The new year is when a huge number of people decide that it is time to get fit and join a health club. Finding the club that is right for you can be confusing. You can either get a great deal that works for you, or wind up spending a lot of money for things you never use. There are a lot of factors you need to consider in selecting a club or gym. This week I’ll be making  a set of posts that are designed to help you sort through the things you need to know in order to get whats best for you when you consider joining a health club.

The posts will cover the following:

• Facilities, costs and contracts
• Personal trainers
• club social environment
• Attrition and how to not be a “statistic”

The most basic consideration is whether the club you are considering has the equipment and facilities you want. If you want to do weight training, the club should have a large supply of free weights. If you want to swim, a pool is mandatory. The same holds true for tennis, raquet sports, yoga, etc. If they don’t have what you want, don’t give them a second look.

When you enter a club for the first time, you will generally be greeted by someone who will be able to tell you about the prices for membership, hours of operation, parking, day care, class schedules, and other benefits of membership. Someone should also give you a full tour of the facility including the training areas, locker rooms, shower and sauna’s (if available), courts, pool, etc. You should see the place before you agree to join.

At some point, you will be shown a list of prices for various options. It is really important that you be very alert at this point to avoid buying things that you really don’t want or need. The first thing you should know is that almost all clubs charge an “initiation” fee. This is a one time charge to set up your membership account. This fee will vary depending on whether you live in an expensive urban area like New York, or in a less expensive area like Omaha. In any event, the fee should be $100 or less if you are joining a health club that is part of a major national chain. If you are joining a high end exclusive club, such as a golf country club, the fee will be much higher. However, almost all clubs will have this fee.

The next item of cost is your monthly membership fee. In the area where I live (Seattle), the fee for a single person will run from $29 per month (before tax) to $85. Fees for couples or families will of course be higher.   It is absolutely critical that you understand what your monthly membership fee includes!   Some places will charge you extra fees for certain classes.  You may also have to pay for use of certain facilities at certain times, such as tennis courts, spa’s, consultations, etc.  Be absolutely clear about what you are getting with your monthly membership.

Another thing you must understand is how long you will have to pay the monthly membership.  Most clubs require a one year commitment when you sign up.  If you quit using the club in two months, you are still obligated to pay them for a year, even if you don’t visit the club.  The sad fact is that most people who sign up in January with high hopes for success will quit going to the club within three weeks.  They did not get any results, but they are still obligated to pay for the membership for a year.

You should also ask specific questions about the following:

• Hours of operation
• Parking
• Peak usage times
• Day Care
• Classes and charges for them
• Any restrictions on use of the facilities during peak hours
• Towel and locker availability and charges

You should find out how much help you will get from the staff without having to pay extra charges.  Most places will try to sell you the services of a personal trainer. These charges will range from $50 to well over $100 per hour.  I would strongly recommend that you do not sign up for personal training services until you have been a member for a few weeks. My next post will cover personal trainers and how they can be useful to you, or an excessive expense. 

The most important thing in selecting a club is how it feels to you.  You can get a small taste of this by asking for a complementary workout to try the place out.  Personally, I would be suspicious of a club that did not offer you a “test drive”.  If they believe they have a good product, they should be more than happy to let you experience it for yourself.  

After you take your “test drive”, you will have a better understanding of whether the club is a place you want to spend your time training, and spend your money to get desired results.  If you have some reservations about the place, then you need to make a list of the things you like and those you don’t like.  Decide if any of the things you don’t like mean that you would not want to train there on a regular basis.  If so, look for another club.  If not, you are almost ready to join.

When you “join” a club, you are going to be asked to sign a contract that obligates you to pay a certain amount of money up front, and then each month.  Be absolutely certain you understand exactly what you are committing to pay.  Once you sign the contract, you will be obligated to pay the club regardless of whether you quit training or not.  Also, ask under what circumstances you can get out of the contract.  When you have answers to all of these questions, you will know exactly what your financial commitment is.

Most clubs require that your monthly bill be taken directly from your checking account.  This is almost universal in the industry.  When you sign the membership contract, you are agreeing that your monthly fee and other club charges will be taken directly out of your checking account on a specific day of the month.

That covers the things you should check out before you sign the membership contract.  Next comes the issue of whether to use a personal trainer or not.

Have a great day,

Richard Schuller

There is no better time than right now to begin regular exercise.  There is nothing magic about beginning on the first of the month, or at some unspecified date in the future.  Once you start a training program, the big challenge will be sustaining it.  Most people quit within a few days or weeks of beginning.  You dont want this to happen to you.  The short video below gives you some key information on how to give yourself the best chance to succeed over the long haul.

