There Is A Method to the Madness
This is a podcast where I will be discussing all aspects of physical fitness. I am an exercise physiologist and personal trainer and owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs for the last 25 years. My passion is health and fitness and I am excited to share my views, some stories, interviews and much more with you.
There Is A Method to the Madness
Harnessing Patience for Lasting Health and Wealth
What if the key to achieving lasting fitness success lies not in intense workouts but in thoughtful planning and patience? Join me, Rob Maxwell, as I reveal proven strategies and common traps in fitness planning, focusing on the importance of order and methodical progress. From the initial consultation and baseline assessments with new clients to setting realistic goals, I share a comprehensive approach to creating personalized exercise prescriptions. This episode serves as a cautionary tale against impulsive, overzealous attempts that often lead to burnout, highlighting why gradual, disciplined efforts yield more sustainable results.
Tune in to discover how an objective mindset can transform both your physical and financial well-being. Delaying gratification and embracing gradual progression aren't just principles for fitness—they're vital for financial health too. I draw parallels between achieving fitness goals and financial milestones, such as paying off debts or maxing out investments, to illustrate how patience and discipline can lead to success. By balancing consistent cardio and strength training, you'll build a solid foundation before tackling more ambitious plans. Patience and honesty about your capabilities are your best allies on this journey to a healthier future.
Welcome to. There's a Method to the Madness. My name is Rob Maxwell. I'm an exercise physiologist and personal trainer. I'm the owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs and I've been in business since 1994. The purpose of this podcast is to get to the real deal of what really works and, most importantly, why things work. Hence the name. There is a method to the madness. Today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about when to do things and what order to stay in regarding your health and fitness. Before I get to that, let me thank Jonathan and Lynn Gilden of the Gilden Group at Realty Pros. They are committed to providing the highest level in customer service for home sales. Why don't you give them a shout and figure out what your home is worth? 386-451-2412.
Speaker 1:Let's talk a little bit about order and making plans. I'm at my absolute best when I go through my planning process with people with workouts where I'll sit down and just kind of going through what I'll do with the new client. So the first step is the consultation and to talk about what their goals are and basically see if it's a good fit, see if it's going to be a win-win situation, see if it's something I can do, want to do see if the training is something that they want to do. So that's like the first step. And then after that I do an assessment. We do an assessment to figure out where they are a basic wellness assessment usually just vitals and body fat and things of that nature and then from there set some long-term and short-term goals. And you may not even know how many goals we set for you, but we have them. And then from there I sit down and I do the exercise prescription where I write it down as far as what you should be doing when you start, as far as cardio frequency goes, strength training frequency goes, and then duration, intensity, all those good things. And then finally you come in and we start executing the plan. Like that that really, really works with everybody. So that's when I feel like I'm at my best as a trainer and a coach.
Speaker 1:And then I would say I'm at my worst when I just wing it, but typically I'll be talking about or in relationship to myself. I don't really do that with clients. I don't even really do that with like advice, say from people on the internet or something, because you just really can't, I don't think, pick up where somebody is and say do this when you don't know a lot. And of course I'll get these little random questions here and there and say what should I do for this and that? And I try to politely give them as much general information as I can without giving them too much specifics, because you just don't know. It's kind of like jumping in. So I really just mean myself if I say, oh, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. That usually doesn't work out very good.
Speaker 1:I think planning is the best thing. Now one of the hardest things to do is to actually stick to the plan. It takes discipline to stick to the plan and I get a good read on people quickly. I believe that's something I've always been pretty good at. I don't know if that's from my psychology background I'm working in counseling my first few years of my career or if I chose that career because that's just something that I intuitively do decently. But I get a good read on people and whenever people try to like jump in with both feet because they just think that's where they need to be, I'm very, very skeptical, like when they want to skip all of the basic steps first because they've been reading on the internet that they should work out X amount of days per week and they should do so many days of cardio, and it's always like a lot more than they're currently doing and rather than go through like the buildup stages, they just want to jump right in Now.
Speaker 1:To the listener you might think, oh, that sounds like fantastic motivation. Why would you want to step on that? The answer to that is that it's not the greatest motivation. I mean, it's not good motivation at all and usually it's not even really motivation. It's more of like a defensive mechanism. That's what I've seen. People kind of want to jump in and do everything they think they need to do all at once, because ultimately they know themselves and they're going to peter out really fast. And it's almost like an excuse to say, well, I know I'm not going to do this very long, so I'm just going to do as much as I can like right now. And that is just not a good plan.
