There are a few universal truths when it comes to either losing weight or gaining muscle. Truth Number 1: Nutrition is #1. Truth Number 2: If you do not meal prep you will fail at #1. Meal prep doesn’t need to be nearly as daunting as you think. Follow these simple tips and practice, practice, practice!

1. Plan to Fail

You want to lose that last 2o pounds. Or maybe you want to get a bit stronger. Whatever your goal is, you should just assume right off the bat that you’re going to find a way to not follow through. You’ll say you’re too busy. You’ll say family obligations got in the way. You’ll say that you just don’t know what to do.

But none of these are true. The truth is deeply rooted in behavioral science. Decision fatigue is a phenomenon that occurs when you’re forced to make decision after decision throughout the day. Your cognitive ability goes down and your ability to make decisions becomes worse and worse. By knowing exactly what you’ll be eating from each meal in a given day you’ve “pre-made” a decision, eliminating the risk of decision fatigue.

The second factor at play is that you’re starting a new habit. Any new habit you start will be the first one to go at the first sign of difficulty. You’re never “too busy” to brush your teeth are you? What about being “too busy” to shower? What about being “too busy” to chit chat at work? Why are we never “too busy” for these things? Because these are normal parts of our routine and habits; it would feel weird to not do them. The newest habits are always the first to go.

2. Should you change your own oil?

Do you change the oil in your car? Could you do it? Probably. It’s an easy enough task after all. But should you do it? Let’s say that you can go somewhere and have it done for $35. If you were to do it yourself, you’d probably spend half that on oil and a filter. Seems like a great deal, right?

Wrong.

By the time you run to the store to buy your oil and filter, you’re about 40 minutes into the project. Then, you change your oil. Now you have a bunch of old oil in containers in your garage. You’re a good citizen, so you won’t just dump that stuff in the road. Now, you have to find somewhere to dispose of the old stuff. You probably have a solid 2 hours invested in this project. That 35 bucks doesn’t seem so bad now does it?

Get real with yourself. If you’ve tried to meal prep time and time again but can’t seem to do it on your own, budget to have someone else do it for you. This “expense” is an investment in your long-term health and wellness. I promise that money spent to have healthy food on hand is money better spent than your dumb car payment, clothes, drinks at the bar, or any other non-investment that will be obsolete in a matter of months.

3. Don’t let perfection get in the way of progress

Will your first week of meal prep be perfect? Of course not! You’re a beginner. Think about healthy food decisions in the same way you think about your development in any area of your life. The first time I picked up a guitar, I wasn’t shredding Stairway to Heaven. I wasn’t doing algebra in 2nd grade either.

Start small. Maybe you only prep breakfast for a month. Hell, that’s a win! Let’s even dial it back a bit to just snacks. Instead of heading to the candy machine at 2:00 this afternoon, pack some beef jerky, an apple, and a dozen almonds. You don’t even need to cook that!

4. See meals as formulas, not recipes

Imagine a plate divided into 8 equal parts. Here’s the breakdown of how each plate should look:

• 4 parts colorful vegetables
• 2 parts lean protein
• 1 part starch
• 1 part healthy fat

No talk of “macros” or anything complicated. This is just a plate of broccoli, skirt steak, a couple small potatoes, and a thumb-sized piece of avocado. A little salt & pepper and you got yourself a delicious meal!

Grocery shop with the same formula

Meal prep will get expensive if you go to the store to buy ingredients for recipes. If you shop according to a formula, it won’t be as expensive nor daunting. As an example, let’s look at how I would buy protein for myself for a week.

I shoot to eat between 150-175 grams of lean protein in a given day, broken into 3 meals. I’ll get Postmates or go out for 2 meals in a given week. So, in a 7-day week, I need to prep for 19 meals each containing roughly 40 grams of protein. Here’s what that’d look like:

• 10 medium chicken breasts
• 5 medium sized sirloin steaks
• 18 large eggs, 1/2 whites

Pretty basic, right? You just need to sit down and write down what are your daily needs then you’ll eventually be able to eye-ball it when you go to the store.

