Personal Trainer Singapore – Coach Jonathan Wong

As many of you guys know, I am a big fan of proper nutrition with whole foods. Good meats, veggies, fruits and nuts as well as whole eggs, cream and unrefined carbs are the basis of all good nutrition plans and diets.

Customizing how much of each, as well as what supplements and herbs each person should take, is what I do for our personal training and weight loss clients.

However the best diet is the one that you can do!

We don’t live in the Olympic training center and we don’t have the perfect life for mass building, weight loss or fat burning. 3x a day training, perfect meals, lots of sleep.

So I need to modify things according to what each client can do.

Recently one of my clients wrote me a great email with lots of questions. I won’t use his real name here, but you will be able to relate to this.

My reply and advice is given at the bottom of the post. Is it the same as my usual advice…? probably not, but its the BEST that this client can do at the moment and that is what matters.

This is not a guy who is trying to find an easy way out, it’s a client with real trouble, so I’m going to help him find a good, or at least “least bad” solution so he gets results.

Hi Coach Jon,

I am finding it difficult to stick to the diet plan.

I can’t seem to find a suitable breakfast. I get up at 6:30am and hit out to your gym by 7:00am so that I can work out before work. Cooking breakfast just is not an option for me. The only choice I have around me conveniently is to grab some breakfast on the way out at the Kopitiam, i.e. Horlicks and Half boiled egss.  I thought some instant oats or cereal would be a good choice. Or would some berries and fruit be a better choice.

As for lunch, I normally take customers out to lunch. Meaning I can grab Japanese or a Steak, which is presentable enough for customers. I avoid rice, bread and potatoes. So I guess this is ok.

As for dinner, I am not much of a dinner person on the weekdays, because I am either stuck in the office, where I have only instant drinks or muesli bars or biscuits with me. If I manage to go home on time, (rarely), I grab dinner at the nearby kopitiam, i.e. mixed rice, where I normally have half a bowl of rice, meats and veggies.

I would like to be more committed to a sustainable diet plan but I am lack of choices.

Are meal replacement drink advisable? Or any other alternative?

Thanks.
My reply:

Hi Jack (name changed), I appreciate your desire, dedication and great attitude! Nutrition is a super important part of success.

The best diet is the one that you can do!

Best option – prepare food on weekends for the entire week
Next best option – Whatever you can do…:)

Unfortunately from what you described as your food intake, its pretty far from what you need to do to get good results. So here is what I would do If I were you:)

I would get an organic protein shake called “Whey Stronger” and another one called “Primal Clear Px” along with what are known as “branch chained amino acids”, you can use these to replace meals.

For breakfast, One day I would take the whey stronger, the next day, the primal clear. I would get both so that I don’t eat the same thing everyday which can lead to allergy.

While it’s not as good as meat, a good shake + some nuts is a decent option for those meals that you skip.

I would also get an organic veggie and fruit drink called “primal greens” and “primal reds” so that your alkaline and anti-oxidant needs are met. I would drink this 2-3x/day and it tastes pretty nice (for a veggie drink!!).

Lunch seems ok. Steaks  or sashimi are great. Fries + sushi or rice filled handrolls are not:) So just beware of your food choices. Remember to eat the ginger with the sashimi because the pickled ginger helps prevent absorption of heavy metals found in the fish.

For dinner, instant drinks + museli = instantly fat so we need to work on that.

You can have another shake for dinner that would be fine.

For snacks you can have the veggie drink, a few nuts, eggs if possible, and 10-20 amino acid capsules. This snack should keep your body in fat burning and muscle building mode!

As all my personal training and fitness bootcamp clients know, my staff and I can’t stand NOT getting them results. And the MAIN factor that stops committed clients from getting results is toxicity.

That means that if you eat, sleep, exercise and have good habits and STILL don’t get great results, toxicity is probably what is stopping you.

If you are eating prata and cookies, then no detox, no exercise gadget and no personal trainer can help you.

The reason detox is important is that our environment is not as clean as it should be. We have plastics, heavy metals, allergenic food, pesticides, and it is estimated 80,000+ chemicals that are man made and which our body is not designed to handle.

