Frank Blevins, had recently moved to Skipburg, CA, and decided to visit his local fitness center to pick up a match or two of racquetball. After filling out the standard guest form, he headed for the courts. Back in Splatville, PA, he used to demonstrate his athletic prowess, and trounce any who dared to enter the court with him. He looked forward to proving his skills here in a new town as well. As he approached the hallway leading to the courts, something was very wrong. He turned and walked down the hallway finding darkened racquetball courts, and unusual sounds.. There was heavy breathing on court one, but to his dismay, it was a yoga class.. There was a thumping noise coming out of court 2, but disappointingly, it was music for the spin class. The other 4 courts were dark, empty, unswept, and unused except for the occasional people who came in to hit a ball around and wonder how one really plays the game. How many people, he wondered came down this hallway and wished they had someone to play with, someone to teach them how to play. He remembers his home facility, where the sound of the ball splatting into the wall, the cries of frustration from a player hitting a bad shot, and the screams of victory would all be deafening, yet a pleasing sound. What happened here?, he says to himself. Where did everyone go? It was all so much fun back home, such great exercise!. I made so many great friends! Then, he realized the seriousness of the situation.. Oh crap!, he thought…, I am going to have to get on a treadmill to get a workout in tonight! Ugh!

The thought was depressing and he just wanted to leave, to go find some other facility. But, he knew he had searched for other facilities, and this one was absolutely the most convenient to his work and home. He’d never consistently drive across town. Frank also wasn’t much on leaving a situation he didn’t like because of the current circumstances. Where others whined and complained, he pursued solutions and took action. He believed in having impact wherever he was, and he strove to leave a place better than the condition in which he found it. This place is ripe with opportunity for improvement, he thought. He chuckled to himself as he remembered one of his favorite quotes “If you have flies in your soup, it must be that you like them there.”

Frank decided he would be the last one to walk down this hallway and wonder what happened. He knew what people were missing out on, and he was definitely NOT going to run on a treadmill for exercise. 10 minutes into a run, his body would scream in agony and his mind would ache in boredom. He knew he could play racquetball for hours!, until he could barely stand up, and never notice a moments pain or boredom. He knew he would burn thousands of more calories than with any other exercise, while having the time of his life in the process.

Rather than working out tonight, Frank headed up to the administrative offices and asked the facility manager what happened? The manager said, yeah, we used to have tons of racquetball players, but that was back in the 80’s. Racquetball is in decline as a sport and there is nothing we can do but find other uses for the courts. The spin and yoga classes are keeping those two courts full 2 hours each night, at least when the instructor shows up. Sure, Frank thought, that fills the space for a couple of hours, but what about the rest of the day? After thinking a moment, Frank asked, would you mind if I posted a few things on the other court doors, and on the bulletin board? I’d like to see if I can get something going racquetball-wise.. The manager said sure!, and good luck! I think you are swimming upstream with a sport in decline, but go for it. With a grin, Frank said, I could use the exercise of swimming upstream. Thanks for letting me give it a go.

The next night Frank came to the club with a few things he’d printed out. On the bulletin board, and on each racquetball court door, he posted a sign that simply said: Hello!, my name is Frank Blevins. I am an average racquetball player, new in town, and am looking for others to play with. You will find me here every Tues and Thurs nights at 6:00 practicing my shots and waiting on your arrival. He put his contact information on the sign as well. After putting the signs up, Frank swept out court 3 and began practicing his shots. He’d take a break every so often and do some plyometrics for strength and conditioning. After an hour or so of this he left. The next time he came to the club, he again practiced shots and did his plyometrics, but he didn’t get the much hoped for knock on the door.. On the 3rd night, though, he completely whiffed a ball when a knock at the door startled him. The door opened, and a middle aged man entered with his hand outstretched toward Frank. My name is Steve Phillips. Are you the Frank Blevins with the sign on the door? That I am, said Frank. Great!, said Steve. I saw your sign, and came here tonight hoping to see what you were made of. Frank and Steve found they were well matched. Neither was even close to being a professional player, but both would chase down any and all shots fired. They wailed away at the ball for over an hour, and came out gasping for air and drenched in sweat. Steve said, gosh Frank, that was the most fun I’ve had in years. I used to play a lot, but haven’t had anyone to play with in a long long time. Will you be here next week? You bet said Frank. Would you mind if I added your name to my signs as a fellow player? No problem Steve said.

