PREFACE
WHY DO WE NEED YET ANOTHER BOOK ON EXERCISE?
The short answer is: I simply can’t continue to watch so many well-meaning exercisers waste so much of their valuable time and effort…with little or no results to show for it…and not do something to help. I sincerely hope that this book will change that situation for some people.
This is a straightforward and brutally honest exercise and nutrition book for genuinely serious men and women of all ages, all sizes, and all abilities…but especially for those who love to eat and hate to exercise. I also include a good dose of fundamental lifestyle advice which is also essential to anyone’s health and well-being as well as to being successful at anything in life.
Between Extremes
There are many very good exercise and nutrition books on the market. I have many, many of them, and much of the advice you will read in this book has been gleaned from these other fine publications as well as from my more than 4 decades of personal experience helping other people to build more attractive, stronger, healthier bodies. The problem is, most of these books have been written for highly motivated, elite level athletes or bodybuilders at one end of the spectrum, or for people who are not genuinely serious about attaining a high level of fitness and health (the dreamers), on the other end of the spectrum. This is one reason why, even with these hundreds of books, magazines, videos, and DVD’s on the market, most exercisers still know next to nothing about efficient, effective, result-producing, QualityExercise. For many years I have wanted to write a book which would help the many people who fall in between these two extremes. This is it.
The actual (non-adapted) CTTC Workouts are written for relatively healthy men and women who are already somewhat experienced at both cardiovascular (aerobic) exercise and exercising with weights. However, Chapter #11 tells you how The CTTC Workouts can easily be adapted to all levels of fitness, and to suit any personal exercise goals…regardless of your age or present physical condition (as long as you have no special or life-threatening medical problems).
This exercise program is the most logical, practical, time-saving, efficient, and effective way to create a truly strong, healthy, and shapely body. It is also a program that you can easily continue, with minor adaptations, for the rest of your life…which is how long a Quality Exercise program should last. You don’t stop cleaning your teeth at sometime during your life, do you (even when they are not your own anymore)? An exercise program should be the same. A Quality Exercise program should form an integral part of your lifestyle.
Time Management
One of the main problems with so many exercise programs (even the good ones) is that they demand too much of your valuable time. Most people just don’t have time to run 1-2 hours, 5-6 days a week and exercise with weights 4 -6 hours a week. Even if you do at this point in time, think about doing this for the next 20, 30, 40 years, and so on. You have to be a real fanatic to do something like this, and most of us are simply not exercise fanatics. We have real lives.
The CTTC Exercise Program is an excellent solution for the “time problem” that many professionals and other busy people have. Doctors, nurses and other health professionals, lawyers, business people, police, firefighters, and many others need to be healthy and in superior physical and mental condition in order to function optimally in their jobs. However, they have very little free time to exercise. The CTTC Exercise Program is the answer for anyone who wants to look good, feel great, function optimally, and be really healthy…but is always short of time.
Yes, it can be done and you do not have to give up everything else in your life in order to do it. In fact, by following The CTTC Exercise and Nutrition Programs, you will have more time to enjoy friends, family, and life…not less.
Above Average
These CTTC Exercise and Nutrition Programs are designed for men and women for whom average is not good enough…people who want to strive for something better!
When followed properly and conscientiously, this CTTC Exercise and Nutrition Programwill help you to develop a superior level of health, and enable you to maintain that level…with a very small investment of your valuable time.
What CTTC Is Not
This is not another bodybuilding book, full of boring technical and scientific information explaining how to become a massive and muscular macho male…or massive and muscular macha female…by lifting tons of iron for 2-3 hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week. You will not find intricate charts and diagrams of complicated exercise plans which are impossible for us mere mortals to figure out…much less carry out.
Not A Wish Book
CTTC is also not another wish-book which promises that you can create a fabulous body in no-time by lifting and swinging your arms and legs around in the air for 5 or 10 minutes a couple of times a week, without ever breaking a sweat or even breathing hard. There are no intelligence-insulting eat-as-much-as-you-want-of-anything-you-want-and-still-lose-body-fat diets here either. You will not find 100 pages of food charts or useless recipes which use expensive ingredients, or which take hours to prepare. There are more than enough of these books already on the market.
CTTC does not contain super-strict, tortuous diets that you need to follow for months on end and, instead of having to wear out a pair of running shoes every week in order to lose your excess body-fat, CTTC utilizesan innovative combination of exercises which, for many people, will require no more than 3 hours of Quality Exercise per week.
