John says: with no kids at home, this should be easier 🙂
Well, Halloween candy has been on display since August, and we know what that portends for the rest of the year.
But why wait to get your health in order? Here are 10 reasons to quit sugar now —even if you think you don’t want to do it.
1. Quitting sugar can help you prevent or even reverse insulin resistance.
Mainstream thinking on insulin resistance is that overweight is the cause. That’s true, but a limited view. What we eat can greatly influence whether or not we develop insulin resistance — or type 2 diabetes, which frequently follows it.
2. Quitting sugar can help you reduce your cholesterol.
Cholesterol synthesis isn’t necessarily the result of a high-fat diet. The rate-limiter in cholesterol formation is an enzyme (HMG-coA reductase) that’s triggered by insulin. Sugar can stimulate big insulin, so it’s a major factor in serum cholesterol. People now say that cholesterol doesn’t really matter — but metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions. If you have one, you probably have more. Keeping cholesterol down by avoiding sugar helps in general — especially if you combine that with preventing or reversing insulin resistance, an underlying condition for several metabolic disorders.
3. Quitting sugar can prevent premature hunger signals.
When sugar promotes high insulin production, glucose can drop pretty low and pretty fast. The speed it drops is the main factor in triggering premature hunger signals — making you hungry for food you don’t need simply because you ate sugary junk.
4. Quitting sugar can reduce “secondary fat consumption.”
Okay, I made up that name. But eating extra fat is something that happens all the time when we eat sugar — think of ice cream, chocolate, rich cakes, cookies. For one thing, fat makes sugar taste sweeter. Also, when you get a craving for sugar, you might reach for something with lots of fat in it, too.
5. Quitting sugar can make healthful foods taste better to you.
Eating sugar triggers endorphins (beta-endorphin). That changes food preferences so that healthy foods seem less appealing. When you quit sugar, eating good foods — like vegetables — will probably be more appetizing.
6. Quitting sugar reduces cravings.
Eating sugar can cause cravings. Yes, for more sugary foods, definitely. But also for other kinds of junk food that have sneaky sugars in them.
7. Quitting sugar can reduce calorie intake.
If you’re not responding addictively to sugar — and eating more sugar and other foods because of that — it will be easier to watch your calories.
8. Quitting sugar can improve your health.
Sugar can impact health directly by increasing inflammation in the body through several mechanisms. Reducing inflammation can improve your health and decrease pain.
9. Quitting sugar can improve your mood and your energy.
People who are carbohydrate sensitive secrete more insulin than normal when they eat sugar. That can set up a “peak-and-valley” pattern in their glucose levels. When you’re at a peak, your energy and mood may feel optimal, but when you’re in a valley, things aren’t feeling good at all.
10. Quitting sugar can improve the overall nutritional value of your diet.
If you’re not killing your appetite with sugary junk, you’ll have room for healthful foods. If you’re not steered in a junky direction by endorphins, you’ll eat more healthful foods. If you’re not eating the usual sugary treats, you may increase the fiber in your diet. If you’re eating wholesome foods, your B-vitamin intake could go up and change your brain chemistry completely.
So it’s up to you and always will be. Will you quit now or wait? Will you quit at all? All I’m saying is quitting sugar can help in these ways — and several others that are not on this list of 10 can also help make you feel great.
Wishing you great health, great moods, great energy, great success in quitting sugar.
Cycling instructors are a special breed, and all a little different. There are those who coach, those who teach choreography, those who talk heart rate and RPM, and those who teach meditation on the bike. I always strive to take a little piece from each style of instruction, to stay the open-minded student and, most importantly, to find my own voice among the throngs of others.
Cycling instructors by nature are fervent, even opinionated. Because of this, we may attract a special type of student — people with a bit of an edge, people who need to grunt it out and really feel something at the beginning or end of the day. Our most endearing quality can sometimes blind us: we are sometimes opinionated and studied to a fault.
