Washingon, DC Fitness Job: Would You Like To Have Fun, Make Money & Help People At The Same Time?

We are looking for someone to take over teaching our group interval classes.

Benefits:

• Good pay (and the potential to move up to THE best paying fitness job in DC)
• No planning on your part (You simply execute our system and coach the participants to move through the workout correctly and safely. We will train you in how to do our classes and how to modify exercises for all levels of fitness.)
• Fun
• Steady income

Who we looking for:

• Someone very punctual – we’re only looking for people who arrive early
• Someone very professional – clean, well groomed, good language
• Someone very reliable – you’ve got to be in town to teach the class
• Someone who can follow directions – we are only looking for people to implement our program, not someone interested in reinventing the wheel
• Someone who brings their best EVERY day – if you can’t put aside whatever is going on in your life and show up with positive energy to give to our clients, then don’t bother

What to do if you are interested:

• Do not email us
• Do not call us
• Do not visit us
• Send your resume to:

Josef Brandenburg
c/o Definitions
1070 Thomas Jefferson St., NW
Washington, DC 20007

Breaking News: Michelangelo’s David Comes To Washington, DC For A Month

Have you heard that Italy is sending Michelangelo’s David to visit Washington, DC for a month?

The historic museum trip has 3 generous sponsors that provided free food unfortunately.

This brings up an important point:  How To Make The Body You Want last forever.

After you’ve cleaned up your diet, worked hard in the gym/ and/or at home, disciplined yourself to be consistent with all of the other demands on your time and energy, and navigated the myriad of obstacles and setbacks that are sure to come up, you will arrive at the body you wanted when you started.  Most people think that this is the end of the road.

No.  No.  No.

The conscious or unconscious belief that most people have is that eating better and exercising regularly is something that you do until your clothes fit again (or your arms are as big as you want them).  Then, after you look and feel the way you want to, then you can go back to what you were doing before you got in shape.  (Occasionally people will say this in a sentence, but usually they will demonstrate their belief with behavior.)

The way you used to eat and the way you used to exercise (or not exercise) was the problem. If you go back to your old lifestyle, then you will also go back to your old body.

The 3 Skills You Must Have To Make The Body You Want Last Forever

#1.  Learn how to come out of a spin: Just in case you weren’t aware, you are human.  That means that you are most definitely going to fall off the wagon at some point.  Maybe you’ll have to work 80-100hrs a week for a while, you’ll have a major family tragedy, get pregnant, or something else will get you off track.

The  common response to realizing that you’ve messed up is, “see, I always do this.  I messed up again.  I don’t know why I just can’t ever seem to keep it up.  I always fall off the wagon.  I don’t even know why I tried in the first place, I’m just a screw up.  I should just give up and stuff my face…”

I know how that feels, and I have most certainly been there too.  It’s not a good place.

People who are successful long term and people who fail long term have one thing in common:  They both fall off the wagon.

People who are successful long term and people who fail long term have one important difference too:  The successes pick themselves up ASAP, refocus on where they want to be and get started back there; the failures wallow in misery and spend their energy insulting themselves.

#2.  Start with the right attitude: Getting and keeping the body you want is a 3 step process:

• Step 1:  get it.  Do what it takes to get what you want.
• Step 2:  find out how many carbs you can eat, and how little exercise you can do to keep it.
• Step 3:  when you mess-up, reset, go back to #1

This is not a quick fix.  This is a new life.

#3.  Learn how to cook: Most people cannot cook period.  They only way that most people (or restaurants) can make their food taste good is by making it unhealthy – extra sugar, high fructose corn syrup and trans-fats.

Healthy food can and should be good food too.  Investing a few bucks in a good cookbook, and some time in learning how to cook will pay huge dividends in life – more energy, less fat, more muscle, and you might even impress somebody special in your life.

Here is my new favorite cookbook:

Josef Brandenburg is 2010, Washington, DC  Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee for both Personal Fitness Professional Magazine and The Washington, DC Fitness Association, The DC Fitness Advisor and the Fitness Expert for the PCOS Challenge TV Show. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a FREE copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.

Josef in the News… Check me out!

Jimmy Moore did an interview with me recently about 10 Fitness Myths that hold people back from getting the bodies they want (esp. as it pertains to folks on low/lower carb diets).  That is FREE right here to download as a podcast or just to listen to at your computer.

Josef Brandenburg is 2010, Washington, DC  Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee for both Personal Fitness Professional Magazine and The Washington, DC Fitness Association, The DC Fitness Advisor and the Fitness Expert for the PCOS Challenge TV Show. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a FREE copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.

Can I Save You 225 Minutes?

What do you think would happen if you added 225min of “target heart rate zone” cardio to your week? If you did 45min of jogging on 5 days per week, do you think that you’d lose some fat? Do you think your results would come in faster?

Nope.

