Below, Tony Reno reveals a fitness secret never revealed before anywhere. And this secret works regardless of which system of training you use
What is the one fitness secret that will produce faster results than any other?
And what is the most amazing offer for fitness equipment ever made?
I'm about to tell you a fitness secret I've used to produce incredible instant results, both for me, and for people I've helped out.
I've used this secret to
This isn't an SCT secret. This isn't anything I've ever talked about before, to anyone.
And despite all that I have written and read, and all the amazing fitness researchers there are in the world who I've learned from over the past few years, this is just one of many fitness principles that I keep discovering that I have never seen described anywhere else, that is, never described anywhere else until I revealed them to some folks.
When you finish this page you'll be able to use this fitness secret immediately, and you'll get dramatic results from this secret even if you never purchase anything from me, never use my equipment, never set foot in a gym again.
This fitness secret
But before I explain my secret I have to tell you something that every fitness researcher knows, so that when you learn my secret you'll be able to use it yourself.
I saw an ad the other day for a pushup device. I don't want to give the device's name away, because for all I know the ad was written by an ad agency and not approved by the inventor.
But being who I am I always perk up and listen any time I see a new fitness product. So I'm watching this show and suddenly this ad pops up and it is this device to help you do fancy pushups. And as these ads always do, they show some muscular model standing there looking Greek-statue like, and then the ad announcer goes
Builds your entire upper body, your chest, your back, your arms, your biceps...
The second I heard that I had to sit up in my chair. "Wow! A pushup device that builds your back and biceps, this I gotta see."
I start waiting for the shots where the guy suspends himself upside down to do some sort of reverse pushups, or some kind of chin-ups with the device, but no, there's nothing like that. The guy just keeps doing pushups. Slightly fancy pushups, but pushups all the same.
Don't get me wrong, if you don't have weights, or if you are just starting out, pushups are a great exercise. While you are just getting started they can build your chest, your triceps, the front of your deltoids (shoulders) even help your abs a bit as your abs hold you in place.
But there isn't a fitness researcher on the planet who wouldn't immediately say, "No Way" the second they heard that a pushup device built a strong back, or strong biceps. It's just not going to happen.
Muscles do one thing. They contract. Whatever you are lifting, or forcing against, the only muscles you are working out are the ones that are contracting or at least trying to contract. Sure you can lower a heavy weight and the muscle might be expanding instead of contracting, but the force the muscle is producing is a contracting force.
Once you know that it starts to get a lot easier to start to get a feel for which exercises can produce results in which muscle groups.
And there is no way that any pushup device, certainly not the one I saw displayed, requires contracting force from either the bicep or back muscles.
That muscles only contract is not a big secret at all, but I guess it is not that well known outside of trained fitness professionals or at least not among ad agencies.
If you want to master taking control of your body, that is the first thing you need to know, muscles contract, that's the only thing they do. By itself that isn't such a big thing, but you do have to know that before you can make use of...
That muscles contract is just one of those things you're supposed to already know so that you can be ready to learn my big secret.
Here's my biggest fitness secret, and I haven't seen anyone anywhere describe this before.
By the way, this isn't the biggest fitness secret I know of, this is only the biggest one that, as far as I can tell, I personally discovered. (or maybe not, maybe I have a bigger secret, but that's a story for a different day). But the only big fitness secret I know of that is on par with this one is that the amount of time you need to "NOT" work out (that it, the time you need to rest between workouts) is as important to know as how to workout is.
What these 2 secrets have in common is that they'll help you smash through plateaus, and make ever advancing gains regardless of what you are doing.
Here's my, never before revealed, secret - Whatever you are trying to do, there is almost always one thing to focus on that will give you far greater results than all other things you could focus on combined.
Do you follow? 1 thing, not 10, not 20, not 100, 1, and Only 1.
Many different fields have the concept, and they call it different names. The name I like best is "limiting factor," but I've seen it called:
It comes up in some guise in almost every complex field of analysis or
business.
But for some reason I've never seen it applied to the complex fields of
fitness or biology, though it should be.
No matter what you are trying to accomplish there is, at this moment in
time, almost always only one limiting factor.
Again that is 1, not 10, not 100, 1.
And you can make faster, easier progress by finding, and focusing directly
on correcting that one limiting factor than you will ever make by focusing
on 10 non-limiting factors.
Here are some limiting factor examples to help you understand the concept better.
Lets say that I have this Ferrari, and I want you to make it go faster than it can right now.
How would you do that?
Would you hire a mechanic to give it a tune-up? Would you replace the engine? Give it some exotic gas?
You could do a hundred things, couldn't you, spending 10s of thousands of dollars?
But wait a minute, I forgot to tell you something. This particular Ferrari has a flat tire.
