The Importance of Equipment and Planning in Fitness Goals

When it comes to achieving fitness goals, having the right equipment and planning can make all the difference. As Colin mentions, even without expensive equipment like a Peloton bike, it's possible to create a workout plan using readily available items. For example, if you don't have any weights or dumbbells, you can still use your own body weight as resistance. You can also repurpose household items, such as moving furniture around the house, to get a good workout.

However, having some form of equipment can be beneficial for motivation and accountability. If you're struggling to find time to exercise, having something to look forward to, like a gym membership or a new bike, can make it easier to stick to your routine. Additionally, having someone to report to, such as a coach or personal trainer, can provide an added layer of motivation and accountability.

The Role of Nutrition in Fitness Goals

While working out is crucial for achieving fitness goals, nutrition plays a significant role in the overall process. Many people underestimate the importance of diet when it comes to weight loss and fat reduction. The truth is, if you're not making changes to your eating habits, you may not see the results you want, even with a solid workout routine. This is because exercise alone cannot compensate for poor nutrition.

For example, someone who spends thousands of dollars on a Peloton bike but still struggles to lose weight or achieve their fitness goals might be doing something wrong in terms of their diet. They might be relying too heavily on convenience foods and not making enough effort to eat healthier, more balanced meals. This is where nutrition planning comes in – having a clear plan for what you're going to eat can help make healthy choices easier and more sustainable.

Accountability and the Power of Commitment

One of the most important factors in achieving fitness goals is accountability. When you have someone or something to report to, it can provide an added motivation to stick to your routine. This could be a friend, family member, or even social media – whatever works for you. The key is to find something that makes you feel accountable and committed to your goals.

For Colin, having a training plan has made it easier to eat healthier when he's working out. He finds that if he's in the midst of a workout routine, he tends to make better food choices because he knows he needs to fuel his body properly. This highlights the importance of finding a system or routine that works for you and sticking to it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, achieving fitness goals requires more than just regular exercise. Having the right equipment, planning, and accountability can all play a significant role in making progress towards your goals. By understanding these factors and incorporating them into your fitness journey, you can increase your chances of success and reach your desired level of health and wellness.