Our discipline, indoor cycling, has been taught one way for so long it’s difficult to embrace any other. But to say there’s only way to move or study a discipline is simply narrow-minded. It limits our ideas and our teaching. When we stop learning, we stop truly teaching.
If mastery could be measured in watts or years on the bike, I’m sure many of us would line up with raised hands to be counted. I submit that mastery is best demonstrated when we stay open to new ideas and enjoy new ways of putting science, innovation and, yes, FUN together when we teach.
My mentor recently pointed out to a group of us, “If you continue to teach form and function only, your classes will eventually become stale. Members and students will stop waking up at 6:00 am unless you provide them with a training concept. A participant will eventually need something more to wake up to than ‘GO GO GO.’ You need to be willing to dig a little deeper and take people a little further.”
The best instructors I’ve found have this uncanny ability to touch, inspire, and excite — and usually not just with a great song. It’s that special blend of art and science that’s truly engaging.
That brings me to this point. It’s much easier to spot a bad instructor than a good one. When you attend a class and the instructor is terrible, you can feel the grumbling and unease in the room. You can easily point out the faults: the music is too loud or uninspiring, the voice too nasal, the cues unclear.
But when you attend a good class and the instructor suddenly announces, “Last Song,” you think, “Where did the time go?” Even though you may not have agreed with every cue or liked all of the songs, you find that you were riveted, captivated and engaged in the activity.
I’m suggesting that, although we might not agree with some of the innovation that has been happening in the cycling community, we should at least acknowledge that it’s a good thing to get people to move, period. All people, cyclists and non-cyclists alike. If it takes push-ups on the handlebars, bikes that move side-to-side, or forward motion video to reach people who would never otherwise set foot in a cycling studio, so be it.
I have come to terms with the fact that I may not get all of my participants to do a century ride with me. Hell, I may not get my participants outside at all. What I can, and should, do is my absolute best to get people excited about cycling. Out of their heads and into their bodies. Safely. If only indoors. If only for 60 minutes.
If the best way to do that is to borrow a great idea or technique from another instructor, I’m open to it.
This week features the 2018 Holiday ride from Joey. The ride is primarily focused towards strength, but there is a fair mix of cadence work. Good luck and have fun. Joey
Joey's “2018 Holiday Ride” Playlist
1: “Wizards in Winter (Instrumental)”, Trans-Siberian Orchestra (The Lost Christmas Eve)
2: “Mmm Yeah (feat. Pitbull)”, Austin Mahone (The Secret)
3: “Palladio”, Escala (Escala)
4: “A Mad Russian's Christmas (Instrumental)”, Trans-Siberian Orchestra (The Christmas Trilogy)
5: “Switch”, Don Diablo (Switch – Single)
6: “Drop That Low (when I Dip)”, Tujamo (Spinnin Records Best of Dance 2016, Vol. 1)
7: “Carol of the Bells”, Pentatonix (PTXmas (Deluxe Edition))
8: “Santa's Lost His Mojo”, Jeremy Lister (Gift Wrapped – 20 Songs That Keep On Giving!)
9: “Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town (Live at C.W. Post College, Greenvale, NY – December 1975)”, Bruce Springsteen (Christmas Hits)
10: “Jingle Bells (feat. Henry Rollins)”, William Shatner (Shatner Claus)
11: “In the Cold, Cold Night”, Tracey Thorn (Tinsel and Lights)
12: “Man Like That”, Gin Wigmore (Gravel & Wine)
13: “What Christmas Means To Me”, 98° (Let It Snow)
14: “You're a Mean One, Mister Grinch”, Famous for a Century (Christmas – Single)
15: “Christmas In Hollis (Bonus Track)”, Run-DMC (Tougher Than Leather)
16: “Deck the Halls”, R.E.M. (Gift Wrapped – 20 Songs That Keep On Giving!)