Over the next few weeks Frank had more and more people contacting him about getting in the program. Apparently many had walked down the same quiet hallway, but didn’t know they had the power to change what they didn’t like. After 6 months, Frank felt at home again. There was always a match to be found, and people thanked him over and over again for getting things started. New friendships were being forged, people were getting in great shape, and the club was moving the yoga class to a different space because of the high demand for court reservations. It is amazing, he thought, that just a simple sign on the door is all it took to start such a great thing. A buzzing sound approached, and Frank deftly swatted a backhand kill shot. I rather think I like the soup being served here now he thought. And he left the club for the evening exhausted and happy.

While this story is fiction, it is just barely that.. I have seen it happen many times in reality! People are waiting for the Franks of the world to just put up a sign. Can you do that?

Why go to the trouble you ask? OH!, it is not much trouble at all! What little effort there is, you will find more than worth it!! You will be repaid over and over in lifetime friendships, frequent appreciation, resume bullet points!, and of course amazing fitness! Who knows, maybe even a few trophies! If no-one takes these first steps, the sport will languish if not die at your university and the courts will be converted to yoga/spin classes…

Racquetball at most, if not all universities is a “club sport” rather than a varsity team. It is a sport that student clubs setup and run. If your university/college does not already have a racquetball club, they need YOU to start one as soon as possible! Do not fear!, if you are not the state champion racquetball player. What racquetball needs most is great leaders, not great players. Anyone can be a great racquetball leader! All it takes is a little communication.

Miarazzo can be a profound tool to help you to mold yourself into the person you’ve always dreamed of being. It doesn’t matter how far you have to go to achieve that. What is important is that you make a change to the right direction and start the journey. The following are steps that will help you use Miarazzo in it’s most effective way.

Step 1.) Establish Goals: You wouldn’t go on a road trip without a map, why would you begin each day’s journey without one? No telling where you will end up, and most likely not a place you’d like to be! Common wisdom these days says that good goals are “SMART” which is an acronym for:

• Specific – Document in the goal precisely what you want to accomplish. You wouldn’t ask your Uber driver to “take you to New York”. No telling where they would drop you off. You would give them a specific address so there is no wasted time or money, and you would reach your desired destination. The same goes for your goals. Rather than set a goal to “get in shape”, set a goal of “be able to run a 5k without stopping in 30 minutes”. Document in the goal the specific steps you will take to attain it. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail after all. Another important thing to do is to choose an image to associate with your goal. As they say, a picture is worth 1000 words, this is true in helping you to visualize the goal you plan to reach.
• Measurable – be sure your goals have measurable outcomes so that you can stay on track and celebrate the wins. You will make excuses and fool yourself into thinking you are doing ok if you do not have measurable outcomes. These should also have target dates so that you don’t slack off and be too easy on yourself. Rather than say your goal is to “lose weight”, say that you will lose 1 lb per week for the next 4 weeks.
• Attainable – it is good to be hard on yourself, but don’t be unrealistic or you will get disappointed in yourself and even depressed. The goal should require some change in your life, or it would have already been achieved. Jim Rohn said “Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.” To be successful, one needs to keep their targets realistic and sustainable. Don’t set yourself up for failure by making an impossible goal like becoming a billionaire or losing 100 lbs by the end of the month.
• Relevant – One of the most important parts of setting a goal is establishing a “why” you want to achieve the goal. Freidrich Nietzsche has a quote that says “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” If you make a goal without having good reasons why you want to achieve them, you will find any “excuse” rather than any “how” and never get them done. Document in your goal why it is important, even if it is self evident. It will more firmly embed in your mind the goals importance. You will most likely even come up with a few reasons why that you’d not thought of before. If you cannot come up with a why, then do not create the goal!
• Timebound – This is tied with the “measurable” part of the SMART acronym. Your goal should not only have a pre-defined value, but also a deadline to keep you motivated and keep the goal from slipping through your fingers. So schedule a date, and a celebration!