For those interested in learning more about fitness and staying up-to-date on the latest news and reviews, Colin recommends checking out the Connect the Watts YouTube channel or website (connectthewatts.com). These resources offer a wealth of information on everything from workout routines to nutrition planning, making it easy to find what you need to stay on track with your fitness goals.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin this latest episode of around the network i talked to colin jenkins from connect the watts in this episode we focus on connected fitness like apple fitness plus and we talk about a very futuristic apple watch enabled service called future which connects you with a real personal trainer to help coach and guide you through your workouts check it out now what's up colin how you doing i'm doing pretty good jeff how are you doing i'm doing excellent but as you can see and probably all the viewers out there can see i definitely could stand to connect the watts a little bit pandemic hasn't been very kind to me in that respect so i was wondering if just right off the bat do you have any advice for someone that's like trying to get bounce back from sort of pandemic fatigue and you know all that comes with that yeah the stuff that's happening now with connective fitness just is making it so much easier to kind of get started to do stuff and like you work from home but and i think a lot of people are now working more from home and so having that ability to like have something that's just like right there next to you just ready to be there if you can just find the motivation to do it i think that's really huge and i think that it's important to like have something that just super convenient near you and that's just like right there so that way at least when you do have motivation you could just do something right yeah and that this is like you know the idea of connected fitness this website every day there's awesome articles about connected fitness products services and things of that nature and that's always something i've i've aspired to do to to get more in shape but i've always lacked the motivation and i feel like connected fitness is maybe the missing piece that could help me have that motivation do you think that the rise of connected fitness could help others like get over the hump so to speak yeah i really hope it does because i mean realistically jeff like gems and i'm speaking to somebody who's owned a gym for the past 10 to 14 years like they've largely just been a failure in the united states at least i mean gym memberships have increased two to three times over the past 20 years and obesity rates have also increased two to three times so there's been no real noticeable effect of people going to gyms and being more healthy and so i think really the key is that gyms aren't working and we need to figure out what something else and having something like i said that's inside your home that's a little bit more gamified because i mean everybody watches netflix or watches tv so that's something everybody kind of shares because it's just so convenient it's just right inside of everybody's house and we need to get fitness kind of on the same level and it's never it's never going to be like as addicting as netflix because there there's some pain with working out there's discomfort with it but for sure it can definitely be improved a lot in terms of you know the gamification and just like yeah just having that ability to make it more attractive to the regular person who is not necessarily going to be self-motivated all the time to to leave their house and go to the gym and do all the things that realistically very few people do colin i have to ask you though i don't think i've met anyone who's who's owned a gym like first of all how did you get into fitness in general and then how do you go about owning your own gym yeah and let me clarify like by gym i mean like fitness studios so it's not like i don't own some giant giant gym but i have owned several fitness studios uh so how i got into fitness was there's a program called crossfit that you might have heard of it's pretty popular but when i started doing crossfit back in college it was not popular at all and i'm lucky in that i'm from santa cruz california which is where crossfit started and so that's how i learned about crossfit and then when i went back to college during my second year there was just no place to do it so the really only option i had was to like open up my own facility so what i did was i just saved a bunch i had a burrito delivery service business that i had started my first year and so i sold enough burritos and this is before yeah this is before uber eats so it's actually a pretty good idea but uh i was able to sell enough burritos that i was able to get enough money to open up you know a small studio and so yeah that's kind of how i got started into it and then you know just over the past decade or so it's just been a fascination of like fitness training program design and you know motivation just what makes what works for different people because it's really fascinating you know how much things have changed and evolved over the past even just the past 10 years where do you see apple going as far as their footprint in the connected fitness landscape well apple has a lot of options and i think they tend to do things fairly slowly in terms of these new types of businesses one thing i've noticed with their apple fitness plus service it's pretty bare bones it's honestly one of the most bare-bones basic services available and that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad but it kind of reminds me of like their apple arcade and such it's just a minor service and it doesn't seem like they're really putting in a ton of effort to expand it or make it really really big or popular so i don't think apple is necessarily trying to really step into the connected fitness world right now fully and i don't know if they will i mean i don't follow apple nearly as closely as you guys but i could imagine 10 to 15 years down the road they might be interested in buying a company like peloton but i don't know if they're necessarily going to take that big step to developing and manufacturing their own equipment anytime soon i feel like apple does sort of tend to do that they you know dabble in a certain area but they don't fully commit to it obviously one could argue that the apple watch they fully committed with connected fitness in some degree but the fact that there's no dedicated workout hardware like with peloton makes me not as interested yeah and i would even question if the apple watch is really that dedicated to the connected fitness because to be honest it even though i love my apple watch like it's the least functional heart rate monitor or watch that i own because like you know with apple they just it doesn't work with anything else and so very few devices are able to connect to the apple watch there's some workarounds and companies are learning to do it better but it's super inconvenient and you know i wish my apple watch would work better for a lot of these different devices and services but as of right now it's it's honestly probably the least functional connected fitness wearable that i own it works a lot it works really well in other areas but in terms of connected fitness it's it's definitely not the best thing that i own for sure so so what what uh products are out there that that we should know about as far as connected fitness uh within