Logical, Practical, Informative
What you will find is pages and pages of practical, useful information which you can easily adapt to suit your own personal needs. Explanations are kept simple, logical, and relevant. They are intended to make you think about what you are doing and why you are doing it.
A sensible understanding of exercise is a prerequisite to being successful at exercise.
Understanding exercise makes it possible for you to recognize what will work for you and what will not, thereby allowing you to make the right exercise choices. In turn, the right exercise choices will enable you to achieve a very high level of health and fitness and, at the same time, sculpt a stronger, firmer, and shapelier body…with the least amount of time and exercise possible!
Principles
The Principles of Quality Exercise and Nutrition presented in this book are so logical and practical that they can be applied to any exercise or nutrition program to enhance its effectiveness, and to increase your results.
Labor Of Love
It is my goal to present this information, both old and new, in such a logical and entertaining way that it will make the material much more interesting and much easier to understand than it has been up to now. I hope to encourage some people to begin exercising, and to help the people who already exercise to reach their health and fitness goals much faster and more efficiently. If I can successfully do this, even on a small scale, then this book will have been more than worth all the time and effort it has taken to write it. If not, then it has still been a labor of love for me. That’s what I like…win-win situations.
Repeating Myself
I repeat things often in Cut Thru The Crap. This is not my short-term memory loss at work. I do this because these things are important and I hope that…by repeating them often enough…they will begin to stick in your mind. I also use bold to emphasize words that I feel need emphasizing.
I am fully aware that these are considered to be appalling literary no-no’s. However, not bestowing enough importance on these ideas, principles, and actions is causing thousands of otherwise serious exercisers to fail to reach their exercise goals and…for me…that is a much more serious no-no. Besides, I have not accomplished all that I have in life by always following someone else’s rules. If I followed the rules, this would just be another in the myriad of pretty-picture exercise books, rehashing the same old information…once again…and that is sooooo not me!
Too Much Info
The science of exercise and the field of building and maintaining optimal health are becoming more important at an ever accelerating rate as health systems fall apart and health insurance premiums continue to skyrocket. For this reason, new research and information are also becoming available at a pace which makes it almost impossible to keep up. There has been more well-designed research conducted on the effects of exercise on healthy people in the last 10-15 years than has been done in the 50 years before that. The same is true for nutrition and the use of nutritional supplements for building and maintaining optimal health.
Unfortunately, much of this information is still being ignored by many in both the medical and the fitness communities.
Why…What…How Much…When
If you are a person leading an average life of working or attending school, paying bills, spending time with your significant other, kids, pets, hobbies, etc., then you certainly don’t have time to sift through all this information yourself. Fortunately, others do and I would like to contribute to this worthy cause.
For those of us who have been passionately involved with health and fitness for the last 20-50 years or more, much of this information is not really new at all, but now we have scientific confirmation for what we already knew from experience long ago. The major difference is that now we know why, what, how much, and when, much more precisely than we did before.
Promises, Promises, Promises
As dinosaurs in the business, we have seen every fad diet, every piece of “miracle equipment”, and every “revolutionary exercise system” come and go, only to see them return years later after people have forgotten that they didn’t work the first time around. Usually they come back with pretty new names and fantastic advertising campaigns, but the results remain the same. After making people’s wallets a lot lighter, they disappear once again to patiently await a new generation of victims.
Run Away, Run Away
You should run from anyone or any exercise program which promises you a “full-body workout with incredible results” in only 5, 10, or 15 minutes a day, once or twice a week…usually without ever having to break a sweat. Promising changes to your whole body by exercising only one part of it (usually your butt or stomach muscles), is another terrific way to scam you out of your hard-earned money. If I were smart, I would also write one of these “magic exercise programs”. Unfortunately for my bank account, I still have too much integrity to do that…even though many of my friends would probably argue that point.
The same advice goes for weight-loss schemes which promise that you can eat as much of anything you want and still lose body-fat. Nutritional supplements which promise “unbelievable results” should, in fact, not be believed. These should be no-brainers but, to the contrary, they have become multi-billion dollar businesses. They are selling hopes and dreams…NOT solutions to your problems.
Foolproof Test
I will give you an absolutely foolproof test to know if a system which makes these kinds of promises actually works or not…and here it is:
The person who comes up with a way to build a strong, healthy, and shapely body without having to exercise intensely…or to lose excess body-fat while eating as much of anything you want…will become the richest person on the face of the earth...INSTANTLY! Within a week of this miracle system becoming known, the inventor’s bank account will make that of Microsoft’s Bill Gates look miniscule. I haven’t seen that happen, so I guess the system isn’t available yet…in spite of what the infomercials proclaim. When it is, I guarantee you that I will be one of the first ones to buy it…at any cost.
