So which ones are best and will work for you?

Well, let’s have a think about the purpose drinking a shake should serve.

Firstly, let’s summarise the advice I’ve shared with you in previous articles:

1. You should be eating small, nutritious meals frequently throughout the day.
2. You should be adding a serve of protein at each meal.
3. You should never cut out your carbs, so you need to add healthy, low energy carbs at each meal.
4. You should be including Omega-3′s in your daily meal plan.
5. You should never miss meals.

So if we put all of that together, you can imagine if you lived according to these guidelines, you’d be eating a lot of food all day long, right? Well, yes, if you eat the right food at the right time in the right quantity, then you’ll be eating lots of nutritious, healthy food throughout each day.

So where do the “shakes” fit in?

Most shakes I’m referring to are the ones advertised on television, stocked in the supermarket shelves, marketed on the internet or found “only” at your local chemist. They are packaged up and come with the big promise to “melt the fat away” or “kill your hunger pangs” or some other big, bold statement. They are filled with…well they’re filled with “fillers”, lots of ingredients that pretty much resemble a multi-vitamin tablet with some protein thrown in.

Basically, we don’t really know what’s in them and their nutritional value is questionable. No doubt consuming them will satisfy your hunger for an hour or two, if that, but otherwise, there really is nothing in these shakes that will optimise your health and achieve your weight management goals.

“Liquid meals” on the other hand, will provide you with the nutrition you need to shape your body and improve your health. A liquid meal is a relatively easy, convenient and tasty way to meet the above guidelines.

So, what is a liquid meal?

You simply take the ingredients you need to construct a healthy meal, throw it all in the blender and whiz it up into a great tasting meal. You can add some milk, a scoop or two of protein powder, some chopped fruit and even add some flaxseed meal or flaxseed oil and blend it all together for a meal that is prepared, consumed and cleaned up in a few minutes.

Unlike a “protein shake”, a liquid meal has more nutrients in it and will satisfy your hunger longer. The ingredients you use will be fresher and come from more nutritious sources, rather than a packet.

Plus the convenience and ease to prepare these liquid meals will help you avoid skipping meals, which is as detrimental to your metabolism as eating junk food is.

So take a pass on the “shake diets”, grab a blender and whiz up a tasty, healthy liquid meal today!

About the Author

Ryan Mitchell is the owner of Evolution Fitness Centre and is a qualified personal trainer and strength and conditioning coach. Ryan is dedicated to helping people achieve their health and fitness goals and draws on his experience and knowledge gained from training people of all ages and fitness levels. Ryan is a former Australian Powerlifiting Champion and Australian team member.

Why do 99% of people do the same thing everytime they want to lose weight? Up the cardio and cut the calories. Why?

Science has proven that your body requires a constant supply of nutrients to function efficiently. It needs energy from certain nutrients at certain times. If it gets these nutrients, it will give you the body you have always wanted.

If you starve it of these nutrients, guess what? You won’t lose fat, you’ll lose muscle, which is far easier to burn. You won’t get leaner, you’ll stay flabby. You won’t look good in the mirror, because you’ll be the same shape you are now, just a little bit smaller.

What will hours of cardio do for you? Your body will only burn a certain amount of calories per minute, so why try harder to burn, burn, burn?

You need to eat frequently. Don’t worry about how long between meals, just eat as frequently as possible. If you’re not hungry within 2-3 hours, reduce your portion sizes. Drink as much water as you can. Train intensely with weights and interval-based cardio, but don’t exercise everyday.

If I could suggest just one thing to you: find a way to get weight training in your program!

Now!

About the Author

Ryan Mitchell is the owner of Evolution Fitness Centre and is a qualified personal trainer and strength and conditioning coach. Ryan is dedicated to helping people achieve their health and fitness goals and draws on his experience and knowledge gained from training people of all ages and fitness levels. Ryan is a former Australian Powerlifiting Champion and Australian team member.

How Bad Do You Want It from Greyskale Multimedia LLC on Vimeo.

But it’s hard when you’re “not motivated”. You struggle to drag yourself out of bed, you’d prefer to go straight home after work and the weekends become a haven for lying on the couch and drinking and eating whatever feels good at the time.