The only effective way to detox plastics (and it helps all other stuff also) is through far infra red saunas. They are touted as “weight loss tools” because they burn up to 600 calories per hour… but I prefer exercise for that! We are using the saunas to get rid of bad stuff so that our bodies can function fully.

Toxins get in the way of our cells producing energy (they reduce the efficiency of mitochondria) – so we feel sluggish, our metabolism drops, the reactions in our body happen slower, we can’t lose weight, burn fat, or gain muscle mass – all because our cells are not as energetic as they should be.

I got only the best brand! “Heavenly Heat” – why? It got the most recommendations by natural medicine doctors and fellow coaches that I respect. It cost’s up to 10X the price of other brands or sauna options… but I think it’s an investment that my personal training, and fitness boot camp clients will appreciate. Nothing but the best stuff for them!

• These saunas keep a relatively low temperature (40-50 deg C – instead of up to 100 deg C in regular saunas) so you don’t run out screaming after 5 mins…
• It uses NO GLUE and NO LAMINATED WOOD – If you use glue or laminated wood, the toxins from their production will get into you while you sit in the heated enclosure. That is NOT what we want during a detox session.
• It uses focused Far Infra Red (FIR) Heaters not “carbon” synthetic ones which spread the power out too much and dilutes the FIR output. This means you get a better heating, sweating and detox effect.
• It has heaters targeting every part of your body ( there are 7 heaters for just 1 person).
• Proper ventilation so the toxic air gets out properly and you don’t need to use the DOOR as a FAN
• Glass door/windows – plastics are poison!
• VERY IMPORTANT - I will provide each person a set of customized anti-oxidants, liver support and detoxification supplements to maximize their sauna time. Without these your body will not be able to effectively remove all the toxins that the sauna stirs up. (This is one of the key value added benefits of doing your detoxification here rather than anywhere else!)

I look forward to using this health and energy boosting method to get our clients even better results!

As a Singapore personal trainer, my clients trust me with their health and ask me all kinds of questions. One often asked question by our fitness boot camp and personal training clients is “what about detox? – do I need it? – how should I go about it?”

There are so many people and companies offering detox products. But detox is a complex situation. Your body is actually capable of most of the detox processes. But you need to support it with the right nutrients to the right places for the right tasks.

Here is how I do it. I learned from a mentor who is a brilliant functional medicine doctor and one of the most sought after detox specialists in the world.

Firstly, everybody is different and needs different detoxes. How do you know if you need a detox? Well… we all do! The world is a toxic place, our food is not as nutritious as it should be, and our stress levels are way above what our ancestors are used to dealing with.

One indicator of a need for detox is the inability to lose bodyfat even though you do other things right! Great nutrition, hard training, correct supplements and you get stuck – the primary reason is toxicity!

So when a client like this comes for a consultation, I check their health history, and their Biosignature (a method of determining health conditions from body fat storage patterns devised by Olympic coach Charles Poliquin). I also use a questionaire to determine if there are other issues like problems with neurotrainsmitters (brain signals), liver, adrenal gland (stress) and other organ issues. I also check digestion and mineral levels.

If a detox is needed, I usually use a combination of medicinal food (guaranteed potency, purity, and effectiveness) which is non allergic, as well as an organic greens/fruit supplement, and fiber. In addition, according to the client’s needs, I would use a variety of nutrients to support the liver, gall bladder and digestive tract in detoxification.

Finally I would add supplements according to the clients “main problem” it might be stuff to take out heavy metal poisons, plastics and excess bad estrogen.

This goes on for 1 week. There might be some nausea or headaches because the liver is working hard to get rid of all the bad stuff from your body. That is why it is so important to support the liver!

After this week your fat burning, muscle building and health will be back on the fast track.

Doing this 2x/ year is recommended because Singapore is a crowded and polluted place. We need to keep our bodies clean to maximize our health, productivity and quality of life.

Go to my personal trainer contact page and ask for a detox consultation today!

