Mental Tricks

TRICK 15: Distract your mind when the exercise gets difficult.

Planning something in your head is a great way to get your mind off the drudgery of a mundane task. Even when it’s too hard to run and concentrate on anything else, just throw a thought in your head every so often to get your mind off the pain. Or you might want to get caught up in the scenery. That’s why I prefer to run outside – it distracts my mind from the drudgery and difficulty of the task. I’ll only do a treadmill if the weather is too bad to go outside and if I have a good TV show to watch at the same time.

Physical Tricks

TRICK 23: For a smaller mid-section, pump up the muscles in the rest of your body. This pulls blood away from the mid-section to fill those other muscles.

Your legs are some of the biggest muscles in your body, and they have a lot of room for blood from a workout. You diverted much of your blood from the mid-section to the extremities.

Eating Tricks

TRICK 63: Eat the same volume of food at every sitting to help minimize fat storage and increase metabolism.

Do yourself and the dishwasher a favor - eat from small plates. When you use a small plate, your food will look like it is more food than it really is. It’s an optical illusion.

Exercise Tricks

TRICK 90: Changing exercises periodically prevents the body from adapting, thereby maximizing results.

The key here is not the exercise or routine, but the fact that there was change. Your body is good at adapting to physical demands placed upon it. In order to increase muscle size, strength, or stamina, you have to increase the intensity or amount of weight you’re working out with. You can improve by working out harder each time or just by changing how you workout.