As a exercise psych guy, this time of year is very busy for me. This is the time of year I get the most emails that contains the words, “goals,” “resolutions,” “core,” “tone,” “marathon,” and “pounds.” They started a few weeks ago and their numbers are climbing daily. But I have a confession. For...
I spent two years and a tiny fortune in graduate school learning everything I could about health and exercise psychology. Now that I'm out, I want to share what I've learned (and am continuing to learn) about habits, motivation, and creating environments where clients feel safe to truly and...
One of the most common reasons that people say they do not want to join a gym is because they aren’t in good enough shape. Many people laugh at the paradox in that thought, but as coaches we take it upon ourselves to understand where a client is coming from. Many people fear the judgement, real or...
By Sohee Lee Sohee, no stranger to the Coyote Point Kettlebell Club, writes on Livestrong about the struggles that every one faces with body composition and lifestyle change. Specifically, patience and delegating your energy to the places that matter. As we have learned from the great work of Roy...
Ed Deci and Richard Ryan introduced SDT in 1985 as a framework for understanding motivation and how it can enrich our lives, formalizing it in 2000. Since then, many health interventions have been created with SDT at their core. In their 2012 paper Fortier, Duda, Guerin, and Teixeira, all of whom...
<blockquoteDo what you need to do, and let the itty bitty details take care of themselves. </blockquote - Sohee
<blockquoteThe biggest stopping point is the feeling of inadequacy, discomfort, mistrust, or a lack of self-efficacy. </blockquote - Jonathan
<blockquoteThe strength model offers promise in identifying strategies to minimize short- term decrements in self-control and assist in developing interventions that foster better self-regulation. </blockquote - Hagger et. al
<blockquoteHabits gather by unseen degrees,As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas. </blockquote - Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XV, line 155. Dryden's
<blockquoteThere is a wide gap between knowing… and doing. </blockquote - John Berardi,
One of the most important topics in coaching that has only recently been studied in depth is willpower. Also known as “discipline” or “ego,” social scientists have finally begun in-depth explorations of how willpower works, is affected, is used, and is improved with training and time. The majority...
One of my first clients as a personal trainer was Erin, an 80 year old Irish woman who came into the gym, straight from Mass on a Tuesday, only to find her previous personal trainer had stood her up for the 3rd time. She was hopping mad, and just wanted a personal trainer who would show up. “My...
I don’t know where you are, but here in the USA this week is Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving might have started out as a noble celebration of abundance, but as with most things in a land where Calvinist pilgrims tried to divine who was “elect” by the earthy accumulation of wealth, more is definitely...
I love goals. People love goals. But goals are a tricky thing for most people. It sounds silly to say, but as someone who teaches people how to set goals for a living I can tell you that most of the people I talk to do not understand the goal of a goal. In sports, where the word goal comes from,...
My latest post, "Win or Learn" on Hello Healthy, the MyFitnessPal blog is all about the way we talk about training to ourselves and how to keep moving forward when it feels like we're standing
I live down the street from the headquarters of Twitter and have seen the company move headquarters a number of times all over my neighborhood of SOMA. Interestingly, the original idea for “twttr” was using SMS text messages to communicate to a small group, which Jack Dorsey prototyped and launched...
Almost 4 years ago, I made a transition from coaching fellow Marine Officer Candidates to helping regular people with regular fitness problems. My median client age went from 20 to 40, the amount of time I had with each person dropped from 12 hours a week to 1 hour, and the average motivation went...
My favorite artist is Tobi Wong. He was a designer who called his art “paraconceptual.” That’s an art-school word that means he made his art by appropriating other people’s work and tweaking it to make a grander statement. Like dipping Tiffany’s pearl earrings in black rubber and selling them in...
What's do you think is the best movie ever made? Citizen Cane? The Godfather? Casablanca? Now what do you think is the worst movie ever made? Showgirls? Battlefield Earth? The Room? Finally, what is your favorite movie of all time? Star Wars? Love Actually? Gross Point Blank? The reason I am asking...
There are some defeats more triumphant than victories. -Michel de Montaigne I began dabbling in Olympic Weightlifting in January of 2012. Dan John taught me to hang snatch with a wooden dowel on the beach at Pacifica, and I did some form of the lifts every day until I underwent the trauma of the...