Warning
If all these products really worked, obesity would not be our national problem. The problem would be people completely disappearing!
These products would have to carry warnings on their labels like: “WARNING: If you use this miracle weight-loss product (or diet), in combination with any other miracle weight-loss products (or diets), such as, but not limited to: pills, patches, rubber or plastic clothing, teas, bracelets, miracle-working fitness equipment, fat-eating foods, massage machines, creams, belts, wraps, herbs, anything that shakes or vibrates, necklaces, tiny electric stimulators, magic stones, powders, magnets…and so on…you will run the risk of losing so much weight, so fast, that you could completely disappear before you realize it.
Lottery Tickets
Wake up people! You would be better off spending that money on lottery tickets. At least your chance of winning the lottery isn’t completely ZERO!
A Better Way
Fitness and aerobics activities are unique in one aspect. They are usually accepted and blindly followed, regardless of whether they produce results or not!
Imagine that you were paying for golf lessons, but after several weeks your score was still 180 for 18 holes or, after weeks of tennis lessons, you still couldn’t even hit the ball. At some point you would stop and say to yourself, “Self, something is wrong here.” For some reason, this usually doesn’t happen with fitness or aerobics (exercise). Most people either quit completely, or they continue on blindly. The idea that there may be a better way never seems to enter their minds!
I often return to gyms after several months, or even after a couple of years, only to find that more than half of the people who were there before have quit. Most of the ones remaining are still following the same “resultless” programs they were following the last time I saw them and they still look the same as before…or sometimes even worse. It is a very strange phenomenon which defies logic.
Results Count
Apparently, a lot of people seem to think that the goal of exercise is to punish their bodies for hours at a time, several days a week, in spite of minimal…or a total lack of…results.
Your exercise goal should be to produce maximum
results with the minimum amount of exercise possible.
RESULTS are what count…not how MUCH exercise you do!
Diminishing Returns
Another factor which is rarely, if ever, considered, is the point of diminishing returns. This is the point in a successful exercise program where your results no longer keep up with your efforts. When I have reached a point where I would have to increase the intensity or duration of my exercise by 15-20% or more, in order to improve my results by only 5%, then I will choose to remain at the present level. The minimal improvement in results does not warrant so much extra time and effort, unless you are an elite athlete. I prefer to spend that extra time doing more productive things…like enjoying life.
Enough Is Enough
The better the condition you get into…the harder it is to get into better condition. You have to decide at which realistic level you will be personally satisfied. Your health and your opinion are the only things that should really count here.
And if you hate to exercise…like I do… why would you ever want do more exercise than is necessary to attain, and then maintain, your personal health and physical goals anyway?
Smarter Is Better
A few systems of exercise and nutrition have withstood the test of time because they do work. Thanks to quality research, these same systems have become better and more precise over the years. Today we have a much better understanding of the genetic, hormonal, and physiological influences on our bodies. We can now apply this knowledge to these systems which have always worked, to achieve even better results, more quickly. It’s no longer a matter of working harder for better results, but working smarter for better results.
I’m Convinced
These are some of the things that convinced me that this book is necessary and this is also why I chose a title which would very clearly explain that the purpose of this book is to literally Cut Thru The Crap of Fitness and Fat-Loss Nutrition .
Better Is Better
As you will see, The CTTC Exercise and Nutrition Program integrates information synergistically, enabling you to:
- Develop the muscle you need to create a shapely (ladies) or athletic (guys) body.
- Burn your excess body-fat away to reveal the shapely (or athletic) body underneath.
- Keep your excess body-fat off once it is gone or…even better…prevent gaining excess body-fat in the first place.
- Increase your strength.
- Improve your cardiovascular fitness.
- Increase your energy levels.
- Improve your flexibility.
- Enhance your health.
- Strengthen your immune system.
- Improve your quality of life.
You Can Have It All
The great thing about The CTTC Exercise Program is that you can accomplish all these things in the same workout. You can’t be much more efficient than that. And I am not talking about busting your butt for 2-3 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. The CTTC Exercise Programis comprised of 3 short…but satisfyingly intense...workoutsa week.
All Also Includes…
In addition to the physical advantages The CTTC Exercise Program will provide, it will also help you to:
- Develop more self-esteem so that you feel better about yourself.
- Develop a better self-image which will make your journey through life flow much easier.
- Develop more self-discipline which will make it easier to get what you want out of life.
- Develop more self-confidence which will make all aspects of your life better.
- Enjoy life more.
More is not better… better is better!