It turns out that what will actually happen is NOTHING. You’d get the same results if you had watched American Idol, Desperate Housewives, and a couple of DVD’s.

I’ve reported on research like this before, but here is some more.

Researchers took obese women and divided them into 4 groups:

1. Exercise group (EX) – they did 45min of aerobics on 5 days per week.
2. Diet group (D) – they ate a reduced calorie diet (which only works because you end up eating fewer carbs FYI)
3. Diet + Exercise Group (EX + D) – the did the 5 days @ 45min per session of aerobics + ate the same diet as the D group
4. Control (C) – they didn’t do nothin’

At the end of 12 weeks there was “no significant change for EX relative to C.” In other words doing aerobic exercise is as effective as sitting on your ass… that is to say that it does nothing.

At the end of 12 weeks there was no significant difference between D and D + EX.  To quote the researchers: “Aerobic exercise training during a 12-week period has no discernible effects on body composition.”

Here’s the link to the free abstract, the full text costs however (I don’t get the money).

Well, That Study Wasn’t Long Enough!

Some people are thinking that the people in the above study just didn’t workout long enough.  The thought is, “what if we took the exercise that did not work before and make them do more of it and for more weeks, then it will work.”

Researchers in Seattle thought of this.  They took overweight people and had them do 60 minutes (fifteen more minutes baby!) of aerobic exercise for a whole dang year!

After 12 months of exercising for 6 hours per week here are the results:

• Men lost 3.96lbs on average
• Women lost 3.08lbs on average

With a big salad I can lose that much going to the bathroom.  (Some times I weight myself before and after just for fun.)

What’s funny is that the researchers said, “these data support the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Institute of Medicine guidelines of 60 min/d of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity.”

REALLY!?!?!?!?  By the researchers numbers I’d need to 30 hours of aerobics per week if I wanted to drop 20 pounds this year.

Resistance training & interval training, however, DO work.  You can read more about that here and here.

Josef Brandenburg is 2010, Washington, DC  Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee for both Personal Fitness Professional Magazine and The Washington, DC Fitness Association, The DC Fitness Advisor and the Fitness Expert for the PCOS Challenge TV Show. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a FREE copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.

How To Workout When The Weather Sucks, or You’re Snowed-In At Home

It’s Snowmageddon in Washington, DC. Gyms are closed. Cars are buried. And if your gym was open today, it’s still a pain to walk there. But that’s OK, you don’t need a gym to get a killer workout.

This video lays out the entire workout, the warm-up, the rest periods, and equipment substitutions too.

Here’s the crib notes:

Part 1 – the warm-up:

The warm-up is actually THE single most important part of any workout. Now, I don’t mean a boring, waste of time warm-up like walking on the treadmill – really, why on earth do people go to the gym to go walking! – I mean something that will actually do your body some good.

Think about it. We wake up, and sit down to eat breakfast, then sit for an hour to get to work, then we sit at our desk for 8-10hrs, then we sit in our cars for another hour, then we site down to watch TV for two hours… why the hell would we go to the gym, sit down on a bike, then do bicep curls and crunches? Do we really need to spend our hour at the gym hunched over like we are the rest of the day?

Walking lunge with OH reach 5-8/side
Walking Spiderman 5-8/side
Walking side lunge 5-8/side
Inch worm 5-8
Single leg bridge 10/side

Part II – fat blasting interval workout

Now that your body is ready to do some real work, let’s do some real work that will make you stronger, fitter and way better looking.

We’re going to use time for this workout instead of reps. You will need a timer – a watch, a Gymboss, or even a kitchen timer will work just fine.

If you are a beginner – start with 30sec of work, followed by 30sec of rest; intermediate do 40/20, and for the advanced folks, go with 50on.10sec off.

This will take 20min. We’ve got 5 stations, that we’ll cycle around

Squat to press

Valslide plank

Lunge jump

Valslide mountain climber

KB swing

You can get a Valslide right here. They are super useful for home or hotel room workouts.

You can also pick up a kettlebell right here.

Josef Brandenburg is 2010, Washington, DC  Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee for both Personal Fitness Professional Magazine and The Washington, DC Fitness Association, The DC Fitness Advisor and the Fitness Expert for the PCOS Challenge TV Show. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a FREE copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.

Super Bowl Party for a Super Body

Conventional Super Bowl food and football look like this:

But the people in the Super Bowl look like this:

or like this:

Here’s a menu and recipes to help you have a great time while you avoid heart burn, weight gain and feeling like crap.

Chips and dip

There are a lot of dips you can choose from:  salsa, baba ganoush, and guacamole, are my favorite.  I just go with the better store bought stuff because I rarely have the time to make it myself.

#1.  Baked Rutabega Chips

These don’t come out all that crispy, but they are still very good and you can spoon pretty much anything on top of them.

