At the mixed martial arts gym I used to train in, in Manchester, we were told do 50 press-ups and 50 ‘Hindu’ press-ups every day, no matter what. (They actually also told us to do the ‘Randy’ workout each day too, which I’ll write about later.)  On my first day I was out of shape and just about squeezed out 30 reps.  Here is the simple but effective advice I was given to increase the number of press-ups, and inevitably build bigger arms and a more defined chest.  This works for just about everybody. It worked for me, and it will work for you. You don’t need an expensive gym membership or gimmicky equipment – you just need this simple strategy.

THE PRESS-UP GAME

Do as many press-ups as you can. When your muscles start to feel like they’re about to reach failure take a pause but do not allow your knees to touch the floor. If they do, you’ve lost the game. Keep all your body weight on your two hands and two feet. To relieve a little pressure from your arms during the pause you can do this: Keep your arms and legs straight, stay in the general press-up position and stick your bottom upwards, so your body forms an inverted ‘V’. Pause like this for a few seconds, and you’ll have enough energy to go for a few more reps. During the pause, pick a number – usually 5 or 10 – and go for that number of reps. When you reach that number, pause again, and so on.

You can pause for as long as you like, whenever you like, as long as you don’t put your knees down.

THE GAME PLAN

Using this technique I managed to go from 30 press-ups to 50 in one day.  Each day, I would then continue doing 50 press-ups, and I simply decreased the amount of time I needed to ‘pause’ in between press-ups. After a couple of weeks, if not less, I could do 50 press-ups straight with no rest in just over a minute.

If you want to increase your press-ups even further, simply follow the same strategy, and add 2-3 reps to the number you did the day before. Alternatively, you can go from 50 to 60 in one go, by adding more pauses. Once you have done 60, you can work on reducing the number and length of the pauses.

If you can’t do 10 press-ups, you’ll need to start with raised press-ups, where your hands are each on a chair and your feet are on the floor. Alternatively you can do wimp press-ups, where your knees and hands are on the floor, instead of your feet. If that’s the case, train everyday in your bedroom for two weeks, before you start the proper press-up training plan.

If you want to be fit forever, working out on a daily basis must be a part of your identity, not something you do once in a while. The most intelligent way to use the motivation that brought you to reading this page is to create a plan for building a daily workout routine into your life, rather than looking for ways to ‘get fit fast’. Workout every day, and you’ll be in the best shape of your life in 3 months, and one of the fittest people you know in 6 months.

Cardio training is the easiest approach to daily training, and in my opinion (and the opinion of Men’s Health Cover Model Owen McGibbin), you really need to do an equal amount of both cardio and strength each week.

The best way to increase your cardio is to get yourself to associate more pleasure to working out than pain. I learnt how to do this when I decided to run the London Marathon in 2006. I used the same principle as in ‘how to get back in shape: strength training’ – set a daily minimum and maximum target, and do the minimum every day, no matter what.

For a cardio workout, the minimum for me was to get outside and walk for 5 mins, then jog really lightly for another 5. You might be thinking “that’s not a workout!”, and you’re sort of right. The thing is, the daily minimum is exactly that – the minimum I would let myself get away with. My target was to go for 15-25 mins each day after the 5 min warmup, and logically that should have been my daily minimum.  That strategy is fine for the days when you feel like working out. But it’s useless on the days when you really don’t feel like working out, and you’re extremely tempted to skip the session. Those are the days you do the bear minimum – just put your training gear on and get outside.

Why is it so important to have a bear minimum? Because if you don’t workout at all, you are training your mind and body to not work out. When you miss one training session, you’re twice as likely to miss training on the following day. If you do the bare minimum, you’ll still be training your mind to build the daily workout habit, and you’re much more likely to train properly the next day – especially when you feel like you didn’t get a full workout today.

How to do the cardio sessions

When starting out, aim for 5 mins warmup jogging; 10 minutes of slightly faster running; 5 mins warm down jogging. If you’re really out of shape, you can even start with fast walking, and build up to running for a full 20 minutes.

When this becomes easy for you, start interval training.

Do your cardio sessions 3-4 times per week to torch fat, and do the strength training workouts to build muscle. Train daily for 6 months, and you’ll be one of the fittest people you know.