Well, let’s get motivated. First, let me tell you what motivation is not:

• Motivation is not screaming, ranting and carrying on; it’s not dramatisation.
• Motivation is not the unrealistic joy and overzealous enthusiasm for exercise.
• Motivation is not acting like you’re in a Rocky movie.
• Motivation is not acting like you’re in Fight Club, either.
• Motivation is not loud, fast, doof doof music.

So how do you get motivated? Motivation is…

• the commitment to doing what you need to do, when you need to do it, weather you want to or feel like it, or not.
• getting up to train when you’ve set the alarm early, even when you’re tired.
• going home via the gym, even though you’ve got a lot of things to do at home.
• being patient, knowing that the hard work will show for itself gradually, slowly, one bit at a time.
• pushing through when the only honest reason you can give yourself not to is “I don’t feel like it”.
• “Can” not “Can’t”.
• acting like Bill Murray on Groundhog Day: doing it over and over and over again.

Now get motivated.

About the Author

Ryan Mitchell is the owner of Evolution Fitness Centre and is a qualified personal trainer and strength and conditioning coach. Ryan is dedicated to helping people achieve their health and fitness goals and draws on his experience and knowledge gained from training people of all ages and fitness levels. Ryan is a former Australian Powerlifiting Champion and Australian team member.

You see, Easter comes at the that time when you’re just starting to find some momentum and it throws you off. Now that it’s over, you’ve got the long, steady road towards summer to enjoy some amazing progress.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Train with weights: no surprises here, but don’t just use weights once in a while. Weight training needs to be a regular, consistent part of your routine, at least twice per week, ideally 3 times per week.
2. Cardio: I’m not talking about going for a walk or ticking your legs over on a stationary bike. You need to add intense interval-based cardio to your program. Get more bang for your buck with short, intense bursts of cardio at least twice per week.
3. Protein: you need to add protein to your diet and more than you think. Forget adding a spoonful of yogurt to your cereal. You need to be getting 20-30 grams of protein per meal and snack. That much! That’s the only way to maximise your metabolism and grow lean, tight, toned muscle.
4. Drink water: lots and lots of water. Flood your cells with water every opportunity you have. Don’t give me that “oh but I’ll go to the toilet a lot” excuse, that’s exactly why you should do it, so your body can flush the toxins out. 2-3 litres per day!
5. Get oiled up: add omega-3 fats to every meal. Flaxseeds, flaxseed oil, fish oil and leafy green veggies are your best choices.

Take this information and use it!

If you’re struggling to get enough protein each meal, add some protein powder to your diet. It’s an easy way to make sure you’re getting enough protein.

Not training enough? Well schedule more sessions into your week. If you can’t find 5 days to allocate to training, even 30 minutes at a time, then you’re not serious. Everyone can find this time.

It’s time to get serious people. Easter’s over and there are no more excuses until Christmas, so get some protein powder, pour yourself a glass of water and plug some weight training into your diary!

About the Author

Ryan Mitchell is the owner of Evolution Fitness Centre and is a qualified personal trainer and strength and conditioning coach. Ryan is dedicated to helping people achieve their health and fitness goals and draws on his experience and knowledge gained from training people of all ages and fitness levels. Ryan is a former Australian Powerlifiting Champion and Australian team member.

About the Author

Ryan Mitchell is the owner of Evolution Fitness Centre and is a qualified personal trainer and strength and conditioning coach. Ryan is dedicated to helping people achieve their health and fitness goals and draws on his experience and knowledge gained from training people of all ages and fitness levels. Ryan is a former Australian Powerlifiting Champion and Australian team member.

This question is usually asked at the start of a program, when the motivation is high and the subject is prepared to do whatever it takes, and then again 3 weeks later after the “honeymoon” phase and things start to become a bit difficult.

Fitting in the exercise, the meals, preparing food ahead of time, making up sessions for sleep ins and pressing family or social commitments start to creep in within a few weeks and the subject realises that they’re in way over their head.

It’s a hard question to answer. Especially when it looks so “easy” on The Biggest Loser. Why shouldn’t everyone be able to lose 7kg a week!?

