Continuing from our last blog on building successful habits that support your purpose, we now get into the the essence of achieving great things. To achieve great things or even just personal goals usually require some time, energy and skill in performing some task. Let’s get into the specifics a bit. Time is a funny thing. One perspective is that time is the common denominator for everyone. It is the one currency that remains a

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Recall, from the last post that you have spent some time to consider what you find most meaningful to you being on this planet. This single point of focus is your purpose and you’ve whittled it down to a succinct idea that you came up with yourself. Now we need to turn that purpose into something more actionable. And that next step is goal-setting. With goal-setting, what milestones are you going to set that works

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As the year comes to a close, it’s inevitable that many people will be setting their new year resolutions (and why I don’t…) It’s a hectic time of the year. There will be people frantically closing out their final tasks before they take off for vacation. There will be people already on holidays visiting friends and family and dealing with uncomfortable questions about the relationship status or career. There will be people searching for that

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When you’re training HIT, especially in a group where others seem fitter than you (‘seem’ is the operative word), it’s kinda like browsing your WeChat Moments. All you see is people posting how great they are. They may be at a new restaurant or hotel grand opening, or they may be on vacation to somewhere exotic, or how amazing their food tastes. Everyone’s amazing except you! Hopefully you know that not everyone’s amazing except for

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We are not all that different - you and I. Pushing yourself to go to the gym and exercise is a miserable experience and I don’t even mean the activity of exercising! Just trying to convince yourself to go is an experience so unpleasant, it’s enough to derail any focused and disciplined individual - yes, even me. I am also not always at my peak performance. I almost always drop in strength and gain fat

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  I’ve blogged many times on mental toughness (here, here, here, here, here, and here). And now, one of my favourite bloggers, Eric Barker just wrote another blog on it! In his blog, he provides 3 tips to improve your mental strength. Read here to become a stronger you, mentally and

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There’s been a lot of emphasis on new exercise routines and functional training in the fitness industry - and there will always be some new shiny object that comes along.  The objective of this blog is to make a case for why the basics are, in my opinion, still supreme. The primary goal for any exercise program is to improve one’s health.  Although, there may be other positive side effects of exercise, such as enjoyment,

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You hear it all the time: “I need to lose weight!” And the instrument you use the most to track your progress - the scale. But do you just want to lose weight indiscriminately? The answer, if you haven’t already guessed, is a emphatic NO! That’s because when a person decides to lose weight, they will usually go on a ‘diet’ and eat less so they weigh less. However, your loss of weight can come

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I’ve blogged a lot about mental toughness (you can read about them here, here, here, here, here, and here), but I’m going to start the new year with a Member Spotlight blog on a Olive Branch member, a mentor and a friend, Cary Cheung.  A story on real mental toughness put into practice. Although Cary doesn’t regularly attend ACT class here in the Shanghai Olive Branch studio, he does train ACT regularly at his home

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If you’ve come to one of our classes before, then you would have probably heard me say “PUSH TO FAILURE”.  This is ingrained in our training philosophy because of one main ideology - stimulus equals adaptation. If you’re trying to make your body stronger (ie. adapt), then you need to apply a stimulus (ie. training) that is strong enough so that the body can hear it and then make the necessary improvements to build up.

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