In today’s business world, it’s all about results. Companies are diligent with assessing employee performance and rewarding or correcting on that basis. How do you score on your first month’s resolution performance appraisal?  Did you meet or exceed your expectations?

Well, you either made your resolution seriously or you did not. If not, then you probably haven’t had much success. If you made it seriously, then let’s talk about how you did. Your degree of commitment would be reflected in your plan. You knew where you were with your weight, muscle tone, aerobic fitness, and other benchmark measures and what you wanted to change. You studied what you needed to do and created a strategy with an exercise or nutrition plan or combination. Most important, you followed through. So, congratulations if you reached your goals!  If you didn’t, consider what might have held you back.

After 20 years in the business, here’s what I think is often overlooked. If weight loss is the goal, many do not install a clear eating plan with firm controls. They think simplistically that joining a gym and visiting it weekly will shed the pounds. Without looking at their nutritional intake, they unfortunately work blindsided, undermining their efforts with extra calories coming in here and there. Science has it that it’s clearly calories in versus calories out. With our fast times, eating out easily has us double our portions. Nutritional studies show that restaurant outings average 1,000 calories, which are probably almost half of the average person’s total daily requirement. It’s a numbers game!  If you have an idea of what’s going out calorically (cardio sessions), but don’t have idea of what’s coming in (daily eating), you can easily cancel out three hard hours of great cardio with two weekly eating out fests. I like to recommend two food log Web sites, www.myfooddiary.com and www.fitday.com to clients who are serious about losing weight or gaining muscle pounds. Numbers usually drive business performance, and numbers drive our efforts to lose weight or gain muscle as well.

Another area overlooked is exercise intensity. If you want to increase lean muscle tissue, you need to progressively overload your muscles to get your body to adapt and create more tissue. I can get a sense of the intensity clients are experiencing by watching their faces. Their efforts are reflected in their facial gestures. Whenever I survey the workout floor, I always see too many comfortable and smiling faces of people who are in the middle of their sets. One recent study from the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s journal showed that women who worked out on their own were more likely to select easier workloads in their strength exercises than when working with a trainer who assigned the weights. We stress our muscles so they’ll grow. If the workout is too light, our bodies will not have any need to change. There is a learning curve in understanding how to safely and effectively challenge our muscles.

Picking the right program to get specific results is another challenge to the new year “resolutioner.” My heart goes out to those wanting and needing to lose body fat and who spend most of their time using weight machines and not cardio machines. After some time of not seeing any change on the scale, they’ll typically give up altogether, feeling demotivated. They would have succeeded had they spent all those hours on a cardio machine. It is the same problem for those wanting to gain muscle, but don’t spend enough time lifting weights. If you look at their typical hour workout, you’ll see that the total number of minutes actually spent on lifting is a very small percentage of the hour. The rest of the hour is spent on stretching, cardio and a lot of wasted down time in between. If increasing your lean muscle tissue is really a priority, your program should require much more time for more weights with a specific amount of rest in between sets. You must choose the right program to get specific results.

How did you fare in your performance appraisal?  If you were prey to the pitfalls listed, don’t give up!  There are 11 more months in 2008 to improve your performance and get your results. If you perform the job well, you’ll get the ultimate bonus of looking and feeling great. So, here’s to Round 2!

John Toves, also known by his clients and friends as J.T., is a certified trainer at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Action Fitness in the Marina and K-One Fitness. He tailors programs for strength and power development, functional training and weight loss. He can be reached at 415-812-9065 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it