Without wishing to burst anyone’s bubble or destroy one’s motivation, the fact is it does take time to undo years, even decades in many instances, of living a sedentary lifestyle and abusing food and alcohol. How long?

It takes as long as it takes.

The difference between those that make improvements quickly and those that plod along is consistency. The commitment to doing what you have to do, eating what you have to eat, whether you want to or not and whether you feel like it or not. The ones that “just do it” are the ones that see it happening first. The ones that struggle with the transition from one lifestyle to another will take longer.

Neither is good or bad, necessarily, it can take a very long time for some people to change their habits. For others, things just seem to click into place. Either way, if you keep persisting and making the commitment to progressing on a daily basis, then you will get there eventually.

If I could have it my way, I’d take a whole year to work with someone to achieve their goals. That’s right, 12 months! The first couple of months would be spent educating your mind and your body. Learning how your metabolism works, learning how to do a proper squat and a proper press. How to plan your meals and time them. How to create just the right balance of food and exercise. The next few months would be spent taking this information and gradually applying it more and more consistently. Working on eating more food at the right times, working on not missing meals, working on making your workouts more efficient, adding more weight to the bar. Not necessarily all at once, but bit by bit, for as long as it takes.

Then the last 4-6 months would be spent dialling in these habits to form a lifestyle. Learning how to modify the exercise and the eating to ensure progress continues, but more importantly, ensure you don’t ever fall off track and slip back into old habits.

What could you achieve in 12 months? Most people don’t ever think beyond 2-3 months…then 6 months later, despite the progress they made, they’re back to square one. It’s heart breaking for us personal trainers to see people think that because they look good now, they can simply stop doing the things that got them there in the first place.

So have a good think about this. 12 months, 1 year, what could you do? If you don’t have the patience, then don’t ask me the bloody question!

About the Author

Ryan Mitchell is the owner of Evolution Fitness Centre and is a qualified personal trainer and strength and conditioning coach. Ryan is dedicated to helping people achieve their health and fitness goals and draws on his experience and knowledge gained from training people of all ages and fitness levels. Ryan is a former Australian Powerlifiting Champion and Australian team member.

We’re powerlifters, that is, we train and aim to lift as much as possible, for one repetition, in the squat, the bench press and the deadlift. It’s crazy that so much preparation and training goes into just one lift, but that’s just how it is for us.

Anyway, this discussion we were having both got us to talking about where we should be with our performances. We’re a little bit ahead of where we were last year, and the year before, but we are way off where we want to be. What’s my point?

Do you know how fired up we got discussing this? We got amped! We both know how to get to where we want to be. The programming is easy. That’s the process. But the resolution to do something about it, now, is the empowering part.

Look, we all want to be fitter, stronger, leaner, healthier, better looking, firmer and tighter. At least one or two of those. We all would like to achieve one or two of those. But it’s not enough. Spend 12 weeks with me and I’ll get you one or two of those things….then what!? Where do you go from there? What’s your ultimate objective?

What ultimate objective or goal, if you achieved it, would really solve most of your problems? Answer that question (and you know what I’d say…write it down!). Now work out how to get it, step by step. Are you fired up? No? Then find a bigger, better objective!

You need to set a goal that is so empowering, that the thought of achieving it fires you up so much that you will do whatever is necessary to reach it right now.

Want to lose 20kg? Does that fire you up? If this is really, truly what you want to achieve, then you’ll clean out your fridge and your pantry of all the crap food sitting there and go home via the supermarket and stock up on healthy food, then start preparing your meals in advance.

Want to run a half marathon? Then you’ll get up and start running tonight! Not next week, not tomorrow, today!

If it doesn’t inspire you into immediate action then don’t bother trying to achieve it. Seriously, you’ll fail! It’s not that’s it’s an unimportant goal, it’s just that it’s not important enough. It has to be so important that you overwrite most of the other things you’ve got going on in your life in order to achive it. Extreme? Maybe, but that’s how you get shit done.

About the Author

Ryan Mitchell is the owner of Evolution Fitness Centre and is a qualified personal trainer and strength and conditioning coach. Ryan is dedicated to helping people achieve their health and fitness goals and draws on his experience and knowledge gained from training people of all ages and fitness levels. Ryan is a former Australian Powerlifiting Champion and Australian team member.