About two years, I met up with a friend from high school who I hadn’t seen in a while. His name is Howard Panes. We met up at a health club I was training at called Can Do Fitness in Short Hills NJ.

Howie is the truly passionate owner of How Fit in Livingston NJ, a top notch personal training studio that offers a truly one of a kind training experience. He is is a very successful guy, and is entrepreneurial in fitness.

At the time, he was training a client outside his own facility, with a product called the NRG Ball. This is a product that Howie (as I call him) developed.

I didn’t want to interrupt him, but as friends who go way back, I took an interest in what he was up to. The guy he was training, was having a ball (literally) with this thing and really challenging himself. I notice that his workout was not long yet it was clear he was taking his fitness level to a whole new level in those 15 minutes or so I watched.

Of course, my interest was peaked. I had a lot of experience by then with portable fitness equipment and I was determined to have my NRG Ball experience.

That was before my Flip Camcorder so I didn’t film the experience, but I have to tell you; having been in or around the fitness industry for a long period of time, and experiencing so many different fitness devices, this one was true a good one.
Maybe it was the focus on core, it’s grip, the ability to do anything from a push up to new movements I had never experienced before. Whatever it was, I was both challenged and intrigued.

Today, I am incorporating NRG Ball training into my life, for a variety of reasons.

1. It’s my fried Howie’s product (I’m honest)
2. It’s challenging, from a push up to new movements I’ve never tried.
3. It’s anywhere, anytime! (I love that).

Read about it and try it out.

He’s got a bunch of videos up there that are great; just click on exercises.

We’re going to do an NRG Ball Transformation Challenge pretty soon, so gets some practice and have fun.

~ JAM

Brief, Intense and Consistent

Ironically, most people are simply out of alignment with all three of these concepts and that’s why they are not fit for power!

What do they do?

They think they need to exercise for long periods of time, as if more was better. They do "slow boring cardio", and the same exercises as yesterday, at the same weight, for "4 sets of 10 reps"… same thing they did last week. They don’t challenge themselves and things never change, like their body.

This bores the living daylights out of most people and because they over train, they can’t sustain. They get depleted, on top of everything else in their life and naturally they don’t see the results they want.

This combination of over training, feeling depleted and poor results, ultimately means inconsistency.

Sound familiar?

What people forget is that fitness in todays day and age is "mass bodybuilding" and obsessive for a variety of reasons I can’t get into in this post. I am a former bodybuilder and know this obsession. I’ll post a few pictures of old in my next post. Yet still to this day I embody the desire to build my body, but I know the principles at play and they don’t define how I stay fit on a day to day basis.

My goals are different.

See my recent posts on the subject.

Bodybuilders have building their body as a sort of business as their goal.  And athletes too have sport as their occupation! This is not the case for the person who’s business may be marketing, or construction or something else; who sees fitness as something they maintain in their life, not the goal itself. They want high levels of fitness, but still fitness is not the goal itself like it is in bodybuilding and sport.

Now anyone who knows me, knows that I teach athletic principles for healthy goal achievement, in Performance Lifestyle training, and the one thing I do to be succesful at this is, is I change the context.

Fitness principles in the context of goal achievement outside of body building or sporting endeavors are applied similarly, but very different at the same time. Major shifts take place in mode and expectations.

The reason so many people are unsuccessful maintaining their fitness is because they don’t understand fitness in the context of life and lifestyle where the goals are not ripped bodies and sporting success. You can have both, but in order to have both you need the lifestyle that supports the outcomes and this is what most people don’t have!

It’s very difficult to train like a bodybuilder or sports athlete on top of an already full schedule, that is not set up to support the the outcomes these people seek. Your lifestyle has to support in every way, the outcomes you seek, if it doesn’t you will not be able to "stick with it".

You don’t have to stick with stuff in an effortful way, what your lifestyle supports. That will happen naturally.

The reason why brief, intense and consistent are the 3 magic words in fitness, is this… for the people who’s business is outside bodybuilding and sports, it is the only sustainable way train and maintain the levels of fitness you want.

When you don’t understand these 3 magic words, chances are you are struggling with obsessiveness  in an attempt to overcome fatigue, and poor results.

Manage Your Energy Like a Pro!

JAM

John Allen Mollenhauer is the founder the Performance Lifestyle community where every day achievers learn to manage their energy like pro’s, to achieve their goals in life, business and sport in healthier more successful ways. As a former athlete, and worn down workaholic turned Healthy High Achiever, John Allen Mollenhauer (aka “JAM”) helps you optimize your lifestyle the way athletes do for better results, even if you are not into sports or a fitness enthusiast. He is the creator of Performance Lifestyle Training and Group Coaching. Unleash Your Full Potential, to Perform, Look and Feel Better and Achieve Your Goals!