David @ DHPT

That is a quote from one of my favourite motivational speakers Dr Eric Thomas.  A high school dropout who was homeless and ended up getting a PhD.  He isn't talking about fitness when he says this but it's very applicable. (Skip to 1:35 if you to skip the intro, but it's worth watching from the start if you have time) Often when the road to our fitness goals gets tough, we turn back to our old habits.  The chocolate finds its way back into the shopping trolley.  We have that extra beer on the weekend.  We skip that early morning workout because we feel like a sleep in. When we begin to see these habits creep in that is the old us rearing its head again.  This is when we need to make a choice about how we move forward.  We need to get past our old ways of thinking before we can get to our new ways of thinking. And it is going to be hard.   Real hard. Proper hard. But will it be worth it? Definitely.   The question is: ...

I quite often log into Twitter  and try and answer questions that people have on health and fitness.  By far and away the most common question I come across (besides people asking whether or not they should go to the gym today) is individuals asking for help on designing a gym program. Now this is a very open ended question - one that can't really be answered in the 140 characters allowed in a tweet.  But I always have the same piece of advice for them.  Start at the end and work backwards. This one piece of advice is aimed at helping them re-focus what they are trying to achieve. Most people who ask this question (be it on Twitter or to a real life person) tend to think that they just need a "workout plan" and that will be enough.  In one respect that is true - you can get a great workout by following a plan, but in another you will not get anywhere fast. You need to have a goal in mind before you start planning your workouts.  For the majority of pe...