Last week we talked about the spirit of competition and how happy it makes athletes when they compete. The Superbowl is set and the Packers will be meeting the Steelers. Congratulations to all of their fans. As a Bear fan, I felt the officiating was on the Packer’s side. The Bear fans in Chicago blamed Jay Cutler for the loss. Basically, finer pointing justified why the Bears lost. It’s very easy to look at everybody else and blame them for a substandard performance. Nobody on the Bears wanted to lose. The fans didn’t want to lose. Bottom line is, the Bears lost. Bear fans hate to admit it, but they did lose. Somebody had to. It’s time for the Bears to take a look and evaluate what went wrong, take responsibility for their performance and improve on it. The key is, look at yourself, be honest, and change what’s wrong, and improve on what’s right.

    The key here is honesty with yourself. We are too easy and too soft on ourselves. Yeah, too easy and too soft on ourselves. We are in a time of praise for ourselves for anything we do. Kids get trophies for being on a team. Raise the bar. Set goals that are realistic, out of your comfort zone, and make a plan. Follow the plan. If it works, pat yourself on the back, raise the bar, and progress to the next level. If it doesn’t work, look at yourself, evaluate your situation, and make the adjustments. Failure is a key to success. When you succeed, bank it and move forward. Never, never, compromise yourself and settle for less. Win or lose, competition is good. Don’t make excuses. Accept your flaws and try to improve on them. Too often we settle for less. We all have talents, but we aren’t always pushing to improve on them. It’s much easier to point fingers and make excuses for our inability to achieve to our full potential. Get out of your comfort zone. Set your goals for something you haven’t ever done. If you succeed, you’ll find it liberating. If you don’t, try again. We are too soft on ourselves and it shows. Do you want to be with the majority? Or you do you want to be with the elite? Be a leader. Don’t be a follower. It starts from within.

Have a good week

If you are from the Illinois/Wisconsin area, today marks a huge day for football fans. The Bears and Packers are squaring off for only the second time ever in postseason. The rivalry is monumental. If you have followed the coverage all week, you can’t help but notice the ear to ear smiles on player’s faces. Why, the “competition.” That’s what makes them go. I can’t help but remember back to when I played sports. I couldn’t stop smiling most the time. Whether I beat somebody at something, or whether I got beat at something. Either way, the motivation to do my best, win or lose, was always there. If you lost, you wanted a do-over. “I know I can do better.” If you won, you accepted it and moved onto the next challenge. Winner got the prize, loser tried harder next time. The loser never gave up. It’s time we look back at losing as a motivator to try harder. Not a reason to give up. Winning and losing is a fact of life. There were many losses in a winners life before they became winners. Winning is more fun than losing, but winning is earned. Make yourself a winner. Earn it. And, today, may the best team win. Green Bay and Chicago earned the right to be there. There is no quit in a winner.

Have a good week

    This newsletter comes on the weekend of Dr. Martin Luther King Day. He had a vision, he had a dream. Slowly those visions and dreams are coming true. The point here is everything starts with a vision, a dream, goals. Successful people set goals, make plans, and then act on them. The New Year Holiday is over and those New Year’s resolutions are quickly becoming a distant memory. Do you have visions of what you want to be? What you want to look like? Things you want to do? Sit down, write them out. Set goals and make a plan. Now, say what you want to do. Next, do what you say. Doing what you say is the hardest thing to do. This is where we all get lost.

    Not doing what you say you are going to do is where we all need to improve. What are some of the ways to improve on this? First of all, one needs to be honest and true to oneself. If you let yourself down, you should be disappointed. This doesn’t seem to bother a lot of people. One solution is to find somebody to be loyal to in achieving your goals. We seem to do a lot better when it comes to letting somebody else down. Write down your goals and visions. Put them where you can see them daily. Check and see if you are doing what you need to do daily. Don’t let weeks go by. Pick something with a date or time limit on it. Choose things that are fun, new, exciting. Challenge yourself. Last of all, give yourself a reward when you succeed.

    We’re there for you if you want to improve your health, lose weight, or improve your athletic performence. Keep Kinetic Connections in your visions for 2011. It’s not too late to follow through on your New Year’s Resolutions.

Welcome to 2011. We hope everybody’s holidays were healthy and safe. This is the first newsletter of 2011. There is some unfinished business from 2010 to clean up. First of all, Kinetic Connections wear is still for sale. If you would like to purchase Kinetic Connections athletic wear, go to www.IDENTITYCUSTOM.com, enter KINETIC2 for the store code. The store will be open until Friday, 1/14/11. Also, we are still taking suggestions to improve our services and our website. If you have any suggestions, we would love to hear them. Please e-mail us at info@kcconditioning.com. Our next staff meeting is 1/15/11. We will be implementing our plan for 2011. We would love to have input from our clients. Hope to hear from you.

We will be adding videos to our website this year. These videos are intended to be instructional with a theme, i.e. improve explosiveness. Hopefully over time we will have a video library showing our training techniques and explaining the philosophy behind the drills and exercises we use in our training. All of our training is researched and tested to be affective in improving performance. We would like to share this information with our followers over the next year.

Last of all, we hope everybody has started the New Year with goals to improve their health. We would like to be part of your health and performance improvement plans for 2011. Please feel free to contact any of us with questions regarding your health plans for 2011. You can contact us at the following e-mails: rob@kcconditioning.com, steve@kcconditioning.com, beth@kcconditioning.com, and larry@kcconditioning.com. We would love to hear from you. Also, Steve, Beth, and Larry are available for personal or small group training sessions at Snap 24 Hour Fitness in Lake Villa, Illinois and Salem, Wisconsin.

Have a good week!