To your good health

Richard Schuller

Trying to make positive changes in your life is usually difficult.  The main reasons have to do with the fact that we have established bad habits that are almost “hard wired” into our brains.  We can change these, but only if we recognize what we are trying to do, and what tools and techniques we have available to us to make the changes.  Even then, it will not be easy.  However, is is both possible and desirable.

Our brains are hard wired to make us do things that provide short term comfort, but often at the expense of our long term welfare.  When we evolved in the wilds almost everything we did was linked to a short term response.  For example, if we found food, we had to eat it because the supply was always precarious.  When we saw something that we wanted, we took it because usually it was necessary for survival.  Our internal drives were linked up with our daily needs for survival.  We still have the same drives that we did 10,000 years ago, but our life circumstances are drastically different.  Now our drives actually work against our long term welfare.

In the primitive situation, there was no “long term”.  We had to eat “right now”.  We had to find fire wood “right now”.  We rarely dealt with any situation where the planning horizon was longer than a few days.  As we developed more dependable forms of subsistence, such as farming and tending animals, we still had no more than a seasonal view of the world, and everything was always scarce. 

In our current world we still have the drives to “eat now” drive and a host of others that work against our long term welfare.  We are dealing with non-conscious drives to do things such as eat, relax, and save our energy that had survival value in pre-historic times.  Now, these drives turn us into unhealthy people who have to deal with obesity, hypertension, heart disease, and a host of other conditions related to eating too much and exercising too little.

When you take the plunge with a new resolution to improve your life, what will happen at once is that you will be working directly counter to your non-conscious hard wired drives to eat and conserve energy.  You need to understand that when you begin restricting your caloric intake, your body will scream “your starving me”.  When you start working out, you non conscious mind will tell you that “you have to conserve energy, you might have to run away from a predator, or survive a famine”.    These are the internal forces that will constantly work on you to quit eating properly and stop exercising. 

Most of your non-conscious drives and habits can be re-directed by your conscious mind if you recognize that you have to do this.  When you begin any program designed to change your habits, your mind and body will constantly try to get you to stop doing the programs.  New programs may run counter to your conditioned habits, and will usually run counter to your primitive survival drives.  Your conscious mind is the best resource you have for battling those habits that are really bad for you in the long run. 

As in the previous post, you need to have a plan to give you any chance of succeeding at your resolutions.  You not only need a plan for your eating and your physical training, you need a plan to help you stay on the program and the diet.    

For example, you can get a good plan for both diet and exercise in my book A Guide to Getting Younger After 60.  If you follow the training and the nutrition guidance, you will be able to make major changes in the your physical body, and other parts of your life as well.  The book provides the plan for you to follow.  You also need to understand that once you are a few weeks into the program, your basic drives will begin to emerge that move you to do things that will be very bad for you in the long term. 

You must have a plan to deal with the forces that will end your diet, stop your physical training, and terminate your progress to any of your long term health goals.   90% of the time the subverting forces will come from your non-conscious mind and the primitive drives to eat constantly and conserve your energy for life threatening situations.   If you understand this, you have a better chance of succeeding with your long term goals (AKA: resolutions).

Your first line of defense (plan) is to decide what you are going to eat each week.  Once you make this plan, then you will find it is much easier to avoid eating anything that is put in front of you.  Without a plan, you are totally at the mercy of your own will power in any situation, and the lack of any strategic reason to eat or avoid any goodie you may encounter.  If you have never tried to do a weekly eating plan, give it a try, you may be shocked at how often you simply eat what happens to be handy.

Most serious resolutions involve a lot of long term commitment and working against your inner drives.  Those who succeed are most often those who have a plan on what to do, and then follow the plan!!!!   As any of you who have worked in an office know, it is really easy to make plan, but very tough to implement the plan.  Rest assured that if you make a plan, recognize that it will require your constant attention to make it work for you.

Richard Schuller

If there is one time of the year when people traditonally wreck their diets or fitness plans it is the end of the year holidays.  Food is everywhere, and the temptation to overeat and not do proper exercise is almost constant.  In the video I suggest a key method for countering the potential ravages of the holidays.  Check it out.

Richard Schuller

Is there something that will stop us from “getting old” before our time?  Is there anything that can help us regain or keep our youthful bodies?  These questions bother a lot of us “over 50″.  We spend billions every year on remedies, treatments, prescription drugs, and devices that promise miracles.  Most of the time, the results are way short of what we would want.

