Guidebook

Excerpt for a week of the faithful guidebook

Faith

God wants you to feel His love right now … you don’t need to fix something about yourself before you can feel His love.  Sometimes people say to me, “I can’t come to your workouts I have to get in shape first.” I tell them, “that’s not how it works. Come and I will help you.”

I know there are also people out there who think they need to fix themselves – they need to stop drinking, they need to be kinder, they need give money to their church… before they can ask God to be in their lives. Well, just like you don’t need to be in shape to be part of the Faithful

Workouts program you don’t need to be perfect to connect with God. If you felt you needed to be perfect before you could ask God to help you through life, then why would Jesus have had to die on the cross?

In John 4:19 it says, “This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.” He loved you before you loved Him.

Fitness

What does “muscle balance” mean and why is it important?

I think the best way to explain it is by describing “muscle imbalance”  Put simply, muscle imbalance occurs when one muscle, or group of muscles, works harder than it should while other muscles don’t work hard enough.  Muscle balance is an important component to injury prevention.  When you exercise you should think about how you can achieve muscle balance.  The major muscle groups work in pairs and those muscle pairs need to be balanced in terms of strength and flexibility.  For example, we bend our elbow by using the biceps (front side of the arm) muscle.  Its pair is the tricep (backside of the arm) muscle.  The tricep muscle must be willing to stretch for the bicep muscle to contract and bend the elbow fully.

Fuel

It can be challenging to limit the amount of sugar you eat. One thing that will help you track how much you consume is to know that 4 grams of sugar equals 1 teaspoon. Even if you are careful about reading labels, it’s difficult to know how much sugar you’re eating because of the different names used for refined sugar. Terms like sucrose, fructose, glucose, maltose and lactose are really just names for sugar.

Which Sugars Are Better For Us?

As far as nutritional benefit to our bodies, all simple sugars are empty calories.