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M5:D21 (D429) Expanding your influence

December 28, 2008 By Michael Mahony, ISSA CPT Leave a Comment

  

What's on my mind today?

One way to learn even more about a subject is to teach someone else what you already know.  By doing this you confirm that you have the knowledge firmly implanted in your brain and you reaffirm some of the information you may have forgotten.  Teaching someone else a technique or process requires you to essentially relearn every aspect of that technique or process.  While doing this, you get better at whatever it is you are teaching.

So how do you expand your influence in an area?  One obvious way is to start teaching the subject to other people.  Expanding your influence doesn’t have to mean taking over the world.  It can simply mean pushing yourself harder, further, faster, more frequently.  To expand your influence in the fitness arena find someone to mentor.  Find someone who knows less than you about the subject and begin teaching them everything you know.  This process will accomplish several things for you.

Increased knowledge

The process of expanding your influence will also expand your knowledge at the same time.  You will learn more about how to get fit and stay fit by mentoring someone else.  Your goal as a mentor should be to teach your pupil enough that they can be self-sufficient in due time.  In order to do this you must be able to answer their questions clearly and succinct.  This will enable your pupil to become self-sufficient and you will accomplish that goal.

Increased confidence

By expanding your influence through mentoring, you will be increasing your own confidence level.  You will learn that you really do know what to do and how to do it.  You will find that you understand the principles for success better than you thought. 

Increased execution

As you expand your influence, you will be forced to “practice what you preach.”  This will increase your execution level.  You will no longer have an excuse to skip a workout or eat poorly because there will be another person holding you directly accountable at all times.  How would it look to teach your pupil the importance of consistent exercise and yet you are skipping workouts?  Obviously you are going to be more consistent due to that positive pressure.

Conclusion

I believe that expanding your influence is an important part of increasing your positive pressure for accountability.  You will have a person who is counting on you to walk the walk not just talk the talk.  It is a step that should be taken by everyone seeking to grow in their knowledge of how to stay fit.

 

 
Find out what I'm doing to my body!

Today was a 30 minute interval session on the elipptical trainer. 
 
Exercise the brain with the Thought of the Day!

When you teach you learn and when you learn you earn.
 
Get a discussion started by answering the question!

How have you been expanding your influence?  Comment this post to answer the question.
 

 
  

M3 : D29 Process

Until tomorrow…GET BACK TO LIFTING!

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M5:D20 (D428) Social Networking 101 (Part 2 of 2)

December 27, 2008 By Michael Mahony, ISSA CPT Leave a Comment

  

What's on my mind today?

Today I continue my series on Social Networking 101.  I am going to cover the following topics in this article:

    Why social networking matters
    How to use Twitter to make fitness connections
    Updating your social networking sites from one location
    Increasing positive pressure through the use of social networking
    How to promote your fitness product using social networking

This article is will help you understand and get started with Social Networking.

Why Social Networking Matters

It wasn’t that long ago that we did not even have the internet.  Today almost everyone has the internet in their home.  Social Networking is a major component of the new Web 2.0 that is proliferating society.  The major idea behind Web 2.0 is to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web.  This is why you see so many news sites allowing comments to be made on their news articles.  Blogs are another piece of Web 2.0 that involves sharing information and allowing comments on that shared information. 

Social networking matters.  It matters because it is the way the new global community is developing.  Sites like eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and Skype are enabling us to connect with like-minded people around the world.  It enables you to do more than just retrieve information.  Sites like Myspace and Facebook are exploding because they give you an opportunity to both share information and retrieve the information you want and need.  Failure to get in touch with social networking is going to result in being left behind technology-wise.  Anyone who wants to have an active web presence in the future is going to need to be part of the social networking scene. 

One way to get started is to be sure to link to other people when doing your blog posts.  Reciprocal linking is a key to success in social networking.

It is important to note that email, instant messaging and the telephone do not fall in the Web 2.0 realm because they are not web applications.

How to use Twitter to make fitness connections

In my previous article I spoke about Twitter and explained a little about what it is about.  Below is a screenshot of my Twitter account.  I will attempt to explain what is going on within that screen.

twitterscreenshot

The window above (as best you can see it) gives me the ability to enter a 140 character message (note the big “140” next to the “What are you doing?” text).  Below that you can see pictures and some text.  These are the “tweets” of the people I am actively following.  You will also note that my Twitter page is customized to my own background.  I am following 137 people at the minute and I have 114 people following me.  This means that anytime I send a tweet it goes to 114 people.  Twitter also gives you the ability to send direct messages to anyone that is following you and whom you are following.  This enables you to talk privately with anyone you are following/being followed by.  You can join the Twitter revolution at http://www.twitter.com.