17: “Christmas / Sarajevo 12/24 (Instrumental)”, Trans-Siberian Orchestra (Christmas Eve and Other Stories)
18: “Feliz Navidad”, Unspoken (Christmas: Joy To the World)
19: “My Dear Acquaintance (A Happy New Year) [Non-Album Track]”, Regina Spektor (My Dear Acquaintance (A Happy New Year) – Single)
How likely is it that you would recommend this Club/Studio/Class/Instructor to a friend or colleague?
As a Life Time Fitness Instructor/employee I hear about our NPS scores frequently… and if you don't understand what NPS refers to and the effect it could have on their business or your class, you may be thinking; “so what?”
Well the short answer is your NPS score is an indication of how likely your students will be to promote the club where you teach or your class to their friends.
Let's start with some understanding from the people who developed this concept:
What is Net Promoter?
Net Promoter® is both a loyalty metric and a discipline for using customer feedback to fuel profitable growth in your business. Developed by Satmetrix, Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld, the concept was first popularized through Reichheld's book The Ultimate Question, and has since been embraced by leading companies worldwide as the standard for measuring and improving customer loyalty.
The Net Promoter Score, or NPS®, is a straightforward metric that holds companies and employees accountable for how they treat customers. It has gained popularity thanks to its simplicity and its linkage to profitable growth. Employees at all levels of the organization understand it, opening the door to customer- centric change and improved performance.
As you can see in the image above, NPS is based on a 0-10 rating score in response to the question; How likely is it that you would recommend to a friend or colleague? The responses are then broken down into three categories:
0-6 Detractors – Unhappy people who will talk down your class or club – damaging your brand through negative word of mouth.
7-8 Passives – Satisfied, but won't go out of their way to promote your class to others.
9-10 Promoters – these are your fans 🙂 The students you look forward to seeing and they in turn look forward to telling others about the awesome class you just taught. In a nut shell, these are the people who will help FILL YOUR CLASS!
To calculate the NPS you subtract the number of Detractors from Promoters, which leaves you with either a positive number (good), zero, or a negative number (bad). So if you have 100 people respond to a survey of the ultimate question if you have more Promoters than Detractors you can expect to see your class size grow.
NPS ignores the Passives as they really don't hurt or help your business. I see the real improvements coming from moving the Detractors up the scale.
I have a few personal complaints and/or concerns with NPS:
The score tends to be skewed by the number of respondents and getting busy people to respond is tough… which is why your manager is forever asking you to ask your participants to complete a survey.
I'm personally more inclined to give negative feedback, actually… I'm guessing we all are.
You may have very little influence on your clubs NPS. If your bike maintenance is lacking, one of the two projectors isn't working or the locker room has a funny smell that causes a member to score your club as a Detractor, there isn't much you can do. This could be a good reason to drill down and solicit NPS for specific areas/departments.
So beyond Life Time, who else uses NPS to measure how successfully they are satisfying their customers? Apple for one. The link is to an article that dispels the myth that Steve Jobs never listened to his customers – Apple listens every day.
In Podcast # 196 Studio Owner Emmy Ragali explains why she has an Instructor Evaluation form on her Go Cycle website. The link to it is easy to find and she and her instructors encourage participants to give feedback regularly. I see that one of the questions is; Are you likely to recommend this instructor's class to a friend?
Which is really all that matters 🙂
Does your studio use NPS [wlm_firstname]? What have been your experiences?
I'll be discussing how we all can help to improve our clubs NPS scores in later articles.
Now I think we can start working on some solutions. While researching this article I learned that the the 80/20 rule is also called the Pareto principle. It's more of a rule of thumb drawn from multiple examples where roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Group dynamics frequently follow this rule and here's some examples:
In business it's typical to see 80% of profits coming from only 20% of all customers.
Inversely 80% of most complaints tend to come from about 20% of members.
80% of sales come from the top 20% of sales people.
80% of the mess at a party comes from 20% or the party-goers… and a different 20% will help clean up at the end while 80% will just watch.