5. Get inspired

There is some emerging research suggesting that one’s ability to eat the same thing repeatedly may be linked to lower rates of obesity. I’ve often dubbed this one’s ability to “eat like a grown-up.” Yeah, I don’t love vegetables either. Kettle Chips are better than chicken breasts. And Sour Patch Kids trump everything. But I also don’t enjoy feeling like garbage and spending another year complaining about not reaching my body composition goals. As you’re learning to live a healthier life, you’ll need to tolerate some level of discomfort.

But that doesn’t mean that you’re stuck in this rut of dry chicken breast and raw broccoli. Food should be pleasurable! If you’re having a hard time getting inspiration for new meal prep ideas, I recommend you try what Maggie and I do every summer: Meal delivery.

Hello Fresh, Blue Apron, and a whole host of other companies have come on the scene to offer ready-to-cook meals delivered to your doorstep. What a time we’re living in! Here’s what to do:

• Sign up for one of the 3-week specials that these companies offer (don’t forget to cancel!).
• Repeat the above for one or two other first-time specials.
• Find 3-4 recipes that you really enjoyed but were also fairly easy to prepare with simple ingredients.
• Make note of the portions of the 3 elements of your plate – veggies, protein, and starch.
• Scale up the portions, make a grocery list, and make however many meals you’d like to prep for the week.

Repeat this process 1-2 times throughout the year. As you switch from one provider to the next, they’ll send you more coupons to get you back. Then, you’ll learn some new recipes to keep things fresh throughout the year.

What have you done that has really helped with your meal prep? What’s keeping you from doing it if it’s still a struggle? What actions can you take this week to step it up?

 

Caring Honest Driven
These are the values that we hold as a team at The Hill.

This month we are getting to know Hollie Siegel!
Miss Hollie is a ray of sunshine and encouragement. She is always caring for others in any way she can. Adding her to the team was an easy decision. Front Desk and Maintenance Maven, she does it all. Plus, she got us all lifting pumpkins at our first Boo Bash!

 

Let’s get to know more about Miss Hollie…

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to work in a marketing department of a major movie studio.

Where did you grow up? Lenexa (KS)

Favorite class or activity in high school? Study Hall, hahaha! In all seriousness, I liked English because I enjoy writing.

Most known for growing up? Go my own way, be my own person — being an individual, better to be true to myself.

Most interesting part time job? I did an internship at a market research company and the owner (Gerry Cain) was a visionary, a genius, and a very good person. Great training for my future.

Share a movie or show you can quote… Movie: “Star Wars” (that’s an easy one!}; TV: “Seinfeld” and “Miami Vice”.

Got any hidden talents?  I am an expert party/event planner, master Lego video game player, voracious reader, and I can spend hours diving off a diving board and spending time in the deep end of a pool. And I know more about movie music/soundtracks than you can shake a stick at. Truth!

What do you like about KC? Really like the variety of people, parts of town and cultures. Love that it’s so easy to get around town, there’s lots to do, some special restaurants, and let’s be real . . . the barbecue!

Coaching: Your Job Title at The Hill? Head of Facilities & Special Projects Coordinator. Front Desk Smiles. 

How & when did you get connected to The Hill? My husband and I met Brian “Z.” in May 2015 and then I met with Coach Joshy in October 2015 for my first “no sweat” session. I joined The Hill the first week of November 2015.

CrossFit goals? Completed my internship at The Hill in December 2017 and plan to take the CrossFit Level 1 exam by April 2019. After that, I am so excited to eventually join the coaching staff.

Why Coach? – what motivates you personally? I love helping people, I really do. It can be explaining a movement, but I really like to connect personally — I want to know what makes people happy and excited, I want to know about them. I am motivated to help people love their time at The Hill (keeping them safe, making sure they have fun and support, and that it’s the best hour of their day). If I can make one person smile, I’ve accomplished something special.

What do you love about your job? Everything! Seriously and really! I’ve found my tribe and there are so many opportunities to engage with both the great people that work at The Hill and all the fantastic members. I also love, love, love that I am being given opportunities to take on new projects that play to my strengths (marketing, writing, etc.).

Education: Masters of Degree in Journalism from the University of Kansas.

What continuing ed are you planning or currently doing?  I am studying for the CrossFit Level 1 Exam, which I will take in the first quarter of 2019. Best possible outcome is that I am coaching by end of 2019. So exciting!

