Week # 7, Training your mind & soul is part of the process to get there!

Physical training and  mental-internal training are important. Let us say that your health already is affected therefore our mind & spirit also, is deteriorated untying a chain of events none of them wished (although that has not been our intention); you may have the desire to begin to improve and heal your body and mind but you must go step by step, we cannot in a day recover what it has taken months or even years to build inside. Let’s take for example a long distance runner that’s training to run a 26 miles marathon, at first he does not run that distance. But practicing every day he develops more endurance, speed and perseverance. Gradually he improves his capacity, and finally reaches his goal to run the event without any problem. Or in this case myself when I decided to compete again after being off stage for more than year I knew it had to be little by little to get back in condition one more time.

A way to training our internal life, (mind-soul) can be through meditation and visualization exercise, it will helps us to get ready to face our own life marathon. Therefore the daily practice of both physical and mental training little by little, will increased our capacity to improve, learning to have discipline and control of our life.

Exercise helps us obtain a good physical condition and also helps us in our internal life, having aspiration, control, felling good about ourselves, being more active, creating a balance between: Mind-Body-Soul; after all  that is our true nature.

We all have professional and personal aspirations, most of the times we visualized them being fulfill remembering past challenges that we have overcome. What’s the source of those experiences?  It is not because some of us are more or less spiritually developed than others it’s because of superior experiences.

Sometimes it happens that the Divine Inspiration touch us in a very special. Most of these people, like professionals, housewife, student, athletes etc., they have carried out their daily routine of visualization (and often without realizing they are doing it) or for an athlete practicing sports during many years, and now the Universe wants to show us  that there are superior realities in the life.

That Divine source means to us: “You do not stop yourselves here! Now you are doing something to obtain name and fame. If you get first place, you will obtain joy, and if you are the last one, you will feel miserable. But there is another world. In that world, you obtain tremendous joy. Here you are thinking that there are so many things that you must do, so many things in front of you, and you feel that you cannot do them all. But in that other world, not only you will be able to make more things, but that also will obtain joy and passion while you’re doing them.   You will not have to wait for the results to obtain joy.

 “Because day to day you’re taking control of your internal life (mind-soul) and your external life (body) having the motivation to continue improving and creating a quality of life superior to the one you have lived until now. If we trained, our body and mind we see that our capacities grow. Previously they were sleeping; they did not work within us. But when we reconnect again with ourselves and regain our passion, we managed to discover our hidden capacities or tap into them, we are able to do something and to transform us into something even better. Everything in us is extending, improving. Once we managed to extend our own capacity of transforming our self our personal best be are more productive, healthy and happy.  That’s our true nature, our internal mechanism activates and we begin to see the possibilities where we did not saw them before.

So this week with my passion again in my life for loving what I do, training to become a better athlete, person and most of all a Personal Trainer for my clients, I’m having so much fun again training myself, and my clients because I’m empowering them to become better, healthier and love the process while achieving their healthy goal!

Training Tips:

• Visualize yourself were how you want to look
• Keep the eye in the prize but enjoy the process
• Have fun with it, laugh even if at first you can do all the repetitions of sets you wanted to do Once a week get out of the gym go for a run or power walk at the park or beach 
• Use resistance bands and do a circuit training for the complete body it will do wonders for your mind and body at the same time
• 1-  Keep a daily journal and pour out  your heart in it, write down everything positive and specially negative it’s a great outlet 
• Keep positive people close to you that will support you and never ever will have a negative word of criticism toward you as a person, and if they do shut them out of your life.

Keep up the good work, until next week!

B healthy, B fabulous!

Frances Anza, Fit 4U, Lifestyle & More...

Blogger: Frances Anza Fit 4U! - Edit Post "Week # 8, Reconnect with the process, old friends ..."

Blogger: Frances Anza Fit 4U! - Edit Post "Week # 8, Reconnect with the process, old friends ..."

Week # 8, Reconnect with the process, old friends your muscles and during the journey with yourself, then it means you're in the right path!

This journey has taking a few twist and turns that are really interesting,  remember when I mentioned keep the eye on the goal but learn to enjoy the road because there’s where the lessons are learned and you rediscover who you are and what you’re made of.

This week was my depletion week, everyone who’s ever done it knows it’s not very easy, because of the absence or low carbs in the diet; “Carbohydrates provide the body with a ready source of energy, although other forms of food such as fats and proteins can also be used for this. When absorbed from the gut and metabolized they provide the glucose that cells convert to energy. The greatest consumer of glucose in the body is the brain”.

Knowing this once we lower them or eliminate them for diet purpose our body and mind completely feels it, such as lack of energy, tiredness, hard time to focus, and mood swings (crankiness). But somehow this week I did experience some of these effects except the crankiness and that was a bit of a good surprise.

 I wanted to search deep inside me to try figure out why I wasn’t cranky at all, and I discovered a few good reasons: this time around I’m enjoying the journey, the process and the changes that my body are having, seeing again little by little every morning when I wake up more definition, my skin getting thinner making it easy to see my veins and I know that means the my body fat is lowering, and overall being more tight and smaller and that’s the purpose of a Depletion diet.

Besides these physical changes, I also have the support of my PITA (pain in the ass) special and great friend, but the most important thing of all these process is that I know I’m in the right path because I feel great, every day I wake up with a smile in my face thanking God for His Blessing in my life.

Also this week I reconnected with an old friend, and she’s also getting ready to compete this summer, she went through her own process last year and now she’s on top of her game too; talking and training with her helped me reconnect again with the whole process, and one of the things I missed from competing: the good memories that we gain from meeting new people and sharing stories with different competitor with all kinds of background. Bibiana Delgado kudos to you girl!!!! God bless you and never forget that His in charge of every little detail in our lives you’re going to be okay, thank you for calling me!