Is it exact and does it apply in every situation? No
When it comes to Heart Rate Monitor usage in our classes, it looks more like 90/10.
Maybe 20% HR usage could be our goal?
This creates some interesting questions;
Are we wasting our time promoting HR training to those who are currently not using a monitor, i.e… should we be content with 20%?
Should we be focusing our teaching efforts on the 10%-20% who get it?
Or should we be more focused on the 80%-90% who don't?
I don't pretend to know the answer, but I believe understanding where we are today is the first step to making changes, if any.
Each of us has to answer the first question for ourselves; are we wasting our time promoting HR training? I don't mean wasting our teaching to HR, but rather should we just stop trying to sell HR to our class?
I say no.
You may have heard the term “Tipping Point” which is illustrated above. The concept was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his best selling book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference to show how different segments (or groups) of people adopt to a new concept and at what stages they are willing to do so.
The Innovators sit in the the front row, way off to one side. They can use their new Garmin HR Monitor to tell you the altitude and GPS location of their bike, in your studio, down to the nearest meter. They have the best shoes and cycling kits. They've read every book on training and are typically so focused that they aren't really following your class. If, on the slim chance they ever ask you a question, understand that it's a setup to test you. Be prepared for a debate. Your answers should often begin with “well that depends” to give yourself an out. I would put most ICI/PRO members into this group.
The Early Adopters sit front & center, watching you and the Innovators. Once they see that its safe/fun/beneficial/cool they jumped on the HR thing with both feet. You know these students by their big smiles and waving hands when you ask; “who is wearing their HR monitor today?” Somemay not even know how to use their monitor, it's just important to them that they have it on. You've heard the expression “I'm as smart as the last person I talked with” ? Well these students will believe (and act) on most everything you say… and then will believe (and act) on what the next Instructor tells them. This is why I see having a common language is so important.
Scattered through the middle of your class are the Early Majority – the group that's willing to try something new, but need more than just the social proof of seeing others wearing a monitor. It took a few years and now they have cycling shoes and shorts. They're attentive, but cautious and looking for clarity from you. I feel students in the Early Majority are ready to adopt HR training if you show them a very tangible benefit, recommend a clear action and assure them that they are making a good decision.
When you see a student wearing gym trunks over his bike shorts, you should instantly think Late Majority.
The guy in the far back with a tattered T-shirt and Discount Store “fitness shoes” is a Laggard. Be thankful that he comes to class but you will never see him with a monitor.
This worked for me –
A few years ago Dave Lang, one of the Personal Trainers at the club where I teach, came to me with the idea to demonstrate a New Leaf Metabolic Assessment in front of my Sunday Endurance class. The majority of students in your class you would call cyclists are probably Early Adopters along with a few Innovators. Who better than have one of the Instructors (Innovator) show everyone exactly what happens during an assessment. I myself hadn't been tested, so I agreed.
The following Sunday Dave set up the test and connected his laptop to the big screens in the studio. Now ~40 people in class could watch in real time what was happening during my test. Dave began with a short lecture / explanation of the testing protocol and then lead me through the assessment.
Two things happened as a result:
The Innovators in class congratulated me (I felt like I had joined their club) and wanted to compare “war stories” of their test.
Over the next few weeks Dave scheduled and conducted over 20 assessments with students who moved into the Early Majority.
Why did this happen?
I asked a number of them later and their responses were similar. They knew they wanted the understanding that a Metabolic Assessment would bring them, but something stood in the way of taking action. It may have been some fear, concern, confusion or maybe they just needed a complete understanding of the process. Whatever it was it did the trick.
What a treat it was to learn we have a Sports Psychologist (and former professional bicycle racer) among our ICI/PRO members!
Meet Dr. KC Wilder
KC and I had an interesting conversation about motivating your students that was completely off topic from what we had intended to discuss. Oh, well. I guess I'll have to have her back again.
:
to show how different segments (or groups) of people adopt to a new concept and at what stages they are willing to do so.