Speaker 1:And it's always a big warning sign for me when somebody is really really, really gung-ho and they want to do everything. They buy all the books, they get extra t-shirts. If you tell them to do three days a week, they text you that they did four. They buy all the tools, they get a new heart rate monitor, they do all these things. And, yes, I've seen cases of this all the time Back in the day, like I'm sure most listeners remember, but the old wearables you used to wear on your arm that could read your calories and now it's like smart watches and apple watches and things like that kind of do that. But there's a time period when you can get these um things and put them on your arm and it would read your caloric output and all that you know, and they would go out and buy those things Like it was just like they're going to do everything that they thought they can do, and it's usually a it's.
Speaker 1:I don't know what the correlation is, but I do know that when I hear that nine times out of 10 or closer to 99 times out of 100, that I go okay, they're going to like really fizzle out really fast. That seems to always be what happens. And then, in the opposite scenario, I'll get people that'll know exactly where they're at, which is maybe they're sedentary. They haven't been doing a whole lot, they've had a few start and stops, you know, like most people, and they come in and they say look, I just, you know, got to get on a plan that's going to work for me. It's got to be something I can do, it's got to be something I'm going to stick to. And they're saying all the right things with that. And then when I build them a plan and I say, look, we're going to start, you know, here, and we're going to build into this, and the ones that say, yep, that's good, you just tell me what to do, I'll show up at my workout times and I'll do it. That sounds good.
Speaker 1:I don't want to do too much at first, and typically those are the people that make it, and I've always said it's the consistency that's the key. Somebody that strength trains on a regular basis two times per week and then, let's say, they walk four days a week. So that's kind of a minimal plan in a way. I mean don't get me wrong, most people do way less than that but that's a minimal, effective plan A couple days a week of strength training, maybe for 30 minutes if the program's set up right, like we'll do here, and so they're getting everything they need in 30 minutes two times a week and then they're doing 30 or 40 minutes of walking four days a week or so. Um, that's a great plan right there. I would take that person over the person that jumped in and did five to six days a week of working out, plus five to six days a week of cardio for a month, like I would take the first person any day because I know they're going to stick to it, they're going to do it, they're going to continue to get results, and the person that jumped in with both feet is going to be not doing it 11 months out of the year. I mean, it's just the way it is.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you can change that personality type. If it is a personality type, you can't change it because psychology has proven that basically our personality types are traits and not states. Going into a little psychological science here. So a trait means it's immovable, it doesn't change, it's almost set. We don't want to say birth because that's not really true, but it is basically set in very, very early ages and you're not going to change your personality. That is what we would call a trait, whereas state is a condition that is movable, meaning that you might tend to be anxious in crowds but you're not anxious when you're at home. So that's state anxiety or state psychological principles. So personalities tend to be traits, and so you're probably not going to change that person who decides to jump in with both feet, only to quit in a month, right?
Speaker 1:So the whole point of this, though, is to maybe help the person that's on the edge of that, like maybe they're not all the way gone, so to say, and there's some rehabilitation that can happen. It's not like it's the end of the world. When somebody has a personality like that, it's just going to be very hard to become as physically fit as you want them to be. So the idea is to stick to the plan, like know what to do and know what to do next, and I like to tell people it's like okay, so you want to do a? Let's say, somebody sees a bodybuilding routine online that looks great, and they think they have the time, they think they have the resources, they think they have the equipment, they think they have the motivation, they think they have all of that to work out six days a week, and so they look into a program that splits up their routine, basically three ways, and, let's say, they do their shoulders and triceps and chest on one day, and then their legs on another, and then back and biceps on another, which is kind of a common three-day split, and then they do that twice each per week, so six days per week. Maybe they look up that program and they think it looks great and they want to do it, yet they haven't even been working out two days per week yet. And so the problem I always tell people with that is it's like why don't you just wait until you've done what you need to do first? Instead, why don't we stick to a program of let's do a month to six weeks at two times per week, and then maybe let's build this up into three times per week, full body, and let's see where you're at there, and then in three months let's kind of reevaluate. And what typically happens is the person hasn't even made it that far, and why? Well, because they weren't going to. They wanted to jump right in and they weren't going to. So instead it's almost like a reward system. It's like if you can do this, then we'll do this type of thing. Just prove you can be consistent for one month, like even if it's two times per week with no cardio, because let's just say this person hasn't done anything.
Speaker 1:And for the podcasters that are listening, the podcasters, the podcast listeners that are listening. You might think, well, that's ludicrous. You know everybody does that. But you're listening. That means you do it. You have to understand you're in that very, very, very small percentage of people, less than 20% of the people that are actually doing what you need to do. The majority of the people aren't.