An example of some great fitness professionals you can connect with on Twitter:  Tom Venuto, Marc David, Craig Ballantyne, Scott Tousignant and many others. 

Twitter gives you the ability to share links and pictures as well, all in a 140 character space!  Give it a try and you won’t be sorry.  Just be sure to reciprocate. 

Updating your social networking sites from one location

One of the keys of social networking is getting to know other people.  By doing this you can create mutually beneficial relationships.  Many joint ventures have been born through social networking.  It is an incredible resource.  However, it is difficult to keep multiple sites up to date because it is time consuming.  There are now sites that will enable you to update all your social networking sites at one time.  The two biggest sites for this type of thing are ping.fm and hellotxt.com.  I personally have used both and prefer hellotxt.com.

hellotxt

With hellotxt you can select ahead of time the sites you want updated (I update Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed).  You then type your update status in the box and it gets sent out to all your choices at the same time.  Hellotxt supports a large combination of social networking sites.  See http://www.hellotxt.com to join and for more information.

pingfm

Ping.fm isn’t much different from hellotxt in features that it provides.  I just found that the mobile interface to hellotxt was faster and since I do alot of updating from cell phone, I chose to stick with hellotxt and not Ping.fm.  I know alot of people who love Ping.fm and use it exclusively. 

Increasing Positive Pressure Thro
ugh the Use of Social Networking

As Adam: RTP 2.0 Blog has consistently stated, there is a need for positive pressure to make accountability work.  There are alot of ways to accomplish positive pressure using social networking.  One way is to occasionally include your blog URL in your tweets on Twitter.  An example of how this can work is a recent photo I uploaded of my son.  I took a photo of Matty playing a Wii game and sent it to Twitpic, a service for providing pictures in your tweets, and within 10 seconds 25 people had already viewed the photo.  Imagine if each time you updated your blog you posted a link to it in Twitter?  What if you just updated your statistics and you posted a link to those in Twitter?  People would begin to visit your blog more often. People who knew nothing about your blog would suddenly be regular readers.  That should increase the pressure in a positive way.

I use Facebook.  I do two things to increase the positive pressure using Facebook:  I post the URL to my blog and I import (automatically) my blog entries.

facebookcut2 
Note that I have my blog URL listed on my Facebook profile (see above).

facebookcut
Note that I have my Facebook settings set to import my blog posts on a regular basis. 

By doing these two things I drive people to my blog.  The URL listing on my Facebook profile has gotten me readers who knew me but didn’t know about my blog.  At the same time, adding my blog posts to my profile keeps them in front of even more people.  This ratchets up the positive pressure on me.

Updating your status with information about your blog is another way to keep the positive pressure high.

suzette
Note how Suzette used her status area to update us on her pushup challenge.

Suzette: Quest for Success posted the following status (via Twitter incidentally) about her pushups and included a link to her blog.  This is an example of using the status information to keep the positive pressure high.

How to Promote Your Fitness Product Using Social Networking

This is one of the trickiest parts of the entire issue we are discussing.  Through social networking you can build a rather gigantic group of people that you communicate with on a regular basis.  You should take the time to develop some sort of connection with these people.  At the point that you are ready, you can start to advertise your product using Twitter and Facebook.  You can update the two places at one time using hellotxt.  The idea is that your audience will be more receptive because they’ve gotten to know you.  They will hopefully have an appreciable amount of trust in you.  These things can only benefit the launch and future sales of your product.

Web 2.0 has a huge advertising and marketing component to it.  People do videos and then post them for others to see.  In these videos they promote their product.  There is no other way you can get your product in front of so many people so quickly.  Social networking is the key to quick distribution of information, including marketing materials.  You can even market products as an affiliate using social networking sites.  Just be careful.  Don’t turn into a spammer or you will lose followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook.

I personally get disgusted when someone asks me to join a group on Facebook and after I join I start getting several messages a day advertising a product.  It is annoying and I wind up leaving the group immediately.

Conclusion

Social networking has alot of aspects to it.  It could take alot of reading and studying to understand it all.  Hopefully I’ve accomplished my goal of educating you on the topic in a short amount of time.  If you have any questions or require further help, please feel free to contact me directly.