How would you describe your coaching style? Enthusiastic, driven, positive — I want the best out of each athlete and the best for each athlete. I have their best interests at heart.

What’s something you wish everyone knew about health and fitness? It’s all about nutrition — that’s the key to everything. You can exercise all day, but it’s the fuel that matters. You can go run a mile and then eat a snickers or two cookies and you’ve negated the good work you did. It’s all about nutritious intake now, tomorrow, next week, next year, next ten years, etc. Consistency is crucial.

What is something you are working on improving as an athlete personally? I’m working on a few things — I am not a good runner (I would rather walk, lol!), so everyday I run/walk a mile, and then walk a second mile to improve my cardio endurance. I want to be able to run an entire mile with no breaks in 6 months, hopefully sooner.

Also want to get back to being able to dead lift 200 pounds, which is doable, and surpass my current back squat PR of 190 pounds. In 2019, I will take on learning double-unders, rope climb progression, and improving my burpee technique to get faster (and breathe at the same time!).

What are you looking forward to? So many positive, happy things — becoming a stronger runner, bringing more intensity to the daily WODs, continuing to learn French (through Duolingo), going on vacation with my husband (John), and finding ways to add meaning and value to everything I do at The Hill.

Anything else you would like to share with The Hill family? From the moment I joined The Hill almost three years ago, I knew this is where I wanted to spend the rest of my career. I found my tribe of people, a family where I fit in and am accepted for who I am. And The Hill is the place where I can maximize my skill tool set and continuously learn. The people are the difference maker — so many great, amazing and wonderful people that are a joy to be around. I love what I do. I love my husband. I love The Hill. And I love life.

One of the most effective aspects of CrossFit training is its variety. Not only does the daily variety of stimuli help keep athletes interested in training, but it also serves the important function of staving off a plateau well into your training life.

When does a plateau occur?

Let’s set some parameters for this discussion and assume that you are training consistently for at least three hours per week. If you’re struggling to get in the minimum effective training time, your plateau is more behavioral than physiological.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For most consistent trainees, the plateau in this graph usually represents the 18-24 month mark in their training. You’ll see that improvement happens very rapidly at first but then slows as time goes on.

Why does this occur? 

This plateau can be summed up simply: The thing that resulted in you initial fitness won’t be the thing that improves your next phase of fitness. There are two distinct types of plateaus that are caused by basic physiology. As I’ve talked about before, continued improvements in fitness require that you not violate the SAID principle: Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. In short, you can’t run the same speed and distance or lift the same weight at the same speed and expect to improve. In CrossFit, we measure the improvement of fitness with power.

Power = Work / Time

Let’s turn back time 20 years and look at our old formula to understand the new formula. Back in the days of leotards and body-building, we didn’t have a tight definition of improved fitness. That’s because how your body looks was superior to how your body performs.

In bodybuilding, the formula looks like this: cause as much muscle fiber damage as possible during training, then eat enough calories to put on muscle but not excess body fat. 

Still a pretty simple formula, but very few people with full time jobs and families have the time to effectively train this way for years without a plateau. That’s why most of your “globo-gyms” are set up to encourage this type of training. They know that you’ll never show up after six weeks, so they over-sell their memberships by a factor of 10. Imagine an airline sells 10 times the seats on each flight, knowing that only 10% of the people who have paid them will board the plane.

So we changed the formula of fitness. Power encompasses performance, not just looks. But — turns out — power also has favorable benefits to physique. Win-win.

Plateau type 1: You’re not doing enough.

In our power equation, “work” can be reflective of the size of a dumb bell, a wall ball, the distance you run, or the calories you row. “Time” is simply how long that work took you to do; either the total time it took to perform the workout or the nanoseconds it took for your elbows to turn around on a clean.

The first type of plateau occurs when you settle into the same “work” each time. Type 1’s were usually very intimidated at the thought of CrossFit and barbells and relative intensity. You probably spent upwards of 12 months considering even stepping foot into an introductory class.

BUT YOU DID IT!

Nice work!!! But still in the back of your mind there is this nagging fear of failure. That you don’t want to try too hard and fall flat on your face.

I’m not advocating for unsafe movements or loads whatsoever. 

I’m saying that you’ll need to eventually swap out your 10# wall ball for a 14# wall ball. You’ll need to get knocked down the mountain just a tad in order to push through this plateau. It will feel as uncomfortable as day 1, but it’s absolutely necessary.