Ingredients

1 Rutabaga, peeled and sliced into thin “chips” (a food processor makes this quick and easy)
1 TBS olive oil + 1 TBS to coat your baking sheet
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
1 tsp Old Bay Seasoning

Directions

Preheat your oven to 425 F.  Mix all the ingredients except 1 TBS of olive oil that should be left over for the baking hseet.

Coat a baking sheet with the remaining olive oil, and then spread the seasoned chips out in a single layer.

Bake for about 30 minutes, turn them once or twice.

#2. Low-Carb Cheese Crackers

Ingredients

4 slices (approx 1 oz each) cheddar cheese (pre-sliced from a grocery store – I’ve used several brands and they all seem to work fine.)

Parchment paper

Directions

1.  Take cheese and fold into quarters (you end up with 4 pieces of cheese that are about ¼ the size of the original slice) and place on baking sheet that has been covered with a sheet of parchment paper.

For best results and crisp leave the unbaked cheese out overnight.

2.  Preheat oven to 400 F, and put cheese in oven when the oven heats to 400.
3.  Bake for 8min

For a crisper cracker – leave the cheese on the parchment paper for an hour or more to help it dry out.  The longer it sits out the dryer it gets and the crisper your cracker.

Nutrition

Makes 4 servings of 4 crackers

Regular cheese crackers – 18g net carb per 1oz serving
These cheese crackers – .5g net carb per 1 oz serving (4 crackers)

#3.  Raw veggies

I know.  This is very anticlimactic, but it’s also probably the easiest one to do.

Pizza

Low-Carb Pizza Green

1 La Banderita (there are other brands too) low-carb tortilla (you can get them at Safeway, Harris Teeter and probably other places)                               5g net carb
2-3 tbsp pesto (fresh is better, watch for added sugar)       1g net carb
1 handful spinach                                                                        .5g net carb
½ cup cooked chicken                                                               1g net carb
½ cup mozzarella cheese                                                          1.5 g net carbs
Pinch parmesan cheese
Salt and pepper to taste

Low-Carb Pizza Red

1 La Banderita (there are other brands too) low-carb tortilla (you can get them at Safeway, Harris Teeter and probably other places)                               5g net carb
2 tbsp no sugar added pizza sauce                                          2.5g net carb
4 slice tomato                                                                                2g net carb
½ cup cooked chicken                                                                1g net carb
1 small handful fresh basil leaves
½ cup mozzarella cheese                                                         1.5g net carb
Pinch parmesan cheese
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions – Same for both (ingredients are listed in ascending order: tortilla first, next thing on top, etc.)

1. Pre-heat over to 400 F and lightly spray large baking sheet.
2. Place tortillas on sheet and add ingredients (Ascending order – so tortilla 1st, then pesto, then spinach, and so on)
3. Bake for 8min, cut up and enjoy!

Nutrition

Green = 9g net carb per pizza
Red = 12g net carb per pizza

Quesadillas

Ingredients

2 x 6” La Tortilla Factory low-carb tortillas
1/4 cup plain, cooked chicken breast     (optional – you can put anything else inside or nothing except cheese)
1/2 cup     Salsa
cooking spray

Instructions

1. Heat skillet with cooking pray
2. Place cheese and chicken between the tortillas, and cook until brown on both sides and cheese is melted.
3. Eat with salsa, and a side of raw veggies like peppers, cucumbers, celery or carrots.

Jalapeño Poppers (not deep fried)

This one is all new and from a client.  It turns out that you don’t have to batter and deep fry a jalapeño to make it taste good.

Ingredients:
- jalapenos
- cream cheese
- bacon (you can also use turkey bacon, and I guess some sort of veggie “bacon” would work too)
- toothpicks

Preheat oven to 350.
Cut jalapenos in half and de-seed with a spoon.
Fill jalapeno halves with cream cheese.
Wrap 1/2 slice of bacon around each filled jalapeno, then secure with a toothpick.
Bake for 20-25 minutes until the bacon starts to squeeze the cream cheese a bit (I use a baking drip tray to let the grease drip off).
Eat. They are addictive.

And for dessert Pineapple & Cream Crepes

Ingredients
1-2 oz mascarpone                                                 125-250 kcal (.5-1g carb)
2 oz super thin slices of pineapple                     27 kcal (5g carb)

Instructions

1. Cut off top and bottom and sides of pineapple, and place in freezer for 10-15min.  With a very sharp knife and careful technique, or preferably a mandolin (you can find one for a good price online), slice 2oz of pineapple.  This should yield 3-4 thin slices.

2.  Take half the mascarpone and put into center of pineapple, and roll around.  Enjoy!

Nutrition Facts

Makes 1 serving @ 152-277 kcal , and 5.5-6g net carb per serving

Josef Brandenburg is 2010, Washington, DC  Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee for both Personal Fitness Professional Magazine and The Washington, DC Fitness Association, The DC Fitness Advisor and the Fitness Expert for the PCOS Challenge TV Show. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a FREE copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.