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CHAZZEN FITNESS  

 All rights reserved 

 No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. 

 ISBN: 978-1-0692235-1-7

Contents

Click on the heading to navigate to the corresponding page

Introduction

My Transformation

Mental Tools

Top 6 Most Impactful Shifts

Other Useful Tips

——-Links From Here Onward Are Not Available in Sample——-

Why We Fall Into Negative Habits

Determining Your Goals

Hypertrophy

Strength

Health

Fat Loss

Do You Need to Track Calories?

How to Track Calories From Nutrition Labels

How to Pick Your Macros

How to Write a Program

Main Steps

Combining Different Goals

How to Fix Muscle Asymmetries

How to Limit Fatigue

How to Warm Up

How to Save Time

How to Write a Program-Summarized

Examples of Weekly Schedule Structures per Goal

Resistance Bands, Body Weight, or Gym

Recommended Exercises per Muscle Group

Final Thoughts

Contact Information

References

Introduction

This ebook is about helping you make changes that last. It’s easy to do the right thing for a couple of weeks while you’re riding on the high of motivation. But, if we eventually fall back into old habits, then the couple weeks of consistency were essentially a waste of time. A lack of information is not the reason most of us lose track of our healthy habits and goals. With the endless knowledge and conflicting facts online, it can become confusing to figure out what the right steps are to achieve our goals. However, even if we had the exact information we needed, we will always end up back at square one if our mind, environment, and habits work against us. This e-booklet will filter out the noise and streamline the most relevant and practical information, to not only help you see the physical changes you desire but, more importantly, arm you with lesser-talked about mental tools. These mental shifts will transform you into the kind of person who forms the habits necessary to achieve and maintain your health and physique goals. These changes will have positive downstream effects on other aspects of your life. The technical information is based on studies and articles referenced. The perspective shifts come from experience, as I have transformed from someone who was at the mercy of their impulses and urges to someone who has control over their behavior. I used to have a sedentary lifestyle, no drive to exercise, and a very unhealthy diet. However, after discovering and employing these perspective shifts, exercise is now a part of my daily routine and I rarely have the urge to eat unhealthy food. When I do have urges, I am able to control how I respond much more effectively. 

If you find this e-booklet helps you, and are inspired to reignite your fitness journey, you can get a free customized weekly program created for you. The website where you can request the programs is listed in the ‘How to Write a Program’ section. Email me at howtogetfitandstayfit@gmail.com if you have any fitness related questions or need something clarified. I will soon be launching a tool to help you stay accountable and consistent. Along with the unique accountability systems, the app will also make tracking progress, and your fitness journey in general, a smoother experience. Unlike most fitness apps that lock advanced features behind expensive subscriptions, our app offers these tools at no cost, as long as you stay consistent. You can read more about it on the website.

Studies and articles used to support a claim are referenced with an alphabetical superscript linking to the reference page. Quotes are credited using a numerical superscript with the corresponding end-notes posted after the references.

My Transformation

I used to live a very sedentary lifestyle up until my twenties. Every aspect of my life was done with zero discipline. I would sleep late, drink a 1.5L bottle of soft drink every day (not an exaggeration), eat junk food with zero restriction, and would never exercise. I would try to go to the gym and would stay consistent, riding on the feeling of motivation for a few days to a couple of weeks at most, before ultimately stopping. This became a recurring pattern, repeated over and over with no success. Eventually, I realized that I cannot rely on feeling like doing the right thing but instead had to learn to act regardless of how I felt. I learned how to control my environment, and subsequently my mind, which led to me being consistent enough to see results. Over time, I went from needing to force myself to exercise, to forcing myself to take rest days.

Once I discovered how to use my mind effectively, I managed to lose 20kg (44lb) in 4 months. The results started flowing more and more effortlessly as the perspective shifts and mental tricks were being cemented as my default way of thinking. The changes in my mind were being reflected by the changes in my body and health. The healthy habits that have eluded me for so long finally started to become part of who I am and my daily routine. The goal isn’t to stop yourself from ever ‘not feeling’ like exercising, but rather to learn how to direct your behavior in spite of these feelings. This is much more sustainable and puts you in control which, in the long term, changes the vector of your impulses from unhealthy habits to healthy ones. 

In the following chapter, I will outline the mental tricks that helped me overcome my lack of discipline, day by day, consistently enough to see results, and the long term perspective shifts that made the changes permanent.

Please consider leaving a review for this ebook on the amazon page if you found it useful, or if you expected something different, so I can provide more value in the future.