Is this me?

• Track your workout times for a week and make note of where you fall in relation to the intent and the rest of class. If you’re 10% or more under that number, choose something each day that is just a tad more difficult than you normally would.
• Make a mental note of your fellow athletes’ post-workout response. Are they writhing on the floor in a heap of sweat after one of Coach Josh’s “Impossible WODs?” If you had the energy to notice someone else’s response or performance, you probably weren’t doing enough. 

Plateau type 2: You’re doing too much.

This one is a little more difficult to diagnose because your judgement is clouded. You were plateau type 1 at some point and then you took my advice and did more. And it worked!

You started to do “Rx” weights and you maybe even started seeing yourself at the top of a few leaderboards. So you did more of what worked the first time. But then your equation got a little top heavy.

A top-heavy power equation results in injury, fatigue, weight gain, and — hopefully this is the one you recognize first — a decrease in performance. 

A top heavy power equation inevitably leads to a lower “time” in the bottom half of the power equation. By nature, an empty-barbell thruster will travel at a greater speed than a bodyweight thruster. But there’s a balance in there that must be met. Here’s an example workout to illustrate this point:

5 Rounds for time of: 

5 Power Cleans, 225 / 155
10 Handstand Push Ups
15 Wall Balls, 30 / 20

Intent: sub-12:00

Pretty nasty workout, right? But, what makes it “nasty”? The sub-12:00 intent. This intent exists to create balance in your power output equation; it assumes ~2:00 rounds. 2:00 rounds means that your power cleans will need to be quick singles with less than 5 seconds rest in between, your handstand push-ups unbroken, and your heavy wall balls unbroken.

But “time” in the power equation isn’t just your WOD time. It’s also the speed at which you lock out a push-up or the micro-second turnaround time on your dumb bell snatch.

The question you ask yourself becomes not “can I do that” but rather “can I do that with the power output required to meet the intent.”

If the intent were sub-22:00, we’re shooting for a low power-output stimulus. You can do those heavy power cleans every :45, you can break up your handstand push-ups into slow, slogging sets, and you can do three sets of five wall-balls. Same workout, entirely different stimulus. Both versions of this workout have a place in your training — you’ll need to start to recognize the difference.

I’d personally opt for a 175# power clean, stick with the HSPU as written (they’re a strength of mine), and do 2 rounds of 30# WB & 3 rounds @ 20#. Could I power clean 225? Yes. But it’d be sluggish, outside the intent, and result in me having a worse overall power clean than when I started.

Are you type 2?

• You’ve been time-capped more than twice a year for reasons of load or gymnastics complexity (time caps are typically set 15-20% outside intent; i.e. shouldn’t happen).
• You’ve thought “yeah Bill got a faster time than me, but I did the ‘rx’ weight”
• There is a big discrepancy between your efficiency in one area vs. another; this is typically endurance/strength or strength/gymnastics.

What everyone can do about it.

1. Don’t use a WOD to get better at gymnastics or stronger on a barbell. This will result in poor power output, making your plateau even worse.
2. Take a video of yourself. Set up your phone against a chalk bucket and look at your lifts compared to someone you’d consider “fast” or “snappy” in their lifts (i.e. Coach Mindy). Use weights that have you looking like her in a conditioning workout.
3. EMOMs are the best thing, ever. You’re likely here 5-10 minutes before or after class starts. Use that time to work on something. Here are some of my favorite ways to get better:
   1. 10:00 EMOM of 2x Snatch: start with an empty bar, adding 10-20 pounds each minute. Make note of the weight at which your reps slow down.
   2. 5:00 EMOM: 3x PERFECT handstand push-ups
   3. 5:00 EMOM: 5x butterfly pull-ups, adding 1 rep each minute
4. Only good reps count; bad reps subtract. There’s a lot of debate on the “10,000 hour” rule. But, let’s use it for the sake of argument. Performing 10,000 power cleans will not make you world class. Performing 10,000 excellent power cleans just may. BUT each sluggish power clean performed while fatigued will count against your 10,000.

Be patient when pushing past a plateau. Just like climbing mountains, there are times when you’ll need to backtrack in order to find a path of less resistance. You got this!