One of the former athletes at the Sports school where I coached formerly is now a DJ and invited me for an interview on health tips. Here is a rough transcript of today’s interview.

Q: 1. Tell us a little bit about what you do.

I help people pursue maximum health and achieve their fitness and performance goals. So I help them get leaner, healthier, stronger and into the best shape of their lives.

Q: 2. Generic question: How much should the average person exercise per week, and how much calories should he or she eat per day in order to stay healthy?

Exercise is a fairly new thing, our ancestors didn’t need it, they had active lives. But for us we don’t usually have that kind of lifestyle. What im saying is that our bodies are made for activity. Very basic things like immune system function and joint health decrease if we do not use our bodies actively as they were created to be used.

If I had my way, the average person should be active 8 to 10 hours per week for best results! But in reality 3 hours per week of proper training plus a few sessions of activity that we enjoy like walking or playing sports would be excellent.

Q 3. For most of us working people, exercise rarely happens because of a lack of time. What are some ways we can stay active throughout the day? (office workouts?)

I could say the usual stuff like stop 1 or 2 bus stops from your home, don’t take the escalator and take the stairs etc … but in reality, these are a tiny drop in the ocean when it comes to improving your health.

And who really does these things?

Do you see your colleagues come in to work sweaty because they walked from 2 bus stops away? No you don’t, nobody does these things.

I would like to say that there is an easy way to maximize your health but there really isn’t.

The problem is with the standards we hold ourselves to, we have confused what is normal with what is average.

It is NORMAL for a human being to be lean with low body-fat, strong, and healthy with no degenerative diseases like obesity, cancer, diabetes, alzhimers or cardiovascular disease.

But unfortunately it is not the average, the average person is not in good shape and is likely to develop one of those conditions. walking from the bus stop is not really going to change this outcome much.

What will change your health is the most powerful attitude changing emotion in existance. And that emotion is love. When we choose not to exercise it is because we don’t love being healthy as much as we love watching TV or surfing the internet. When we choose to eat unnatural foods like cake or prata it is because we love the taste more than we love being lean and free from heart problems.

So actually the action is not as important as your attitude toward your own health. You need to love your body. Nobody can do that for you.

MYTHBUSTERS

1. Doing crunches or other exercises on the ab machine we see in infomercials will get rid of belly fat.

Nope, if you want lean abs, you do it with your food choices and your lifestyle.

You will need to eat foods that promote fat burning and prevent fat storage.

Foods that do this include green veggies, nuts, meat, whole eggs and healthy fats like omega 3 oils. Most ab machines actually make your posture worse and more hunched.

2. Skipping meals are a good way to lose weight

Think about it this way, when you skip drinking water, do you go toilet less or more?

You go less because your body tires to hold on to the water is has.

When you skip food, your body tries to hold on to fat that you store because it wants to make sure that there is enough in case you are in a starvation situation.

Eating healthy food that does not spike your blood sugar, in smaller meals throughout the day is proven to work for fat burning.

3. Weight-training will make me bulk up

Weight training will make a woman have nice curves a slimmer waist and good health. Eating cakes, noodles and cookies will make a woman have the wrong kind of curves and bulk up.

If you hit the gym but also eat starchy, processed food, you will get bulky and it will not be muscle, it will be fat and the food is the reason not the gym. Just think about this, many men want bigger muscles but are not able to get them easily.

And men have about 10 times the muscle building hormones that women do. So its actually even harder for a woman to get too bulky.

The problem is that many of the women you might see on TV who go to the gym are also on steroids which make them have the muscle building ability of a man, and it’s just not something that happens to women who go to the gym to get healthy.

4. Eating after 8pm causes mad weight gain.

Depends on what you eat. If you eat a pizza you could eat that any time during the day and it would make you fat. But if you a hard boiled egg and some almonds, you could eat that any time and it would not make you fat.

The main things to consider when talking about late night eating is how it affects sleep.

We do want to eat a small snack of slow digesting food like nuts, egg, cheese or a small piece of meat. This makes our body know that there is enough food and you are more likely to have a good sleep because your body will not wake you up to go and eat.