Step 2.) Link Motivational Quotes: to keep you inspired and moving in the right direction. If you do not find a quote you like in Miarazzo’s quotes, search the internet and find one that does. You can add quotes you find to Miarazzo, and then link them to your goals. Be sure the quote is meaningful to you and related to the goal. You will be surprised how motivating quotes are. Like with the goals on Miarazzo, images can be added to quotes you create. Be sure to add an image that is meaningful to you and related to the quotes you add. If you don’t like the images we have on our quotes, just copy our quote and create a new quote of your own with an image of your choosing. Visualizations help!

Step 3.) Link Habits to your goals to sow your destiny. These are the things you need to do on a regular basis to achieve your goal. Ralph Waldo Emerson says: “Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.“ And you thought you were just setting goals here? This is where you build a destiny! With Miarazzo you can track your habits on a daily basis. For the first 60 days, set your habit frequency to daily, if not always so that it will show up every day in your home page feed at Miarazzo. It takes most people 60 days to establish a habit.

Step 4.) Link Metrics to your goals so that they are measurable and you know your numbers.

Step 5.) Seriously review your goals at least daily. When you create your goal, be sure to set it’s review frequency to daily or always so that it shows up in your Miarazzo home page feed. No skimming. Seriously ponder the goal itself, the quotes you assigned to it, and enter your metrics/habits. Create an icon on your mobile phone home page to take you directly to Miarazzo, and visit the site every day to keep yourself on track. Click on the goal title in your feed to take you to the “goal view” page where you will also see the quotes and be able to mark it as “reviewed”.

One of my favorite quotes is from the book “Dune” by Frank Herbert which says “The test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does.“. If you internalize this, it becomes something like “I will test myself by what I actually do, not by all the things I keep telling myself I’ll do someday”. Meditate on this thought/quote every morning and make a plan to actually do something each day that gets you closer to where you want to be.

The Pareto principle says that 80% of consequences stem from 20% of causes, aka, the 80/20 rule. This is true in many categories of your life, be that work, study, diet, habits, practically anything you can think of.  This principle can be used to help you lose weight fast!

Apply The Pareto Principle To Your Diet to Lose Weight

If you are overweight and want to see a remarkable change, just eliminate your biggest weakness.  When your weakness is just one thing (like sodas) it is a lot easier to remove than all things of that category (like all sweets).  If sodas are your weakness, get rid of them.  Find something you like to drink that has zero calories instead.  Surely there is something.  For me, this weakness would be Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls.  These are very dangerous for me.  I like them so much, I run the risk of eating an entire box in a day!  So, I don’t buy them and eat something I like (Oreos), but that I seem to have some control over. If it truly is a weakness, don’t try to “just eat one”, but don’t even have them in your house.

Some people are sweet snackers, some are savory snackers, and some are beer drinkers.  So, if eliminating one item within these categories doesn’t do much for you because you have 50 other choices, you may need to eliminate the category itself.  You’ve been eating these things for years, so you may need to replace it with something healthy just to satisfy the habit.

The key to getting rid of your food weakness is discipline.  If you can’t master yourself, be sure that you know yourself. That means don’t even bring it into the house if you know you won’t have the discipline to leave it alone.  If there are others in your household who want it in the house, ask them to help you be accountable.

It is the simplest thing to do.  Eliminate your food weakness, and you’ll definitely start losing weight.

This is no gimmick, and I’m not here to sell you the next great exercise machine for 4 easy payments!  The key to a better body and great fitness is applying a few life principles such as “How to Eat an Elephant”, the “Pareto principle”, convenience, and most importantly, sustainability, to your workouts.