There are a whole bunch of training programs out there that assume that you will train every single day, no matter what. However, if you trained every day no matter what, you wouldn’t be out of shape in the first place.

This training plan is different. It is designed to get you back into shape by first getting you to associate pleasure to working out. It works on the basis of having a minimum and maximum target for each session. On a day when you really don’t feel like working out, you do the minimum. When you’ve completed the minimum workout, you are in a better position to choose whether to do the full workout or not.

After a few weeks of following it, you will find it easy to complete the full workout every time, and will only fall back to the minimum when you really need to – these are the days when the old you would have skipped the session.

The plan as its laid out below does not assume that you can already do the number of prescribed reps. The reps are your goal. If at the start you can only do 15 push-ups, start there and you’ll build up to the prescribed number of reps by training 4-5 times per week, and aim to increase by 1-2 reps in each workout. The article on “how to increase press-ups” will be useful.  You’ll be amazed at how quickly you get to 30, then 50 reps.  Once you can do this number of reps with ease, you will need a new training plan – and I’ll give you one.

Ideally you’ll have a chin-up bar or some way of doing a rowing motion to work your back & biceps. If you don’t have a chinup bar, do the workout minus chin-ups, and buy one from the shops at some time during the week. Here are the workouts:

Maximum (Workout Goal):

50 push-ups, 30 squats, 10-20 chin-ups, 30 lunges (on each leg), 50 sit ups, 50 supermans (lower back)

This entire workout will only take about 10-15 mins. Take as little rest as possible, and aim to reduce the time of the entire workout.

If this workout is too easy for you, do incline pressups; up to 50 jumping squats & lunges; and up to 100 sit ups and supermans.

Bare Minimum (Acceptable Daily Workout):

50 pushups, 30 squats.

Do this every day, no matter what. Obviously if you can’t do this number, do as many as you can, increasing each day using the techniques in the “how to increase your press-ups” article. Don’t wait until you can do 50 press ups before you do the full six exercises above. You can do all six on day 1. The point is if on day 4 or 5, you feel like skipping the session, just do the press-ups and squats. You can do that everyday, can’t you?

Most people advise not to do strength training every day. The hardest boxers and mixed martial artists I know consider the type of workout laid out above as their daily warmup before they start their MMA training.  They consider ‘real’ training as a hard-core heavy weight-training workout – the type you can build up to when daily training is completely natural to you.

If your muscles feel a bit sore on day 2, that is a good sign, and after you do the first 5-10 pushups on day 2, that muscular pain will go away as blood goes to your muscles and they warm up. You can keep training.

Disclaimer: If in doubt, see a physician before engaging in any training program.

When I’m out of shape or haven’t been working out for a while, I only need to do this for a week or two before I’m back to achieving the “maximum” daily training goal. At this point I’ll start the next phase of strength training.

This audio download was recorded by one of the world’s foremost experts of behavioural change, Anthony Robbins’ Master Coach James Murphy. To take up coaching with a Robbins Research International coach will normally cost you around £350 per hour – because you read my blog you can get this one hour session with James for a very limited time for FREE!

THIS WILL BE OF HUGE BENEFIT TO YOU IF:

• You don’t tend to achieve all the goals you set

• You don’t have outcomes in each area of your life

• You often have loads of great ideas and plans, but don’t always follow through with action

• Want to know the process of building momentum towards your goals, so that you can consistently follow through on any goal

• Want to know how to take action towards your goals, even when you don’t feel like it.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

• How to define an inspiring purpose for your life

• How to create a ‘code of conduct’ for your life – uncover the values that drive the deepest levels of your behavior

• How to set and achieve goals

• How to get yourself to take action, even when you don’t feel like it

• The “Motivational (American!) Football” technique developed by James to get you the result every time

• How to shift and change your FOCUS to stay motivated long term.

James developed these techniques based on just under 20,000 one-to-one and group coaching sessions that he’s conducted, and he’s used them himself to train for marathons (he’s done 6 and is currently training for an ultra-marathon).

As you learn these techniques I want you to ask yourself “How can I use this to achieve my personal goals in the same way James uses it to achieve his fitness goals?”