 

 
Find out what I'm doing to my body!

Mike’s Workout Log:

  

Matty’s Workout Log:

Yet another great workout using the H.I.T. style of training.  The giant sets for the quads continue to kill us both.  It is incredible how those at the beginning of the workout really change the complexion of the workout.

 
Exercise the brain with the Thought of the Day!

Having a workout partner is going to help you push yourself even harder than you do alone.
 
Get a discussion started by answering the question!

Do you use a workout partner to up the intensity of your workouts?  Comment this post to answer the question.
 

 
  

ver-the-edge.aspx” target=”_blank”>

ver-the-edge.aspx” target=”_blank”>M3 : D28 Over the edge

Until tomorrow…GET BACK TO LIFTING!

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M5:D19 (D427) Social Networking 101 (Part 1 of 2)

December 26, 2008 By Michael Mahony, ISSA CPT Leave a Comment


What's on my mind today?

Before we get started on social networking, I wanted to thank my guest posers today:  Mitchell and Bob the Panda.  They joined me for this awesome photo.  By the way, check out my shoulders…I see some changes developing there!

Today we often hear the terms Web 2.0 and Social Networking.  These are related issues that I plan to discuss further in this two part series on social networking.

Web 2.0

The idea of Web 2.0 revolves around applications that have interactive features.  Fresh and useful data is the core of Web 2.0.  The primary focus of any Web 2.0 application is participation rather than publishing.  The idea is to trust others to provide reliable content.  Blog comments are one example of this type of focus.  You may have noticed that many news articles now allow you to make comments.  This is a Web 2.0 application.

Social Networking

Social networking applications involve like-minded people who launch a highly interactive service based upon their common interests.  These applications generally have easy to use communication tools.  They link people together so that information is shared.  The idea is to get to know alot of different people.  You gain people’s trust when they get to know you on a personal level and that’s the entire point of social networking.  There are many examples of social networking applications.  The most common applications are previewed below via screenshots.

Facebook:

Facebook is an extremely involved social networking site.  On this site you are able to link up with other people and share information.  I have found Facebook to be extremely useful for both marketing and personal purposes.  I will discuss the marketing perspective in Part 2.  The personal side is obvious.  You are able to link up to other friends and stay in touch with what is going on in their lives.  While this was not my initial purpose for Facebook, I have learned that an important part of social networking is getting to know other people

MySpace:

MySpace is similar to Facebook.  It is more aimed at a younger crowd in my opinion and definitely leans towards personal use rather than business use.

Twitter:

Twitter is an interesting tool.  All tweets (as they are called) are limited to 140 characters.  You follow people and they follow you.  You are able to see the tweets of those you follow.  You can then reply to them or add to them as you see fit.  What ends up happening is a giant discussion breaks out between many different people.  Twitter is a very useful social networking application because it enables you to get to know alot of people on a personal level.  I have made many friends via Twitter.  At the same time, I’ve found some extremely useful information through the tweets that I read.

Friendfeed:

This service combines the feeds from various places (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.) into one location.  It makes it easier to stay up with what your friends are doing, but I don’t really like using Friendfeed that much.  The theory here is the same as the other social networking sites—you connect to people who connect you to other people and that just gives you massive exposure.

Hellotxt:

As you get more and more involved with social networking you will want to update your status on a regular basis.  Hellotxt is an application that allows you to update a multitude of social networking sites all at once via the Hellotxt interface.  At the same time, all the previous statuses are saved for your review.  I use this site alot, even from my cell phone. 

Conclusion:

There are alot of social networking sites these days and they all have the same basic purpose—to put like-minded people together so that they can accomplish whatever purpose they have set out to accomplish.  I will be discussing how to use these sites to your benefit in the next installment of this series.  Check back for the next installment and you will learn everything you ever wanted to know about using social networking to increase your own accountability.

 
Find out what I'm doing to my body!

I woke up today at 5 a.m. and wound up going for a 3 mile run for my morning cardio.
 
Exercise the brain with the Thought of the Day!

Merry Christmas!
 
Get a discussion started by answering the question!

How have the holidays effected your fitness program?  Comment this post to answer the question.
 

 
  

M327 On the verge

Until tomorrow…GET BACK TO LIFTING!

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M5:D18 (D246) Back for more

December 25, 2008 By Michael Mahony, ISSA CPT Leave a Comment

  

What's on my mind today?

