The No Excuses Series #1

I have a philosophy in life and in business, and that is a philosophy of there are absolutely no excuses in the striving for success and the achievement of my clearly defined goals.

In this series I hope to be travelling down numerous tangents (not necessarily directly related to exercise) which show that are excuses very rarely match up to the reality, very rarely are good enough and how these excuses can be eliminated therefore helping you achieve more success in your life in some form or another.

Excuse No.1

The Weather
(Or more specifically snow)

I received a text a few hours before a session with the genuine question of whether I would be able to make it into the gym for a session, which is a perfectly reasonable question, but I was surprised to get it because no matter what the weather was like, I can say with absolute certainty, that I would have made it in to the gym. If our cars were snowed in I'd expect any C & J Personal Trainer to try public transport, to get a lift off someone who isn't as snowed in, if that failed I'd expect them to run, if that failed I'd expect them to walk, and if they can't walk, well, you better get crawling.

So as you can see, in this little company we demand excellence of ourselves, therefore expect excellence from our clients.

"A good leader (or trainer!) must be harder on himself than anyone else. He must find discipline in himself  before he can discipline others. A man should not ask others to do things that he would not ask himself to do do at some point in his life." Vince Lombardi

And even if the weather was that atrocious, that hellishly bad that you couldn't even get out of the door, then we would still expect you to be able to workout, to train, and to get nearer your goals by performing (for example) exclusively body weight exercises and flows (which all of my clients should pretty much be able to construct by themselves by now!).

To sum up my philosophy on Personal Training and life; you must practice excellence in order to inspire it in others.

The weather is never an excuse not to train, to turn up for sessions or to skip out of thrying to make progress in some element of your life. There is always a way.

Picture stolen directly from Rosstraining.com (which you should all check out IMMEDIATELY by the way!)

And if a little bit of snow does stop you from training, getting to work or doing ANYTHING in life, perhaps you should take a look at the people who experience extreme adversity every day and still manage to pursue their goals.


In other news I became an Advanced Kettlebell Instructor this week, you may now bow down in my awesomeness at completing a day course to give me such a title.

(In all honesty the instructor taking the course looked as if he couldn't be arsed all the way through it and I doubt you could have failed the course if you tried. There are very few actual testing standards in Personal Training courses as a couple of my articles have touched on before, with most courses concerned with keeping people coming back to do more courses. Whether I ever go back to this particular company remains to see seen.)

No I don't do courses during which I train other Personal Trainers yet but WHEN I do (and I will before too long I hope) I will do so with this quote in mind:

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." Henry Adams
 

So yeah, show some enthusiasm, or step out of the way of people who would love to be in your position.

By Chris Kershaw