So its funny how one thing lead to another, like a domino chain effect: enjoying the process, my friends and along the way I finally found again Frances reconnected with myself, my mind, and my body!!! It doesn’t matter the outcome but for just having this amazing experience this right there is my prize, thank you God!!!

Ok my tip for this week:

1.   To shred that stubborn fat lower (carefully) your intake of carb
2. Increase your amount of time of cardio workout
3.  Try new exercise that you normally won’t do, give them a chance personally I loved the results after doing Wood Chop upward and downward Cable twist for our oblique’s and intercostals abs.
4. After finishing your cardio add a few sets of walking lunges and kickbacks you will feel the burn.

Keep up the good work, feel free to comment, see you next week, until then.

B Healthy, B Fabulous from

Frances Anza, Fit 4U! Lifestyle & More…

Wk #9 sometimes a kick in the butt “literary” is all we need…

Wk #9 sometimes a kick in the butt “literary” is all we need…

Like everything in our daily life’s we have ups and downs, good days and let’s not say bad days I like to call them not so good, just because I want to keep a positive attitude towards everything I do in life, regarding personal matters and professional. Stuff will always happened to us in our daily basis but the difference is the attitude we can assume when the situation occurs they say its 10% situation and 90% of the attitude I will choose to face the situation.

As days go by and I increase my training doing the cardio twice a day, adding more sets or repetitions to my routine is completely normal that I will fell a little more tired its part of the process. The moments that feel like you can’t go on I just think about my goal to keep going.

Not everybody understands your dream; your passion for something is what moves you go after your goal. Let’s face it, not everybody is going to understand it and they might even say is not worth it, is a stupid thing to do, always criticizing you, at some point you get tired and feed up with them, I always say if you don’t have anything good or positive to say just don’t say anything at all; JUST SHUT UP!!!!  But don’t go around putting people down, nobody has the right to do that even if they’re our “friends”.

 At this stage of my training my mind set of concentration  is: shout out all distractions and sometimes I just don’t want to be “chatty Kathy” calling everybody blabbing on and on about how I am and what I’m doing, I just don’t.  So that said and out of my system I moved on with my daily life and my training.

Doing things completely different, this time I also need to be completely blunt and honest with myself, there’s too much on the line at this point. On the other side of the rainbow I have friends who understand my dream and goal and support me.  That’s why I have to thank two persons this week that literally kick my ass: Paco your honesty and clinic eye as an experience and a damn good photographer woke me up! Thank you for that; and to my special and sweet P.I.T.A.  (pain in the ass) sweetie kudos to you for not sugar coating anything for me and call them like you see them (bananas are good source of potassium among other things ;-) ).

So these are my tips for you this week:

1. 1- Once you know your goals make a plan and go for it, but also make sure every once in while you get an honest feedback of people that truly support your goal; and be ready to shout down does who do not respect it, they don’t need to understand it but at least respect it.
2. 2- Training tip for legs: walking lunges are the most complete workout for your legs there more intense than the stationary lunges, and at the same time you’re working a little bit cardio because your heart rate will increase, meaning you’re burning a little bit more body fat, at the same time.
3. 3-If you’re advance you can also do it as a super set: walking lunges/leg curl, that combination will burn as hell your butt and hamstrings.
4. 4- Also do single leg exercises like single leg press or single leg curl, this will make both legs work hard even our weak side and the benefits are incredible try it, and let me know how it feels.
5. 5- And finally don’t ever ever ever let anybody put your dreams down; nobody has the right to do that.

So until next week, 

B healthy, B Fabulous, God Bless

Frances Anza Fit 4 U! Lifestyle & More…

Week # 10! Spice up things to keep it fresh!

Week #10 is almost finished, I kicked it up a notch so I started to do my second cardio of the day, and I knew it wasn’t going to be easy but it had to be done. So far the results are good and the sacrifice was worth it my body fat is going down and mange to lose 2 more pounds.

The difference this time around is that I’m more focus and I’m learning to enjoy my journey, from planning and cooking my meals, writing down my daily journal and of course the training. Ah and one more factor that it’s really important to me, I have the support of this amazing person he has show me that his really interested in my success and pushes me to do even more (some times he can be a “PITA” pain in the ass but at the end I really appreciated it)

This week I decided to keep it fresh and new so I decided to do my training in other gym, that way I’m trying different machines and environment and believe it does a difference. Why? Keep in mind that our muscles get use to the equipment, training, sets & rept.  That’s why some times we can easily feel like we are stock and don’t see any progress and we fall into a “plato” and when this happens you can get discourage and frustrated.

One way to avoid this is changing your training, I know not all the time we can afford to join two different gyms, but you can also keep it fresh by changing your routine, little changes make a big difference it could be adding one more set; more o less repetitions; or weight (that will depend of what’s your target: lose weight or gain mass) another change can be the order of your exercises, and don’t be afraid to try new exercises or techniques. Let’s face it when we hit the same routine over and over you get board and tired of it, and most of the time you haven’t realize that all you needed all along was to spice it up a little bit ( even in our personal life’s spicing things make them better)

Other factor as important as our routine is our nutrition check it out see if you’re eating enough carbs, protein and good fats or you should cut back on the serving (again that depends on your final goal).

So if you want to spice up your routine try this  small changes in your training and diet, remember you don’t have to join another gym, just take the time to analyze your diet, your routine and if you want a little more variety you can always workout outdoors with bands, medicine balls etc.

I’m really looking forward to see what’s in storage for the next 9 weeks that I still have ahead of me.

Until next week, B healthy! God Bless

Frances Anza Fit 4 U!!