the carpet, slowly pull yourself up to a sitting position, then stand. Take a minute or two to get the full effect. You don't literally have to "jump" out of bed

7) Take a breather That's right...take a breather before you even start. Visit the bathroom, get a sip of water or juice to kinda wake you up, walk around a little, take the stairs, get the blood flowing. A few minutes will help you adjust to being awake instead of jumping right into your workout. For me, my morning sequence is to go to the bathroom, weigh myself, grab my workout clothes, and go upstairs. While the video is starting up, I get dressed and take my breather so when the workout is ready to begin, so am I.

8) Add cold water A nice trick I sometimes use is to splash cold water on my face when I wake up. It happens faster this way, I believe.

9) Repeat, repeat, repeat Most activities become a habit if you do them for 30 days. At some point, your 5am coach will stop giving you its non-pep talk and your subconscious will take over. You'll just find yourself doing it.

So good luck!!

Why do we pick up pounds in the winter even when we're working out?

It seems that no matter how hard we are working out or eating right, many of us tend to gain or maintain weight during the winter and find it's so much easier to lose weight in the warmer months. True, there are more options for activities when its nice and sunny outside than when its cold and dreary, but that's not all there is to it. The reason for this frustrating phenomena may lie in the fact that when it's cold, our bodies burn fewer calories (unless you're freezing - i.e. shivering) than in the heat.

According to Dr. Mirkin, "The hotter it is, the more extra work your heart has to do to prevent you from overheating. More than 70 percent of the energy produced by your muscles during exercise is lost as heat. So the harder you exercise, the hotter your muscles become. In hot weather, not only must your heart pump extra blood to bring oxygen to your muscles, it must also pump hot blood from your heated muscles to your skin where heat can be dissipated.

On the other hand, in cold weather, your heart only has to pump blood to your muscles and very little extra blood to your skin to dissipate heat. Your muscles produce so much heat during exercise that your body does not need to produce more heat to keep you warm. So your heart works harder and you burn more calories in hot weather. This information should not discourage you from exercising when it’s cold, because staying in shape is a year-round proposition."

Another specialist, Dr. Sugar, offers the following perspective; "It is true that different temperatures can affect your metabolism and lead to changes in calories burned. This effect is most dramatic at very cold temperatures when we shiver. Shivering alone can actually burn up to a few hundred calories an hour, but this effect of cold temperatures on metabolism is only significant if you’re actually shivering. It would have to be very cold to shiver while jogging, because so much body heat is generated from your exercising muscles. You will notice that sometimes you sweat less when jogging in the cold because the ambient temperature is keeping you cool.

Very hot environments, like saunas, can slightly increase your body’s baseline rate of calories burned, but it’s not dramatic. As discussed in this LA Times article, researchers have found that sitting in a hot tub burns slightly more calories than sitting on the couch, and we can extrapolate that a sauna would be similar to a hot tub. It is estimated that someone would burn 34 calories sitting in a hot tub for 20 minutes versus burning 23 calories sitting on the couch for the same amount of time. This is not a significant number of calories when you consider that walking for 20 minutes burns 100 calories. The long and short of it is that temperature extremes can affect calories burned, but not dramatically unless you are shivering for long periods of time. More articles can be found here on Dr. Sugar's site Also, along the right hand side are great exercise tips and articles!