Speaker 1:So if this podcast is being listened to, you know, thrown over the old airwaves at Target as people are shopping which man, that'd be great, that'd be good for business, you know, great for my sponsors too. But you know it's not going to happen. But I can dream. But let's say that's going on. The majority of people are going to be like, yeah, I ain't going to get to the gym two times a week. I mean, majority of people aren't doing it. So why don't we just with everything? That's just an example, that's an extreme example. But with everything, why don't we say I'll start doing this increase after I've proven I can do this for a certain amount of time? That's just a really good philosophy that I find works very well, as my Siri just told me, the time for some reason, and I didn't even ask for it. But that's okay. So that is a philosophy that works with many things.
Speaker 1:I even use it with money, because I can definitely be an impulse buyer. I can think, oh, I want to get this, I want to get that. And then I think to myself well, I don't know, I've done that before. I'll end up selling it. So I've recently picked up a thing that works pretty good. I'll say you know what, I'm going to do this. If I still want this object, then I'm going to wait until this bill is completely paid off, and then this scenario has been taken care of too. And then, if I still really, really, really want to do this thing, then I'm going to do it. Well, guess what? I've been in a situation like that.
Speaker 1:A few months ago I told myself that, and I said I really wanted a moderately expensive purchase. And then I said you know what, hold on, hold on. Your tendency is to do this. I'm being objective, I'm listening to my tendencies and I said all right, so kind of earn it first. So do this first, do that. And guess what I did? That In this case, I needed to pay off a portion of a car for somebody. And then what was the second thing I had to do? Oh, I had to put all the rest of my money into my IRA for my tax deduction at the end of the year. I wanted to make sure that I maximized my retirement, because I always think that's good for me to do. So I said, before I do anything, I'm going to max that out, and if you're a business owner, you know you can put in $8,000 now per year into your IRAs. So I maxed that out and then I said, all right, so now I can Guess what I didn't really want to do, what I was going to do, and that's kind of like the whole point.
Speaker 1:We can get really grandiose ideas of what we should be doing exercise-wise, yet if we really look at where we are, we have to be honest and say well, if I'm not even getting to the gym two times a week, why am I going to buy into this program? My friend wants me to do Pilates with her five days a week. It sounds like a great idea, but the reality is I've had a really hard time even getting there twice. I mean, that's just being objective with yourself, and I do think that's why a good training plan works really, really well is because, as I told you the steps in the beginning of this podcast. Like it becomes really really objective Sit back, collect the data, do the assessment, set the goals, make a plan and then always focus on overload so a little bit better each time. Like that's getting really objective. And if we do that with, like the things that come up, like I'll tell you right now. It's very, very simple. I said it last time and I'll say it again. I'm going to keep repeating it until everybody does it Two to three days per week of strength training is really really ideal.
Speaker 1:Couple that with five days a week more if you want, but five days a week of 30 minute walks and you're really above the norm, like you're doing absolutely great. If you want to do more than that, okay. But why don't you wait till you're at least there, and that means all the way there? In other words, you can't say, well, yeah, I've been doing the weight training because you know, at least with our clients and I guess it's pretty evident because they have appointments, so they come and that helps them get there and that's fine, that's a big tool for personal training.
Speaker 1:But oftentimes people are doing the strength training but not the cardio, so you can't play the game the opposite way. You got to be like well, both. So you can't say you know, I've been getting to the gym three times a week, so now I want to go five. It's like, well, hold on, you're not doing your cardio. Yeah, I've been going once. Well, that's not the deal. I said two to three days a week of your strength training and then five days a week of cardio. So once you start doing that consistently, let's say you do that for a month and maybe you're not seeing as much results as you'd like. Maybe I thought that's going to be true if you're doing that.
Speaker 1:But we could say, okay, well then let's try to do this a little bit more, but let's do it first. Let's make sure we've done both sides of what we're supposed to do before we jump to the next step. I don't know what it is about us humans, but we don't like to do that. We like to get these grandiose ideas and jump full in with both feet and instead I'm just asking you to be objective and I'm telling you, as a person who has a degree, two different degrees, three different degrees actually in social sciences, I'm asking you to like let's learn to be objective and take a step back and learn to do what we need to do first before we do the next thing. Let's accomplish the first thing before we accomplish the second thing. All right, so now let me thank Overhead Door of Daytona Beach, the premier garage door company in Daytona Beach. I can vouch for Jeff and Zach Hawk, wonderful human beings. They got the best product, the best service. Give them a shout at overheaddoordaytonacom.