Most people start working out with workouts that are too hard, too fast, too soon.  They will get so sore the first workout that they won’t come back for the 2nd workout, or at best do it for a few days. Working out less, but regularly, throughout the months and years will take you significantly further than those intense “P90X”  extreme workouts that you will quit in a month if not a week. Sustainability is the key!

How to Eat an Elephant:  Lets talk about how to eat an elephant first.  You want to do something you can continue to do for the rest of your life without it becoming a drudgery.  Let’s face it, lifting weights isn’t a whole lot of fun.  But, if you break it up throughout the day, you can do it without even breaking a sweat. Building the habit is just as important as building the muscle. “Eating an elephant” means breaking up over sized tasks into manageable bites. Over sized tasks can be overwhelming in size or in difficulty.  A big 1 hour workout can be too much to take on days when your a bit tired and/or busy.  It takes time to rest between sets; time you could be doing something else besides wishing the workout was over.  So, why not do your “3 sets” throughout the day instead of all at once?  In the morning, do a set before you shower, a second set after you shower, and a final set when you get home from work.  You’ve done your same 3 sets, and probably did each set a little better than if they were done all at once, and you hardly even notice you’d worked out. This is especially true these days when many of us are working remotely and can get a set in almost any time of the day.  

Sustainable and Convenient Workouts: Your muscles definitely need a day between workouts to rest and repair. An easy way to do this is by doing upper body (chest, arms, abs, back) one day, and lower body (legs, gluts) the next day. You don’t have to have an expensive gym membership either. It is often said that the absolute best gym is the most convenient gym, and that is in your garage! Hurdles to working out must be removed, and driving to a gym bringing clothes, showering, etc. are all hurdles. All you need is an exercise mat, 1 set of dumbbells, and a good music playlist. For upper body, there is nothing better than push-ups which will work your triceps, abs, chest, shoulders all at once. You’ll still need some further ab work, but the pushups will allow you to skip those unpleasant planks. For your biceps and deltoids, get 1 set of dumbbells for curls and military press. For legs and glutes, try lunges and plyometrics to build muscle every other day, and racquetball, tennis, running, or Zumba for cardio/aerobic fitness.  Granted, there is not a way to break up the cardio/aerobic fitness throughout your day, but everything else can be. 

If you must go to the gym keep sustainability in mind there as well.  I’m always tempted to lift heavier and heavier weights, or push a cardio machine further and further or faster and faster.  This is unsustainable.  If you don’t end up with an injury, you’ll burn out, get injured, or start skipping workouts.  Do a moderate amount of weight or cardio and do it regularly.  This will result in a sustainable workout that keeps you strong, lean, and feeling good. Don’t fall into the trap of forever increasing the weight or reps you are doing. We would like to think that we can curl an additional 5 lbs every month as our muscles grow. At that rate, in 5 years, starting with 20 lb dumbbells, we all be curling 320 lb dumbbells! If you are dreading the next set, you are probably doing too much. And, it’s not just that there is a maximum weight limit to what our muscles can do. We are human, and humans seek pleasure and avoid pain and this will limit the sustainability of our workouts if they are too painful in time or effort. If you are working out at your maximum capacity, you will find excuses to skip it for the day. You will definitely gain more muscle and fitness by a regular moderate workout than an extreme workout that you tend to skip.

I was reminded of this just last week while travelling for work.  The place I was going to had the best food imaginable for lunches, and dining out every evening was beginning to take a toll on my waist line.  I had been doing pretty well at eating manageable portion sizes, but the food was just too rich.  So, on Wednesday, out of guilt, I did a lot more exercise than I normally would, trying to make up for it.  Thursday and Friday, I could hardly move without excruciating pain and didn’t do any workout at all.  Saturday I was still extremely sore, but finally was able to do 1/2 of what I would usually do.   You will end up working out less if you do too much.  So, start out pretty easy, and gradually work yourself up to bigger workouts, larger reps, more sets, etc. Remember to find a moderate level of workout to stay at permanently too.  You will only set yourself back if you do too much too soon or if you keep adding to the workout.