Mental Tools

In the beginning stages, you should not rely on willpower but instead set up systems to counteract negative habits formed over time. These systems represent strategic methods to shape both your physical and mental environment, fostering the formation of healthy habits and behaviors by reducing mental barriers. By nurturing consistency, these systems will help you maintain healthy behaviors long enough to achieve noticeable results. As you begin to see these results you will likely become internally motivated and driven. Once you become internally motivated, the tools and strategies from this ebook will become second nature, requiring less conscious effort to deploy. When this shift happens, your willpower is aligned with your goals, and it will feel like more of a mental struggle not to exercise than to exercise. People often think of will power as the ability to force yourself to act, and is something you need to acquire, but it is more practical to realize that you are constantly exerting your will. The issue is the vector of your will currently goes against your goals. Think of will power as a boat you are steering. Right now the chaotic and unconscious tides of the ocean are deciding where to take you without your input. You have to actively take control and mindfully decide which direction your boat travels.

There is a discrepancy between your subconscious core values and your conscious desires. When there is conflict between your subconscious thought patterns and your conscious goals, your subconscious always eventually wins. The good news is with mindful effort, and consistency over time, you can alter your default subconscious thought patterns and beliefs, which will translate to less resistance aligning your behavior with your goals. 

The following are tools and perspective shifts that I discovered were most impactful through experience, which enabled me to make transformations that stick. I used to have zero motivation to exercise and never employed any restrictions on my diet. These tips enabled me to think like the kind of person who has the types of habits that lead to a consistently healthy lifestyle. Taking control of my mind and behavior, and seeing the changes in my health and physique, had positive downstream effects on other aspects of my life outside of health and fitness. 

Top 6 Most Impactful Shifts

1. Energy goes where attention flows. When you know it is time to go to the gym but you don’t feel like it, you are placing your attention on all the reasons why you should not go. In this moment it is important to remember why you want to go in the first place. Visualize your dream physique (or whatever your goal is) and keep that image in mind. When you focus on that it dilutes the feeling of reluctance and the barrier to working out weakens. Vividly imagine embodying your goal body and how it would feel to inhabit that body. You should notice that when you are imagining your goal physique that you are propelled to action. Visualization and vivid imagination were the catalysts that set me on the path of transforming my mindset. When I first started working out, I relied heavily on this technique. Now, while resistance training has become a core habit, I continue to use visualization and imagination successfully for exercises I find less enjoyable such as cardio. I also apply these techniques from session to session, and set to set, for each muscle group/exercise to enhance my performance.

2. Exercise every day. Exercise, in some form, every day until you are addicted to the results and it is a part of your routine. Once it is firmly embedded as something you do without needing to force yourself, you can worry about optimizing your program. The biggest mistake most people make when it comes to working out, or taking on the herculean task of changing any habit, is easing into it. The fact that you are even negotiating with a version of you that you are trying to leave behind is already setting yourself up for failure. I recognize that it may seem odd to suggest this in an ebook you are reading in order to learn how to exercise consistently. However, I find that people don’t typically have an issue with short term consistency, but rather struggle with consistency over the course of several weeks to months when the emotion of motivation has subsided. A classic example of this is new years. The gyms are much busier for the first two weeks of January then they return to normal from week three onwards. It is more wise to workout every day with shorter sessions, than programming in rest days from the start with longer workout sessions. Shorter sessions will decrease the mental barrier to consistency compared to less frequent but longer sessions. Your priority at the start of your fitness journey should be changing your mind and habits. This doesn’t mean you have to engage in intense weightlifting sessions daily. Instead, you could schedule 20-30 minute walks or other low-effort activities each day. The key is to develop the habit of intentional movement every day to quickly shift your habits. Exercising every day is the fastest way to desensitize yourself to the seemingly rational excuses and turn exercising into a long term habit. This will quickly shift your perception of exercise from a burden you should do to something you want to do.

3. Beware of mental illusions and traps.“Just one more” is a common thought our minds trap us with and is a dangerous illusion. “Just one more cookie…just one more rest day, i’ll exercise tomorrow…”. You should always visualize your goal when you have temptations until they subside. These seemingly innocent thoughts are often what cause us to slip up the most. The thoughts of laziness and excuses are easy to identify as they explicitly and directly oppose our goals, making them the most obvious to counteract. The thoughts such as “just one more” diminish the importance of your goal and the impact that straying off the plan will cause. Even if you have the strictest standards, especially in the beginning of your journey, you may slip a little off course here and there. If that happens, you should not beat yourself up about it or ruminate on the mistake. Your mind was wired to seek these kinds of foods out or to save energy when you can. However, that is why you cannot ever accept the “it’s just one more” mentality. That sort of reasoning will always spiral out of control and accumulate into more and more “just one more”s until you are buried in an avalanche of tiny slip ups. That is not to say that you should completely avoid these kinds of foods, but recognize when your mind is tricking you. You should set a diet plan with flexibility scheduled in (for example you can only eat ‘junk’ food on Saturdays, or only from 3-4pm etc.) and use the tips discussed to adhere to it.
   