However we do not want to eat a huge meal within 2 hours of sleep because during sleep, the body recovers itself from the stresses of the day. If you eat a large meal right before sleep, your body will not be focused on recovering, it will be focused on digestion which is not what we want.

About your fitness center

1. Tell us a little bit about the Genesis Performance Centre

The Genesis performance center is the fitness and health center where my staff and I help hundreds of Singapore residents each year to maximize their health and get into the best shape of their lives. We help our clients to pursue maximum health with nutrition that is customized for their genetics, supplements and herbs that correct any hormonal or sleep problems, as well as exercise that gives them the optimal fitness for their chosen activity.

Our clients range from competitive athletes at the national level, to people who haven’t exercised for years. We customize the program to meet their goals and their current fitness level.

2. Let’s say if I were a total couch bum who decided to turn my life around and get fit, what would your fitness plan for me look like?

Assuming you love yourself enough to visit us…

First we would do a health assessment which includes your body fat, your sleep, tests for you nutrition, mineral and digestion levels. We test these because these are fundamental to health, and the best training program in the world does not give good results without a good foundation of internal health.

And also physical testing of your posture, movements and joints so that we can be sure that the exercises we ask you to do are not dangerous for you. With these results, we customize a nutrition and training program for you. For the typical client, within a week you will be measurably different. Leaner, sleeping better and you will be more energetic.

Most personal trainers in Singapore simply take a client through a fixed circuit of machine exercises that are the same for each client.This is a great way to earn a quick buck off an unsuspecting client. – NOT Good

Most fitness bootcamps in Singapore simply get a bunch of people to run or jump around in an open field or park without care about long term progress and excellence. This is a great way to injure a person who has not trained in a long while. – NOT Good

But the ONE thing most lacking from most Singapore personal training or fitness/weight loss boot camp programs is doing nutritional guidance the right way.

One benefit that my staff and I have is that we have more than 200 clients in our facility each year. And we track each and every one of them. Measurements, genetic tolerances, fat levels, and each and every weight that they lifted! So we have a huge database of information about what works and what doesn’t.

For example, one of our clients was doing alot of things right, training hard, high level of activity (he does martial arts on non-gym days) and is a motivated client. BUT he was not losing fat at the rate that he should have been.

But -BOOM- once we changed his nutrition to something that suits his particular genetics, and cut out one or two foods that did not suit his genes, he dropped 2.5% bodyfat in 10 days – that about 5-10mm on each bodyfat site.

Another lady had problems with her upper body fat. Her legs looked great and athletic but her upper body was stagnant even tho she ate healthy food most of the time. For her she needed a particular supplement because her family eats NO red meat, and for her, L-carnitine was a very useful thing to boost her fat loss results.

(For both these clients we used biosignature to help them get results)

As you can see, diet troubleshooting is not a simple matter of “calories in-calories out”. (Subject for another LONG post) it is a matter of balance and individualization especially for those who have plateaued.

Meanwhile what are the general guidelines?

If you are fat – i.e. can’t see your abs (guy) or don’t have a firm stomach (ladies), I use the following nutritional guidelines.

• No starches
• Green veggies unlimited
• Un-processed meat unlimited
• Nuts 2 handfuls per day for medium/large men (70kg+) and 1 handful per day for women and smaller guys.
• Fish Oil – 1g per day per % of bodyfat you are
• Cheat meals – 1 per week – But you can test 2-3 (on the same day) to see if you can tolerate it.
• Post workout shake is protein + glutamine + glycine
• Drink water and unsugared tea.

Here is a picture of me after a 4 week holiday + reservist + little training and horrible army food. No carbs for you fat boy!

If you are lean – can see abs (guys) can see line down the middle of your tummy (ladies)

This is a picture of me 12 weeks later – Carbs will help me stay LEANER

You actually need starches. Start adding them post workout. And see if you get fatter (you should probably get LEANER because you prevent the body from using precious protein as a fuel), if you don’t get fatter, add them to your solid meal post workout too, then breakfast. More on training days less on non training days.