HOW TO GET AND USE THE FREE DOWNLOAD:

• Fill in the box below and press the “Subscribe” button:
  

  Your email:
  

   

• Check your email inbox, and follow the instructions to get the download

• It’s a 1-hour session with a lot of information, so listen to it once to allow your mind to absorb it

• The second time you listen to it, have a pen & paper with you, and sit down and DO the exercises James suggests – they are powerful and they work.

• Take Action towards your goals and improve your life results!

For your entertainment, here is the first week of a 16-week training plan you can get online. Follow me on my journey to discover how well it works in real life.

This is the first week of a 16 week training program I’m on to reach my goal: six-pack abs. If you want to read about Mens Health, go here.

With the advent of NLP, we now know that we can reproduce any particular behaviour in any particular context in order to create the results we want in life, using a process called ‘modeling’.  It’s simple: you find a successful person, find out what they’re doing that nobody else is, and copy them. Success leaves clues. More often that not, those successful clues are not in the specific behaviours that the successful person uses, but are in the mind-set and psychology that created those behaviours.

Let’s turn to the cover of Mens’ Health magazine for a striking visual example of the result that most men want to create in their lives – the Cover Model body.  If all we needed was the knowledge of how to create that result, and the training plan that the cover model used, anybody who bought and read the magazine would have wash board abs… if only it were that easy.  Anybody who has ever bought the magazine knows that you only get the results when you actually stick to the training and eating plans in the long term.

So, what’s stopping us from doing that? In a word: Beliefs.  One of the main differences in the psychology of successful people to the rest of us is the beliefs that they hold about themselves, and that area of their lives.  So, what are the beliefs that the world’s top fitness model has about health and fitness?

Watch Men’s Health Cover Model Owen McKibbin Here

Conveniently, Owen McKibbin (the most frequent Cover Model of Men’s Health Magazine) was kind enough to tell us his beliefs in a book he wrote which you can purchase from amazon here:

Find Owen’s Workout Book Here

To save you the money on the book, (and the embarrassment of having one of your house-mates noticing you’re going to bed every night reading a book with a picture of this guy with no shirt on, on literally every page) here are the beliefs and priciples that Owen McKibbin lives by:

1. I Believe that cardiovascular and strength training are equally important for everybody – no matter which you prefer, no matter which is trendier at the moment, and no matter what type of body you have.
2. I believe in eating right as an essential component of fitness, not merely a support strategy.
3. I believe that exercise done in hard, short bursts will get you into better shape, and get you there faster, than long, slow efforts.
4. I believe that weight-lifting sessions targeting the big muscles must be interspersed with workouts that focus on strengthening the smaller, more injury-prone muscles and joints.
5. I believe that muscles should be developed for function, not just display.
6. I believe that an overemphasis on crunches and sit-ups is not the way to work your midsection and achieve wash board abs.
7. I believe in drinking buckets of water all day long.
8. I believe in stretching as a fitness necessity, not just a warmup, cooldown, or ancillary activity.
9. I believe in rest, but not necessarily rest days.
10. I believe in clean living.

Owen goes into each of these in a bit more depth, but in short these beliefs are clearly reflected in the way he lives, and the physique he’s produced as a result. Imagine acting on these beliefs daily, such that every morning, before breakfast you complete an intense 30-45 minute workout routine (three weight-training, three cardio, and one stretching/yoga each week) and then supporting yourself with excellent dietary habits. Wouldn’t you expect your body to look something like his after a couple of years? Or, based on the last blog, after 1000 hours of training (about 7 years of working out 30 minutes per day)?

Here’s your coaching challenge:

Record everything you eat everyday for the next week, and every exercise session (if you do any). Based on your week’s log, what beliefs do you hold on to that are reflected in the way your body looks and feels? What are your excuses for not working out? Are those beliefs serving you to create your version of physical excellence? Beliefs drive behaviour. You are in charge of your mind, your beliefs, your emotions, and your results.

If you want better life results, than those you’re currently getting, you know what to do: 0208.133.4520 – you’ll leave the free Fitness Coaching Strategy Session with a realistic written plan to build massive momentum towards your physical goals over the next 3 months… after all it only takes 3-4 weeks of daily training to make working out a habit, and 7 short years later, I might be writing a blog about your appearance on Men’s/Women’s Health Magazine.