   The reason why you can schedule in flexibility with food but not with exercising (as suggested in tip number 2), at least when you are first starting out, is because the urge to eat the foods that are unhealthiest for us are very strong and deeply ingrained in us. When we avoid these foods and eat healthy, we do not directly get the same rewards in our brains as we do when we exercise. After we exercise we naturally get rewarded^[A] for our efforts, which enforces that behavior. When we suddenly eliminate all comfort foods from our diet, the cravings intensify until we give in and indulge in unhealthy choices again. When that happens, it is easy to over indulge and reverse the several weeks of discipline within a few days. That is why you should slowly diminish the rewards you get from unhealthy food over time instead of ripping yourself away from the reward cold turkey. As you continually, and slowly, decrease how much junk food you consume, and replace it with whole foods, you will recalibrate your mind to find enjoyment in healthy food again^[B].
   
   In addition to visualizing your goal as motivation, try a technique called ‘urge surfing’¹. This involves mindfully acknowledging the urge and learning to sit with it until it passes. Instead of distracting yourself or fighting against the urge, adopt the role of a passive observer. Observe how the urge intensifies up to a peak before it begins to subside. Urges typically last only a few minutes at most. By riding out urges repeatedly, your mind becomes desensitized to them, reducing their duration and intensity over time.
   
   Think of these urges as adaptive little creatures in your mind. Actively fighting an urge gives it the foundation to escalate in intensity. Once you cave in, the urge calibrates itself so that next time, instead of gradually ramping up, it quickly hits the intensity level at which you previously gave in.
   
   By using the urge surfing mindfulness technique, you take away the floor from which the urge can plant its roots.

4. Telling people the actions I am taking rather than the results I will get. You may have noticed this in other areas of your life besides working out or dieting, where we declare our goal and what we will achieve to others before we have acted towards it. This is natural, of course, and it makes us feel good. The reason we do this is because telling people our future goals pulls an abstract and distant future into your present reality. We want people to associate that grand goal with us as if we have already accomplished it. However, telling people what actions you are going to take such as “today I am going to the gym” is a binary statement that you can immediately be held accountable to-you either end up going to the gym or not. It is much harder to back out of that statement than telling people your grandiose future goals.

5. Setting reminders. Sometimes we slip up simply because we forget the goals we set throughout our busy days. Setting regular reminders throughout the day (via phone alarms or notes left around the house) can keep the goals in the forefront of our thoughts throughout the day. Setting alarms/reminders along with visualizing your goal in the moment that the reminder goes off, in my experience, is a powerful combination. 

6. Short term comfort has long term consequences. Initially, I did not have examples in my family or social circles of people who took their health and exercise regimens seriously. Naturally, I fell into similar patterns of behavior. However, at a certain point I recognized the trajectory of my habits and where they were  taking me. I saw people in my life suffering the consequences of their unhealthy decisions but still not having the will to change. This prompted me to ask myself which type of person I wanted to become. I could either continue down the path of being apathetic towards my health by making excuses, or I could take my goals seriously and uphold a higher standard for my behavior. Opting for the latter would not only be more fulfilling but also serve as an example for those around me. My personal transformation had a positive impact on my friends and some family members, inspiring them to start working out as well. Visualizing these two potential paths was crucial in determining my values and structuring my goals. It helped me put into perspective the short-term efforts and ‘sacrifices’ required, and view them as virtuous. This perspective was a key motivator in driving my daily decisions, as I aimed to move away from my current position and become part of a group I held in high regard. I discuss why this topic is important to me in more detail in the final thoughts section.

 ¹ Urge surfing is a visualization technique developed by psychologist Dr. Alan Marlatt

Other Useful Tips

7. Adaptability leads to consistency. When we are tired or low on time, it can seem rational to use these as excuses to skip the workout. Instead of avoiding the workout, do the simplest version of it. After warming up, aim to do just one or two exercises from your program for that day. Adapting your tasks rather than a rigid all-or-nothing mentality enables you to stay on track. It is better to take a small step in the right direction than no step. Adapting your plans is a sustainable approach to adopting exercising as a consistent habit. As we discussed in tip number 2, shorter and simpler sessions lower the barrier your mind sets against the workout and make it easier to build a mindset of consistency.

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