the same lane is the apple watch would you say well there's a variety of them there's fitbit there's garmin whoop is a really good one because it tracks a lot of like your recovery and your heart rate uh hrv which is a measurement of your recovery so you know like if you should maybe take a rest day so for somebody who is interested in like really dialing in their fitness i feel like a lot of these other ones just provide a little bit more and a lot of these wearables do similar things as apple it's just that they're able to transmit their information to other products so it just makes them more usable like if you're gonna tie it to your treadmill or use it with your rower whereas the apple watch you know it doesn't really do that for a lot of products now speaking of apple watch i did see one of your recent videos about a product or service i should say called future it's a service in the corresponding app and it basically provides you with your own personal trainer like a real live personal trainer can you talk a little bit more about that yeah so the future app was just super impressive to me because you know i test these apps all the time and usually they have some classes or a little bit of individualization but not a whole lot but what you said to me the future really unique is the coaches one-on-one with you set up meetings through facetime but the coaches they have on staff are almost overqualified like the services i think is like 150 a month or so and these coaches are really good like professional strength coaches and i have a lot of friends that are strength coaches and they provide services similar to future and they do it at like 500 to like a thousand dollars per month and i think future even does it better than a lot of them so that was kind of what blew me the way is the fact that they could create this kind of personalized system for you at such cheap cost and then as you're saying with the apple watch and the apple integration it's so integrated with apple that and if you don't even have an apple phone you can't even use the service and if you don't have an apple watch they actually send you an apple watch which is kind of cool because you know when you're taking the classes the apple watch is you know telling you what to do alongside with your phone and if you have a headset on the coach is actually giving you personalized messages that they had left when they designed the workout for you and you can change the weights that you're using on your watch so you can record everything you do super conveniently without even you know touching your phone so i just thought it was really impressive with how well it was integrated with you know the apple and the apple watch i've always had a problem with accountability like just being accountable i always have these goals but having someone to answer to so to speak kind of pushes pushes you a little bit so i don't know i might check that out do i need a gym membership to use future or can i use it at home or what's the yeah so that is kind of the thing with with future it's it is based on what you have so if you're working out at home primarily and you don't have any equipment like you could still use future but the coach is going to write you a workout with stuff that you have available so go go lift those those that dresser over there move that couch exactly so you probably won't have as good an experience with the service like future unless you have at least you know some equipment or you know some dumbbells and yeah if you had like a little if you had a garage gym or if you went to a gym um i think that is probably ideal for a future and it makes sense like because a lot of people don't go to the gym because they don't really know what to do or don't have a plan and don't really that's me yeah definitely me aren't really excited because they're not you're gonna go there and you know play around with something for a little bit and then just head out whereas you know if you have a plan when you go there it might be a little bit more enticing to you know make that trek over you know to the gym for like a half an hour hour or whatever makes sense for you so colin are there any other tips or pieces of advice you can give our our viewers to uh maybe if they're interested in becoming uh fitter is that a word yeah yeah that works yeah there's just a few things like one you have to start somewhere because most people just never start doing anything and that's really the hardest part so if you can't afford a peloton bike like get a cheaper bike or find something else that you can do or just right away you know download an app follow a program whatever makes sense like you just got to do the first workout or commit to the first week and then the second piece that you're saying is actually huge is having that accountability aspect most people that i've found that are successful have a lot of accountability and for some people that's just you know telling their family about what their goals are going to do or what they're going to do this month are their friends or sometimes posting on social media works but not usually as much but even having a coach that's just huge because you have somebody that you feel accountable to who's kind of kind of like say hey what what happened this week or okay you fell off let's figure this out for next week because you can't be falling off two weeks in a row and so right the accountability like getting started accountability and then the third piece i think for most people is and this isn't really about connected fitness tech but nutrition plays a bigger role than i think most people want to believe when it comes to their their health and fitness goals and you can't really ignore it so you could work out a ton and but if you don't change your eating habits sometimes you just don't see the results you really want and so right whatever you do if it involves losing weight or losing fat like you have to have some sort of nutrition component even if it's just like a broad plan of i'm gonna try eating this for breakfast instead of this like you just have to do something to that degree because i think a lot of people do get discouraged they spend thousands of dollars on a peloton they ride it four days a week and they lose like they're still getting number twos and mcdonald's there yeah yeah they don't lose anyway and they blame they blame the bike when really you gotta see these devices as as tools to help with that but they're not going to necessarily be the only thing that you need to do um i know for me personally that if i have like a training plan like if i am working out it's just easier to eat better during that period like if i'm not working out it's just for some reason my brain works where if i'm working out i try to eat better and if i'm not working out i don't care so i don't know if that's how everybody is but i think there's a decent amount of people that if you start working out you just might naturally eat better as well but you do have to have that component in there for sure so colin i really appreciate it you dropped some some serious knowledge there and as someone who is aspires to get fit or just get more in shape like i'm not like yeah super out of shape but i want to be in better shape so colin for those that are interested where can they find more well you can go to the youtube channel for connect the watts uh that's where all the videos go for you know the reviews guides updates all the stuff for connected fitness and you can also go to the connect