The rest of the plan remains the same except that you should take a cheat meal probably midweek, and your post workout shake should have some carbs instead of glutamine (glycine remains).

I actually just made this transition (I have a basketball tournament coming up and want to be leaner) – it happens at about 10 % bodyfat for guys and 16% for women.

The “fat person” plan is usually called a “cyclic ketogenic diet” and the “lean person” plan is usually called “carbohydrate cycling”.

There are man other factors to consider. But consistently do the first things first, and most of you will already get significant results.

But of course if you want an experienced eye to help you adjust weekly/monthly exactly what you should be doing according to precise measurements and tracking – that is what our personal training programs are for – results results results!

Each and every month there are perhaps 10-15 potential clients (that is a large amount of business!) that we have to turn down because they specifically want “in-home” training.

There is nothing wrong with this of course, sometimes people may be too busy to come to a gym, sometimes they may not be comfortable with the traditional, intimidating “gym environment” and sometimes they just don’t believe that there is a difference between “in home” training and training in a fully equipped fitness facility like the Genesis Performance Center.

As a Singapore personal training and Singapore fitness bootcamp service provider we do our very best to address these concerns.

• If your schedule is packed we do our best to be flexible in our personal training programs so that you can come in any time that our private fitness center is open. There will always be a slot and a space for you! (That is why we have thousands of square feet of space and are soon upgrading to an even bigger facility)
• If you are worried about the unfriendliness or intimidation factor present in most gyms, we make sure that you are brought into a positive, encouraging community that spurs you on to greatness. (Nobody joins our personal training or bootcamp programs to be average or even above average!)

But today I would like to speak to those who don’t see the benefits of training in a properly equipped gym.

• There is this misconception that you can become great by doing a few push ups at home. It is certainly OK. And we do give home or hotel workouts for those clients who need to travel or can’t train with us as often as they would like. However this is a STOP GAP measure. As soon as their schedule allows we get them back into the gym for more effective workouts.

The reason for this is simple.

Unless you have a space for a proper home gym, you will never have heavy enough weights at home to become really great!

Even our ladies in the Curves & Core Ladies Fitness Bootcamp who are lean, slim and weigh 50kg are lifting 60-70kg weights or more because they are so lean, strong, fit and healthy. How much more so for a strong male who may need 160kg of weights ar home.

If you only use the “5kg home weights” you will not get the speedy results that all Singapore residents want! (I don’t know anybody who wants slow results over fast ones)

What I tell people is this – yes you can order pizza delivered to your home as a meal, but if you want a gourmet meal cooked by the best chefs, you need to go to a fine restaurant. In fitness that “fine dining experience” would be a fully equipped training center for fitness bootcamps and personal training.

We invite you to dine with us at the Genesis Performance Center.

One thing that I try to do to the best of my abiltiy is client’s program designs. While it is true that an average program done with great effort is better than a great program done with a slack attitude, all things being equal if you are on the right program for YOU, your results will be alot quicker!

The general idea is that your body adapts best when it is adapting to only ONE or a FEW stressors at one time. For e.g. you can’t get really good at triathlons and really good at discus throwing at the same time.

If you do some of everything, you are going to end up with less than optimal results in everything.

Of course you will be better than an untrained person and any exercise is better than none at all but it would be kidding yourself to think that you can get as much benefits from an unfocused program as you can from a focused one.

Many programs try to do too much. And clients get sub optimal results.

There is a difference between a program that “makes me puke” and a program that “makes me better”.

I prefer to make clients better!

If I wanted to get more muscular AND better at a 2.4km run AND able to do more chinups AND lose some extra fat on my belly AND jump higher. I would do them ONE BY ONE while maintaining the qualities that I have alreay gained.

If my program has…

• Lots of chinups every day
• a few 2-5km runs
• fat loss burpee and kettlebell intervals
• some olympic lifts
• and plyometric jumps…
• All at the same time…

I will be… above average but disappointed.

But if I do specific phases of fat loss for 4 weeks, Olympic lifting and power training 4 weeks, muscle growth 4 weeks, Plyometrics 2-4 weeks, and then finally a few longer runs to boost my 2.4km run, these 4 months will be ALOT more useful than a mixture of random exercises trying to do everything at once.