If the rest of the body part focus workouts are as brutal as this week’s quad focused workouts, Matty and I are in for some serious workouts!  The training has been extremely exciting.  The DOMs has been intense.  At the same time, the drive and motivation to get to the gym has been huge.

Starting Christmas day I am going to do a brief 2-part series on social networking.  I will discuss the following issues:

    How to increase the positive pressure through the use of social networking
    How to use Twitter to make connections
    How to update your social networking sites from one location
    Why social networking matters
    How to promote your fitness product using social networking

If you are interested in any of those topics, my series is going to be just what you need.  Social networking is a major component of Web 2.0 strategy.  Everyone can learn something from the series I’ve written, so please come back to read up on the topic.

My video podcast this Sunday will be about weight training principles for success.  You will learn about the various methods of weight training and why I use the method that I use.  This podcast will be the beginning of my efforts to eliminate the confusion caused by the so-called internet gurus and the plans they sell to everyone.  Weight training really shouldn’t be so complicated.  It should not be a mystery to anyone.  The principles you will learn will make it possible for you to create your own incredible workout plan and then give you the tools to stick to it.   Be sure to tune in on Sunday.

 

 
Find out what I'm doing to my body!

Mike’s Workout Log:

Matty’s Workout Log:

It is still extremely brutal to do 2 giant sets in a row that are focused on the quads.  It makes the rest of the workout extremely difficult to complete, but satisfying when you do.  The quads being worked so hard just takes a ton out of you.  There is a huge aerobic benefit from this type of workout as well.

 
Exercise the brain with the Thought of the Day!

Working hard is a satisfying thing. 
 
Get a discussion started by answering the question!

How hard do you push yourself in the gym and could you push yourself even harder?  Comment this post to answer the question. 
 

 
  

M3 : D26 My current thoughts

Until tomorrow…GET BACK TO LIFTING!

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M5:D17 (D425) The aftermath isn’t so overrated

December 24, 2008 By Michael Mahony, ISSA CPT Leave a Comment

  

What's on my mind today?

Today was interesting.  I woke up and found that my quads hurt more than they've hurt in years.  Yes, despite all the leg work I've done, despite all the increases I've had in my quads, this workout was by far the most painful the day after.  This is what High Intensity Training is all about.  Who needs 4 sets of each exercise for the legs when you can do 1 set and get massive results?  It is all about being efficient at the gym.

If my quads don't gain in size after this week they never will again.  This was just one workout from the week's three workouts.  Tomorrow I get to blast these quads yet again.  The feeling I had when I finished my first Giant Set for quads was incredible.  I had never felt such intensity in my leg training before.  I think I've learned a new trick to add to my regimen.  I am always interested in new intensity tricks and I've even used the Giant Set before, but this way was intense.  3 straight exercises taken to failure, no rest in between, what a killer recipe!

The key thing to take away from my comments today is that you need intensity when you lift.  If you go in the gym and just go through the motions you are wasting your own time.  Get resolved to get into the gym and work with intensity.  Let the light stuff be for the other people at the gym.  Your job is to lift heavy, lift slowly and lift until failure.  These things will add up to an intense workout that will show you incredible results.  I keep saying this over and over in the hope that someone will learn from it and apply it.

Would I want you to do the exact workouts as me?  No way!  Would I want you to lift with the same intensity as me?  Most definitely!  You owe it to yourself to make the most of your time at the gym.  High Intensity Training is the way to do that.  You have to want it enough.  You have to push yourself to the extreme limits that your body is actually ready for.  It isn't just about cutting fat my friend, you need more muscle.  If you add muscle you aide in the burning of fat.  It is a simple scientific fact that often goes unnoticed.  Cutting isn't the way to go.  Bulk up and then watch the fat burn off rapidly.  It is a new way for you to think, I get that.  However, just because you've always heard that you need to cut before bulking doesn't make it so.  You've heard it here before and you will continue to hear it here.

 

 
Find out what I'm doing to my body!
Today was one hour of steady state cardio.  I completed this on the elipptical trainer.
 
Exercise the brain with the Thought of the Day!

Focus on giving your best effort and the results will soon follow.
 
Get a discussion started by answering the question!

What do you do to give your best effort in the gym?  Comment this post to answer the question.
 

 
  

M3 : D25 Travel Day

Until tomorrow…GET BACK TO LIFTING!

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