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!

The world is a toxic place for sure. That is why I am fond of detoxing and asking my personal training clients to do the same perhaps 2 weeks per year. But toxicity not only applies to humans, but also to animals. The animals that we get our wonderful omega-3 oils from are also contaminated. So we need to get out supplements from the best possible sources. Even some repuatble brands that many internet stores sell, are implicated in the above report.

While the report is not outright against these brands, my tolerance for contamination in supplements is… ZERO! I mean… how much poison would you like to eat? Just a little? Of course not… NONE at all! (Or at least as little as is humanly possible). Because the supplement industry is so unregulated, I choose carefully which products and which brands to sell. And my clients never have to worry about reports like the one in this link to ABC news.

After all, the bulk of the cost of producing fish oils is not the extraction of the oil. It is the PURIFICATION of the oil. So that is where the sub par companies (all except a few in the world) will cut costs.

Supplements are not something you want to save a few dollars on. The great supplements cost just a bit more, but have alot less nonsense in them, and have alot better potency!

Day 2 went well. Sleep is better. Usually I can sleep 6+ hours then I wake up automatically, even the herbs that work for many of my personal training clients and nutritional consultation clients did not work for me. But last night I did close to 8 hours straight. Very Good.

The amount of bowel movement continues to amaze me. The volume is so much. Sorry again for the graphic description, but it is true. There must be a lot of toxins to clear out!

Food is same. But I change the timings of the shakes around according to which time of the day I am going to train. I take more shakes and amino acids around that time.

I used a slightly different form of fiber this morning to avoid any chance of allergies.

Another piece of good news is that the supplements last a little longer than I expected counting the servings on the bottles. This may reduce the overall cost in the end which is also good news.

Urine smells funny and different, could be the curcumin in the supplements but it also feels like its clearing out bad stuff.

Breath does not smell bad (I think!) and sweat is normal not more or less.

Today I will do a bit of olympic lift practice (just to work on technique, I just a bit too much back and not up…) and I will do high rep upper body work with chinups and presses to get the lymph flowing.

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!

Just something I learned about the manufacture of fish oil from our lecture on toxicity.
Did you know that the cost of purification (getting rid of toxins, heavy metals that cause cancer and stop enzyme and hormone function) of fish oil is much higher than the cost of obtaining the oil in the first place?
So that is how cheap brands save costs!
With supplements always get the best that you can find. They are the parachute of your health – and you don’t try to save money on parachutes do you!

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.

Have you heard about these glyconutrients being sold in Singapore? Apparently they are great for your health and are so recent that few people even know about them! (The biblical saying “there is nothing new under the sun” comes to mind…”)

The idea is that there are “essential sugars” that we all need for optimal health. And these glyconutrients are it!

Be smart. There are essential amino acids and essential fatty acids. These are things that ARE good for us and help us with everything from immune system function, detoxification, cell membrane function, and reducing fat storage (and a huge list more!).

But there is NO SUCH THING as essential sugars. In fact there isn’t supposed to be much sugar in us at all. If you drained the blood of a person and dried it up. How much sugar do you think there would be in that dried up powder?

Answer – Just a couple of grams! About the amount in one teaspoon.

Blood sugar needs to be kept in a very small range for optimal health, and we can manufacture any sugar we need from proteins. (it doesn’t take much!)

The idea of essential sugars is bogus.

If there are proper, double blind, peer reviewed studies that come out proving these glyconutrients work, I may change my tune (possibly)… but i doubt it will happen. But till then, stay away from stuff that costs alot and does nothing (and with these glyconutrients being simple sugars, they are probably bad for you!)

Here is what I would buy if I had a limited supplement budget:
1. A digestive aid
2. A good fish oil. (I would only use Poliquin’s, Metagenics, Thorne, or Biotest)
3. A good multivitamin/veggie extract supplements (same brands)
4. Magnesium and zinc
Hey if you are in Singapore – get them from me, I sell only the best stuff!:)
drop us an email at support @ genesis performance center. com (remove spaces)

This stuff is proven, and has worked in both clinical and real life settings.

