The key to extreme success with any fitness program is going to be consistent nutritional strategies.  No matter how hard you work in the gym, if you are fueling your body with junk and far too many calories, you are not going to get the results you are looking for.  Your nutritional strategies are going to make or break you.  There are some simple strategies you can use with your nutrition that will help improve your results by 80% or more.

Carefully Manage Calorie Changes

Whether increasing calories or decreasing calories, it must be managed carefully.  Make small changes in either direction and then monitor the results.  If you are trying to increase your calories because you want to build more muscle, add 100 calories a day for a week.  Thus, if you had been at 2,200 calories, go to 2,300 calories and stay there for a week. Find out what your scale and body fat measurements are.  If they are still acceptable to you, increase another 100 calories a day.  Repeat this process until your results go where you don’t want (ie. body fat starts to increase dramatically, etc.) and then just drop back to the previous level and hold it there until you get the final results you are after.  This same process works for dropping calories as well.

Carefully Manage Macronutrient Changes

Never just cut your carbs very low or increase them very high.  It has to be done in a careful manner.  Remember, the psychology of all of this plays a huge role in your success.  If you suddenly increase your carb intake for energy and find that you gained fat, it will probably send you into a panic and you will over correct the other way.  Make macronutrient changes in the same manner as you would make calorie changes.  Do things gradually and monitor the progress.  Step back a level when your results go where you don’t like.  This will keep your nutritional plan on target.

Twitter is a great tool for getting to know people and for building lists of potential customers for later projects.  At the same time, it is essential that you make personal connections on Twitter because that is what it is all about.  Impersonal interaction is frowned upon and will lose followers.

For me, I use Twitter to get to know people, but at the same time, I use it to ratchet up my personal accountability. 

Two Ways I Use Twitter to Ratchet Up Accountability

1. Get Your Blog Content Seen.  I currently have over 2,600 followers on Twitter.  In order to get my blog content seen by my followers, I have set up an automated process for this to happen.  I have gone to my Google account and set up an RSS feed through Google that leads to this blog’s content.  I then used Twitterfeed.com to push the RSS feed through my Twitter account.  Every time there is new content on this blog, twitterfeed.com pushes that new content through my Twitter account via a tweet.  I don’t have to be logged in nor do I have to trigger anything, it is all automated.  This puts my latest blog posts in front of over 2,600 people all at one time.  Visitor logs show that since I started doing this, traffic has increased tremendously.  In addition to this automated method, I post a regular tweet that simply says “Does your fitness plan lack accountability?” with a link to this blog.  It has worked to get me alot of readers.  
2. Be transparent on nutrition.  A big thing for me is being transparent about nutrition.  Thus, in this mission I began posting my meals on Twitter.  I prefix each tweet with the day number and what meal it is and then I end each tweet with a has tag #m8.  The hash tag enables my followers (or even those who read this blog and don’t follow me) to search on #m8 and find the meals I’ve been consuming.  This works very well because I am forced to post my meals on Twitter because I am telling my readers that I am doing this and I am giving them an easy way to search for my meals.  Without the hash tag it would be easy to fall off the wagon on this accountability technique.  That’s the cool thing about Twitter, you can create your own hash tag for whatever purpose you need.

I believe that social media has some great tools for accountability.  Over time I will discuss these ideas in this blog, so watch for that.

This is Focus Friday and today I am highlighting my friend, Dougal McDonald.  This is a guy who has been through some amazingly difficult times and still maintains a positive attitude.  He came extremely close to death or paralysis and yet here is is, shredding hard again.

If you have never “met” Dougal you are going to want to head over to http://mindbodysuperfit.blogspot.com and read his entire story. I strongly suggest that you go back into his archives and read up on this guy. You will not only be amazed, you will be motivated beyond belief.  His story is incredible.  Each time I think I have it tough I remind myself of Dougal and his story and I get right back moving.

I thought that Dougal would make the perfect first edition of Focus Friday.

Motivating Factors

There are several factors that go into motivating me to get the workouts done.  These factors are what lead me to get up as early as I do, because only by getting up early can I assure that my workouts actually get completed.

I workout because I want to have excellent health.  I want to look and feel the best that I can.  It is important to me because I have a fairly young family and I want to be there for them later in life.

I workout because I like how it feels.  I enjoy pumping iron and running on a treadmill.  These things give me energy and make me feel alive. 

I workout because it makes my body look better.  While some may view this as a vain reason, to me it is just one of the many reasons I do this.  If I wasn’t looking better I wouldn’t work as hard as I do.