Pareto Principle:  Muscle burns calories, and the more muscle you have, the more calories you will burn even when at rest (your metabolism will rise).  So, to lose weight, you need to build muscle. I have found that no matter how much cardio exercise I get, I don’t lose much weight unless I include some weight training to build muscle.  To apply the Pareto principle to your muscles and your workout, think about your biggest muscles as well as what will enhance your looks the most, if that is your goal for working out.  One little muscle in your forearm might be important for a body builder, but probably not worth the time to isolate and work by itself for the rest of us.  It can get worked as a side effect of working something more important such as your biceps, triceps, or chest muscles. 80% of your improvements in metabolism and looks can be done by working 20% of your muscles.

Glutes and Legs – these are your largest muscles and can increase your metabolism the fastest.  If you do nothing else, work these muscle groups as a minimum and you can get results.  

Make It Fun: I mentioned earlier in this article that lifting weights is just no fun and therefore unsustainable for most people.  The same goes for exercise machines.  I feel like I have a fair amount of discipline, but it is just too mind numbing for me to get on a treadmill or just about any exercise machine 3 times a week for any amount of time.  What I do love to do for large lengths of time is play a sport like racquetball, tennis, badminton, etc.  I will do this for hours on end without ever noticing I’m “working out”.  Another thing that is almost as good as a sport is taking a class such as Zumba, Dance Blast, etc at my local fitness club.  Once you get over “dancing in public” without a beverage to relax your inhibitions, it’s a lot of laughs and a lot of unnoticed exercise.

Injury prevention:  I see people taking huge risks all the time with their workouts.  I see people pushing their bodies beyond what they were made to do all the time.  Things like straight arm weight lifting (imagine a slow motion jumping jack with heavy weights in hand). Yeah, it really works the shoulder muscle hard, but one day that shoulder is going to give out on you.  Then, you are not going to work out for 6 months while you have surgery and recover. There are hundreds of safe ways to workout every muscle on your body, so why risk an injury?  Think twice about the leverage stress and strain you are putting on your joints before doing an exercise.  Shoulders and knees are what I see people risking the most often.  Take plyometric jumping for example.  I see people jumping on and off platforms, usually very unsteady platforms, or even worse, bleachers!  They are really asking for it.  And by “it”, I don’t mean a staring role on Funniest Home Video’s.  You don’t need to take this risk.  Just jump as high as you can from solid ground, reaching for the stars.  Do 3 sets of 12 of these and see if you aren’t completely wiped out.  You get the same exercise, and almost zero risk of injury.

In summary, work your biggest muscles, one set at a time throughout the day, in safe ways, and increase reps/sets gradually to a moderate level. Also find some fun activities that you can do regularly and trick yourself into a workout.

What is the Pareto Principle?

The Pareto principle was named for Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, and states that 80% of consequences stem from 20% of causes. Vilfredo discovered that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.  He also found that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.  Like Vilfredo, you will find percentages like these in many aspects of your life.  They can be found in your work, study, diet, habits, and practically anything you can think of.

Focus on the 20% of what you are trying to accomplish that will have 80% of the impact. Master the main concepts that will be tested on an exam first and fill in lesser details as time allows.  Don’t try to memorize every little detail.  80% of the exam will probably be on the 20% of the material that were the main concepts.

Lose Weight and Gain Fitness Easily

Work on your largest muscles first to get a better body in minutes per day, and leave the rest to nature.  Work on the 20% of muscles that are largest and you’ll get 80% of the looks and metabolism gains you are searching for. The Pareto Principle will help you lose weight fast by eliminating your main food weakness.  Your main food weakness may very well be 80% of the reason for your current weight though it is only 20% of what you  are eating.

Apply the Pareto Principle to everything you do to save time, make your work more productive, and make your work sustainable.  There simply isn’t time or energy to do 100% of the things in your life, 100% of the time.

You can only do some things great. Cast all else aside. – Steve Jobs