the watts website connectthewatts.com and that's where we post a lot of articles about more updates and news and all that stuff uh so you can go to both places and you'll get a lot more information there thanks thanks youin this latest episode of around the network i talked to colin jenkins from connect the watts in this episode we focus on connected fitness like apple fitness plus and we talk about a very futuristic apple watch enabled service called future which connects you with a real personal trainer to help coach and guide you through your workouts check it out now what's up colin how you doing i'm doing pretty good jeff how are you doing i'm doing excellent but as you can see and probably all the viewers out there can see i definitely could stand to connect the watts a little bit pandemic hasn't been very kind to me in that respect so i was wondering if just right off the bat do you have any advice for someone that's like trying to get bounce back from sort of pandemic fatigue and you know all that comes with that yeah the stuff that's happening now with connective fitness just is making it so much easier to kind of get started to do stuff and like you work from home but and i think a lot of people are now working more from home and so having that ability to like have something that's just like right there next to you just ready to be there if you can just find the motivation to do it i think that's really huge and i think that it's important to like have something that just super convenient near you and that's just like right there so that way at least when you do have motivation you could just do something right yeah and that this is like you know the idea of connected fitness this website every day there's awesome articles about connected fitness products services and things of that nature and that's always something i've i've aspired to do to to get more in shape but i've always lacked the motivation and i feel like connected fitness is maybe the missing piece that could help me have that motivation do you think that the rise of connected fitness could help others like get over the hump so to speak yeah i really hope it does because i mean realistically jeff like gems and i'm speaking to somebody who's owned a gym for the past 10 to 14 years like they've largely just been a failure in the united states at least i mean gym memberships have increased two to three times over the past 20 years and obesity rates have also increased two to three times so there's been no real noticeable effect of people going to gyms and being more healthy and so i think really the key is that gyms aren't working and we need to figure out what something else and having something like i said that's inside your home that's a little bit more gamified because i mean everybody watches netflix or watches tv so that's something everybody kind of shares because it's just so convenient it's just right inside of everybody's house and we need to get fitness kind of on the same level and it's never it's never going to be like as addicting as netflix because there there's some pain with working out there's discomfort with it but for sure it can definitely be improved a lot in terms of you know the gamification and just like yeah just having that ability to make it more attractive to the regular person who is not necessarily going to be self-motivated all the time to to leave their house and go to the gym and do all the things that realistically very few people do colin i have to ask you though i don't think i've met anyone who's who's owned a gym like first of all how did you get into fitness in general and then how do you go about owning your own gym yeah and let me clarify like by gym i mean like fitness studios so it's not like i don't own some giant giant gym but i have owned several fitness studios uh so how i got into fitness was there's a program called crossfit that you might have heard of it's pretty popular but when i started doing crossfit back in college it was not popular at all and i'm lucky in that i'm from santa cruz california which is where crossfit started and so that's how i learned about crossfit and then when i went back to college during my second year there was just no place to do it so the really only option i had was to like open up my own facility so what i did was i just saved a bunch i had a burrito delivery service business that i had started my first year and so i sold enough burritos and this is before yeah this is before uber eats so it's actually a pretty good idea but uh i was able to sell enough burritos that i was able to get enough money to open up you know a small studio and so yeah that's kind of how i got started into it and then you know just over the past decade or so it's just been a fascination of like fitness training program design and you know motivation just what makes what works for different people because it's really fascinating you know how much things have changed and evolved over the past even just the past 10 years where do you see apple going as far as their footprint in the connected fitness landscape well apple has a lot of options and i think they tend to do things fairly slowly in terms of these new types of businesses one thing i've noticed with their apple fitness plus service it's pretty bare bones it's honestly one of the most bare-bones basic services available and that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad but it kind of reminds me of like their apple arcade and such it's just a minor service and it doesn't seem like they're really putting in a ton of effort to expand it or make it really really big or popular so i don't think apple is necessarily trying to really step into the connected fitness world right now fully and i don't know if they will i mean i don't follow apple nearly as closely as you guys but i could imagine 10 to 15 years down the road they might be interested in buying a company like peloton but i don't know if they're necessarily going to take that big step to developing and manufacturing their own equipment anytime soon i feel like apple does sort of tend to do that they you know dabble in a certain area but they don't fully commit to it obviously one could argue that the apple watch they fully committed with connected fitness in some degree but the fact that there's no dedicated workout hardware like with peloton makes me not as interested yeah and i would even question if the apple watch is really that dedicated to the connected fitness because to be honest it even though i love my apple watch like it's the least functional heart rate monitor or watch that i own because like you know with apple they just it doesn't work with anything else and so very few devices are able to connect to the apple watch there's some workarounds and companies are learning to do it better but it's super inconvenient and you know i wish my apple watch would work better for a lot of these different devices and services but as of right now it's it's honestly probably the least functional connected fitness wearable that i own it works a lot it works really well in other areas but in terms of connected fitness it's it's definitely not the best thing that i own for sure so so what what uh products are out there that that we should know about as far as connected fitness uh within the same lane is the apple watch would you say well there's a variety of them there's fitbit there's garmin whoop is a really good one because it tracks a lot of like your recovery and your heart rate uh hrv which is a