If I were the Singapore minister of health I would not let supplements be sold through Multi Level Marketing channels. I am not against network marketing. All of us “network” market by recommending products and services that we like, to our family and friends. There is of course nothing wrong with this.

But when it comes to supplements in Singapore being sold through Multi Level Marketing, this is a problem. That is because it’s not possible to make a high quality supplement at a low price.

However, a low price is necessary for a MLM product to be successful because there are SO many levels of people to pay! This makes any MLM supplement a LOW value to the consumer.

Some examples of MLM products that I, as a successful personal trainer and health professional was asked to endorse…

Low quality multi vitamins – 2x the price, minimal value, low qualtiy ingredients that are chemically incapable of performing as advertised.

“Special antioxidant juices” made from “Exotic”  fruits that nobody has heard of – woooo magical… – These juices cost as much as a vintage wine (120 SGD per bottle for fruit juice!) and you “only” need a tiny shotglass per day to meet your antioxidant needs.

NONSENSE.

This is NOT the way antioxidants work. They need to be taken in a wide spectrum for maximum effect and there are different ones for different free radicals.

Fish Oil blends that stink shortly after opening. If its a capsule, it should be able to last a long time as long as the bottle is kept closed. This is because the best capsule designs include anti-oxidants in the design so the oil does not go bad. Also, these fish oils come from who knows where and would probably contain either heavy metals (poison) or hexanes (cancer).

Low quality protein powders – Low grade soy proteins with lots of fillers. Soy is not a good main protein source and no truly healthy people make it their main source of protein.

I won’t endores products like these for GOOD REASONS. And if I were the Singapore Minister Of Health, I’d get rid of them before they hurt somebody. Either in their wallet or worse still, in their health.

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!

As part of the Biosignature Modulation system which I am a practitioner of. The most difficult and complicated part of the body to lose fat from is you tummy. Your tummy fat, if it is high compared to the rest of your body’s fat stores is an indicator of long term exposure to stress hormones. Stress can come from ANYWHERE and EVERYWHERE and your body can’t tell the difference! Deadlines from your boss, sales targets to meet, examinations, toxins in the environment, bad food like trans fats, lack of sleep, dehydration… it’s ALL stress. And it means MORE unwanted belly fat on your tummy!

During your biosignature assessment, we will determine which areas of your body store the most fat and from there we will be able to recommend the correct supplements, lifestyle and training to fix it. Biosignature is individualized nutrition and lifestyle for your genetics and your current hormonal state.

If stress hormones are a problem, part of the solution is being more appreciative and positive in life…

21 Things You Can Do To Be Happier And Reduce Your Stress Levels (And Tummy Fat)!

ONE. Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully..

TWO. Marry a man/woman you love to talk to. As you get older, their conversational skills will be as important as any other.

THREE. Don’t believe all you hear, spend all you have or sleep all you want.

FOUR. When you say, ‘I love you,’ mean it.

FIVE. When you say, ‘I’m sorry,’ look the person in the eye.

SIX. Be engaged at least six months before you get married.

SEVEN. Believe in love at first sight.

EIGHT. Never laugh at anyone’s dreams. People who don’t have dreams don’t have much.

NINE. Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt but it’s the only way to live life completely.

TEN.. In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling.

ELEVEN. Don’t judge people by their relatives.

TWELVE. Talk slowly but think quickly.

THIRTEEN! .. When someone asks you a question you don’t want to answer, smile and ask, ‘Why do you want to know?’

FOURTEEN. Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

FIFTEEN. Say ‘bless you’ when you hear someone sneeze..

SIXTEEN. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

SEVENTEEN. Remember the three R’s: Respect for self; Respect for others; and Responsibility for all your actions.

EIGHTEEN. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

NINETEEN. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

TWENTY. Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice

TWENTY- ONE. Spend some time alone.