There are really two answers to the question about “getting old”.  One is obvious, that our age is what it is.  With all his billions, Bill Gates can’t buy one minute of yesterday.  Our chronological age will always be whatever it is.

The second part of the answer is that there are many things that almost anyone can do to counter the degenerative processes of aging…that is “getting old before your time”.  It is possible to regain a huge amount of physical and mental viability (youth) and dramatically improve “quality of life”.  What is the secret?

Actually, there is really no “secret” in the sense of some formula locked away in a vault known only to a few people.  The secret is very much out in the open.  The problem is that most people ignore it, or don’t know what to do or how to do it. 

This site is devoted to the proposition that it is possible for almost anyone to dramatically transform their body, and their mind if they do what is required.  Most of the time the problem is that people approach the issue of aging with a dysfunctional set of expectations, and limited knowledge.  My intent here is to help you begin to understand how to transform your body (and your life) and then actually DO it.

First of all, most people begin with a series of completely dysfunctional ideas about aging and what they can do.  The most common theme is that “getting old is inevitable”, “you always put on a few pounds after 40″, “after 50 it is really hard to change anything”, etc.  The theme is that there is nothing that you can do…everything is going to happen to you.  My response: “Rubbish!”

Part of feeling like everything is out of your control is the idea that someone else (usually “The Doctor”) has a few pills you can take, or a hormone shot, or some medication that will slow the decline.    Since you have no control over things, your only hope is that “The Doc” can give you a potion that will help.  

This type of thinking will not get you very far.  Let me introduce a somewhat radical idea that you have probably never considered before.  Here is is: Anti-aging is a skill.  You can develop the skill to dramatically change your body and your life, at any age.

Why do I say it is a “skill”.  Here are a couple definitions of skill:  1) the ability to do something well, coming from one’s knowledge; and 2) competent excellence in performance.    The key elements here are “knowledge”, and “performance”.  You have to know what to do…and then you have to actually do it!

Learning the “skill” of anti-aging is something most people can do, but at present very few actually do.  My purpose on this site is to help you become “skilled” at anti-aging.  There are a lot of things you need to know, and then you have to actually do what you have learned.  I’ll help you with both of these things.

You are well ahead of the game if you understand that you will not just be ”going through a program” or “doing a diet”, you will be learning the invaluable skill of making and keeping your body in it’s best possible condition.   Your reward is that you get to live every day in a strong, healthy body.  You will be the one who takes the action that brings about what you want.  It is not “out sourced” to a “doctor” or some wandering guru.

The answer to the question “is getting old inevitable” is that you have the choice of doing things that will prevent you from “getting old before your time”….or you can “just let it happen”.    If you want to get a week long preview of how this can be done, just sign up for the FREE ”quick start” course in the box on this page. 

In case you were wondering, I am not going to sell you a bunch of useless drugs or “supplements”.  This does not involve buying expensive equipment that winds up wasting away in your garage.  No hormone replacements, no nostrems from a “pharmacy in Mexico”.  This will be about you discovering how to build a great body…and keep it in good working order. 

Check out the free “quick start” course….you have nothing to lose but some years…

Richard

Practically everyone keeps telling seniors that they need “regular exercise”, but no one seems to say why. Here are three big reasons that you should take to heart.

The word regularshould be highlighted. Exercise needs to be a habit. It is a very good habit because as we age the maxim “use it or lose it” is the order of the day. We all know that training can build lean muscle, and good cardiovascular health. The importance of “regular’ training is that as we age, our bodies tend to lose the benefits of training more rapidly than when we were younger. In your college days, you could skip a week at the gym with only modest impact on your overall condition. This is not the case as you get older. You need to be regular with your training (3 times a week) or you will find that you not make the gains you could.

A second reason for regular training is that most of us need to build or re-build our neuromuscular system to regain some of our youthful strength. Regular training is critical to build the coordinationthat gradually deteriorates if you don’t do a wide range of complex movements. Older people tend to gradually restrict their movements, and thus gradually lose the ability to control their movement in the unused ranges of motion. Thus, they are prone to fall, or have other accidents because they have lost control over certain types of movement. Regular training can substantially reduce this problem.

Finally, a third reason for doing regular training is that the key to a healthy cardiovascular system is regular training. The circulation system, the lungs and the supporting muscle structure need to be stressed regularly, or conditioning diminishes rapidly. Cardio conditioning is key to preventing stroke, heart attacks, and other degenerative diseases that occur because the veins and capillaries are clogged or constricted. Keep doing cardio workouts regularly and you will minimize the chances for losing the conditioning you have built up.

Again, three good reasons to be “regular” in your training.