measurement of your recovery so you know like if you should maybe take a rest day so for somebody who is interested in like really dialing in their fitness i feel like a lot of these other ones just provide a little bit more and a lot of these wearables do similar things as apple it's just that they're able to transmit their information to other products so it just makes them more usable like if you're gonna tie it to your treadmill or use it with your rower whereas the apple watch you know it doesn't really do that for a lot of products now speaking of apple watch i did see one of your recent videos about a product or service i should say called future it's a service in the corresponding app and it basically provides you with your own personal trainer like a real live personal trainer can you talk a little bit more about that yeah so the future app was just super impressive to me because you know i test these apps all the time and usually they have some classes or a little bit of individualization but not a whole lot but what you said to me the future really unique is the coaches one-on-one with you set up meetings through facetime but the coaches they have on staff are almost overqualified like the services i think is like 150 a month or so and these coaches are really good like professional strength coaches and i have a lot of friends that are strength coaches and they provide services similar to future and they do it at like 500 to like a thousand dollars per month and i think future even does it better than a lot of them so that was kind of what blew me the way is the fact that they could create this kind of personalized system for you at such cheap cost and then as you're saying with the apple watch and the apple integration it's so integrated with apple that and if you don't even have an apple phone you can't even use the service and if you don't have an apple watch they actually send you an apple watch which is kind of cool because you know when you're taking the classes the apple watch is you know telling you what to do alongside with your phone and if you have a headset on the coach is actually giving you personalized messages that they had left when they designed the workout for you and you can change the weights that you're using on your watch so you can record everything you do super conveniently without even you know touching your phone so i just thought it was really impressive with how well it was integrated with you know the apple and the apple watch i've always had a problem with accountability like just being accountable i always have these goals but having someone to answer to so to speak kind of pushes pushes you a little bit so i don't know i might check that out do i need a gym membership to use future or can i use it at home or what's the yeah so that is kind of the thing with with future it's it is based on what you have so if you're working out at home primarily and you don't have any equipment like you could still use future but the coach is going to write you a workout with stuff that you have available so go go lift those those that dresser over there move that couch exactly so you probably won't have as good an experience with the service like future unless you have at least you know some equipment or you know some dumbbells and yeah if you had like a little if you had a garage gym or if you went to a gym um i think that is probably ideal for a future and it makes sense like because a lot of people don't go to the gym because they don't really know what to do or don't have a plan and don't really that's me yeah definitely me aren't really excited because they're not you're gonna go there and you know play around with something for a little bit and then just head out whereas you know if you have a plan when you go there it might be a little bit more enticing to you know make that trek over you know to the gym for like a half an hour hour or whatever makes sense for you so colin are there any other tips or pieces of advice you can give our our viewers to uh maybe if they're interested in becoming uh fitter is that a word yeah yeah that works yeah there's just a few things like one you have to start somewhere because most people just never start doing anything and that's really the hardest part so if you can't afford a peloton bike like get a cheaper bike or find something else that you can do or just right away you know download an app follow a program whatever makes sense like you just got to do the first workout or commit to the first week and then the second piece that you're saying is actually huge is having that accountability aspect most people that i've found that are successful have a lot of accountability and for some people that's just you know telling their family about what their goals are going to do or what they're going to do this month are their friends or sometimes posting on social media works but not usually as much but even having a coach that's just huge because you have somebody that you feel accountable to who's kind of kind of like say hey what what happened this week or okay you fell off let's figure this out for next week because you can't be falling off two weeks in a row and so right the accountability like getting started accountability and then the third piece i think for most people is and this isn't really about connected fitness tech but nutrition plays a bigger role than i think most people want to believe when it comes to their their health and fitness goals and you can't really ignore it so you could work out a ton and but if you don't change your eating habits sometimes you just don't see the results you really want and so right whatever you do if it involves losing weight or losing fat like you have to have some sort of nutrition component even if it's just like a broad plan of i'm gonna try eating this for breakfast instead of this like you just have to do something to that degree because i think a lot of people do get discouraged they spend thousands of dollars on a peloton they ride it four days a week and they lose like they're still getting number twos and mcdonald's there yeah yeah they don't lose anyway and they blame they blame the bike when really you gotta see these devices as as tools to help with that but they're not going to necessarily be the only thing that you need to do um i know for me personally that if i have like a training plan like if i am working out it's just easier to eat better during that period like if i'm not working out it's just for some reason my brain works where if i'm working out i try to eat better and if i'm not working out i don't care so i don't know if that's how everybody is but i think there's a decent amount of people that if you start working out you just might naturally eat better as well but you do have to have that component in there for sure so colin i really appreciate it you dropped some some serious knowledge there and as someone who is aspires to get fit or just get more in shape like i'm not like yeah super out of shape but i want to be in better shape so colin for those that are interested where can they find more well you can go to the youtube channel for connect the watts uh that's where all the videos go for you know the reviews guides updates all the stuff for connected fitness and you can also go to the connect the watts website connectthewatts.com and that's where we post a lot of articles about more updates and news and all that stuff uh so you can go to both places and you'll get a lot more information there thanks thanks you\n"