This is the science of program design that is brought into all our personal training programs. Even our group class fitness bootcamps have these elements in their program design.

That’s why we can guarantee results while keeping you injury free!

I have been taking an old fashioned supplement. It used to be sold in Singapore, but its cheap and I think the profit margins are low so the local supplement distributors don’t carry it.

I first read about it on Charles Poliquin’s site, and how it will help digestion and absorption of food. So that the nutritious food and good supplements which I am already eating, can be properly absorbed and not go to waste (literally down the toilet).

It is Hydrochloric acid. Good for dissolving metals…and good for digesting food.
(don’t worry, our stomach linings protect us from it while still allowing digestion to go on inside the stomach… yet another brillitantly designed piece of body machinery)

We test all our clients personal training, fitness bootcamp or NS fitness…for deficiency in this important function of digestion. And when we get rid of the problem with good supplements that heal your digestive system, results are boosted FAST!

The best coaches in any field or industry know about the 80-20 rule. And as a guy who wants to provide the best personal training in Singapore, I certainly want to apply this to everything we do at the Genesis Performance Center.

I’ll just give some examples here of how this rule is used in some sample programs for my clients.

The general idea of this rule is the 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts.

That is very true. But I would like to look at it from the perspective of our most important asset.

Time

I often have clients who have to cut short training because of urgent work or family commitments. This is not their fault.

Here is where the 80-20 rule makes it’s presence most obvious in the training program.

Our training programs for the majority of clients include individualized Self massage, corrective training (for posture/movement dysfucntion) warmup, core training and static stretching.

Followed by strength training and then metabolic training/cardio
This usually takes 55-70mins

But what if I had 25 mins?

PRIORITIZE
I would first cut out the self massage with rollers/tennis balls – yes its important, but people have gotten good results injury free before this came onto the fitness scene. skipping a session of this is not the worst thing in the world. And most of my clients buy a foam roller for home use anyway so its not a big deal (in the grand scheme of things) self massage does not fall into the critical 20%

Then I would cut out the cardio at the end. This is used to burn extra fat calories at the end of a workout when fat stores are most easily burned. It’s good for fat loss but its not critical compared to maintaining lean muscle mass. Again, not part of the critical 20%.
Then I would cut out the corrective training, yes its important, but the benefits are felt long term and not over a single session. Again, not part of the 20%.

That leaves warmup (5 mins), strength training (15mins) and metabolic conditioning – burpee variations, bodyweight circuits, Kettlebell swings etc…(5-10 mins)

A total of 25 mins.

In fact for the strength training, I am cutting out probably everything ecept a superset that includes a compound lower body exercise like a deadlift, and a big upper body exercise like a chinup.

Will a client on such a program get fat after such a short session. No. In fact some people are over trained and such a program will actually boost results.

As long as nutrition is ok, this top 20% of critical time usage will just about ensure that even busy clients get awesome results.

The research statistics are pretty scary. During our life we have about an 80% chance of having back pain. Sure its not a Singaporean study but I see no reason to think that we are different.

After taking a look at some of the ways “real life” people I know in Singapore that have hurt their backs…it’s something that we as personal trainers and fitness professionals MUST take note of and prevent. Here are some of the ways that people I know have been hurt.

1.    Back pain after Sneezing (this one was a slipped disc that required long term medical care)
2.    Back pain after helping an old lady carry her shipping.
3.    Back pain while slipping on a moist badminton court
4.    Back pain while helping a friend shift furniture

As usual I’m a “be a part of the solution” kind of guy, and actually I study a lots of material specially so that my staff and I at the Genesis Performance Center can help our clients deal with, prevent and recover from back pain so that they are back to full speed, full strength and full health.

Back pain is frustrating because it makes us feel old and immobile and I dare say …. even helpless! It is only responsible for fitness and performance professionals to help people avoid it!

This is why our personal training programs, our sports specific programs and our group fitness bootcamps all take into account the clients current and past back pain problems.