The hidden element of

“Having Fun”

We all know that we need to lift weights, train our cardiovascular system, and eat nutritiously in order to stay healthy, younger, and attain our goals in fitness what ever they may be. Often times though we lost sight of making sure our training makes us “feel good” emotionally as well as physically.  If you remember I have touched on this before and if you would like to see that e-mail again, respond to this e-mail and I will send it to you.

Over the last few weeks I have been doing well training by myself and with clients from time to time, however I know now that I have not been pushing myself as hard as I could have been.  The reason I know that now is because I have begun training with a friend that I have not trained with in quite some time.  He is preparing for his first show in June so I am really pushing him hard during our workouts.  However, I am pushing myself equally as hard in order to not only keep up, but to gain the absolute most from my workouts as well.  Those of you who have been fortunate, or unfortunate depending on how you look at it,  enough to watch us train the last few weeks know that we are really working hard.  We are yelling at ourselves and each other to sike ourselves up and push even heavier and heavier weight and do it until we either fail, or puke.  (This has happened by the way)  In any case, I am really enjoying the challenge of pushing through the mental barriers I sometimes set for myself, and pushing through the pain that is always associated with intense training.  My last 7 workouts have been the best I have had in months and I have my friend to thank for that.

Last night just for the hell of it, I challenged my partner to some intense cardiovascular training.  If I will raise the bar with weight training, what can I achieve with my cardio.  So we made a little challenge where I did the bike for 16:30 minutes and he did the elliptical for 15 minutes.  I was hootin and hollerin between gasps for breath and it was pushing him to go even harder, even though he was already dieing.  In the end we both burned more calories than we had in a while and I would like to say that the handicap of 1:30 extra minutes helped me to win the challenge.  Needless to say it was not enough though as my partner smoked me by about 64 more calories.

So if you are fortunate enough to have a good training partner, treat them like gold.  As I have described here, it really raises the intensity of your training making your goals move to you a whole lot faster, while at the same time putting the element of fun into the sometimes burdensome exercise routine.

On a side note, the 2005 Healthy Body Challenge is right around the corner and if you want to meet some nice people, have fun, and really workout hard.  You need to participate in this challenge.  Contestants in the past have made some phenomenal transformations is a short period of time and I don’t think there is a single person who did not really enjoy the experience.