I really don't care about the fact that your car has 12 cylinders, and is fuel injected with a GPS sensing, traction controlled, all wheel drive, whatchamacallit controlled by a state of the art on board computer. Until you fix that flat, the rest of it might as well be modern art, for all the driving good it is going to do you. The flat tire is the limiting factor.
People understand this with cars, and you never see them tuning their engine because the tire is flat, but you see it all the time in fitness.
Let me give you some examples from a fitness and performance perspective.
Suppose someone wants to drive a golf ball 250 yards, and can currently only drive the ball 200 yards. What's the fastest way for this person to make the advance.
If he happens to be a very weak person who has years of golfing practice and experience, then more driving range practice is not going to help them progress nearly as rapidly as going to a gym and building muscle power will.
Since muscle power is the limiting factor in his case, then programs focused on increasing muscle power are going to produce dramatic results whereas programs focused on golf skills will produce marginal results at best..
You could forgive this golfer for then going around and telling everyone that he found that the key to a great drive was the weight room. He'd be wrong about that for most people, even though he was right for himself.
But if instead the guy who can only hit the golf ball 200 yards wasn't a physically weak, but highly experienced golfer, if we were instead talking about a powerful, but highly inexperienced NFL linemen, what would his fastest approach to adding 50 yards to his drive be? The NFL linemen is going to get far quicker results focusing on the techniques required to golf. He's not going to get nearly as big an improvement if he does like the first guy and tries to increase his drive in the gym by building even more muscle.
It wouldn't be surprising at all for the NFL linemen to add 75 yards or more to his drive after just a couple of lessons. So the football linemen would naturally conclude that it only takes a few simple lessons to add huge distance to their drive. And he might go around saying, "I added 75 yards to my drive with a couple of lessons," thinking mistakenly that this would work for anyone, when it wouldn't.
It turns out that almost everything you are doing has a limiting factor. Once you know that limiting factor, then you know the one thing you can focus on that will outperform, by far, everything else that you would focus on. And that one thing is almost surely a different thing for you than it is for someone else.
I'll give you 2 telling examples from my own life. Before I knew anything that I know now, I used to try to run to get in shape. I used to get magazines like runners world and stuff like that to see if it could help me get in shape.. I used to get up to a half a mile pretty quickly, usually within a few days of starting a program. But then what would happen is that the soles of my feet would blister and then tear, and soon I'd have to skip running for days, sometimes weeks at a time waiting for my feet to get better.
Time and time again I'd start the running program right out of some book, get to the point where my feet blistered and tore, then I'd be stuck for a while.
So then I got the brilliant idea (after some trial and error) of lacing my shoes a bit looser, and wearing 2, sometimes even 3 pairs of socks, and once I started doing that it was soon easy for me to go to 3 mile runs pretty quickly.
There it was, a ten dollar purchase tripled my running distance overnight.
But here's where people have to think differently than they have been. When I got to 3 miles I didn't suddenly get stuck and need to put on 4 pairs of socks. Nope, when I got to 3 miles my knees would give out. And until I invented my systems, I was pretty much stuck at getting up to 3 miles on a run.
An even better example (at least for plugging my equipment) is one that I showed videos of, not that long ago on the site.
This year I spent several Friday's trying to learn to ski. But try as I might I couldn't get past the stage of being a slow intermediate skier.
I'd work on the techniques the instructor taught me diligently, but I was getting nowhere. Then I noticed that every time I skied and tried to turn sharply there was one muscle group that was always giving out, a muscle to the side of my calves called the pereoneus.
Once I figured out that that muscle group was my limiting factor I created a simple, but powerful workout for that muscle group, did a single workout, and three days later I hit the slopes and was skiing black diamonds easily and fast.
Everyone I know who skis is amazed that I could go from being a weak intermediate skier to being a confident black diamond skier after only one workout, not on the slopes, but on my equipment.
Does that mean anyone who did my pereoneus workout would suddenly ski black diamonds?
It might, if that happened to be the limiting factor that was holding them back, but it wouldn't do much for them if the limiting factor was instead technique based. The reason it worked as well as it did for me is that I had gotten the technique down, so it wasn't technique that was holding me back, it was a strength limit. (and I had just the equipment to solve that).
Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods both "Got It" when it comes to this. Both of them had mastered the coordination of their sport at a amazing level, and once they had, then they spent time in the weight room building muscle to make faster gains than they could have made by continuing to keep all their focus on coordination skills.
With almost every amazing fitness or sports breakthrough, what you'll almost always find is that the person who made the amazing breakthrough had worked hard on many things and was getting nowhere. Then, suddenly, and practically overnight, that person spends a small amount of time on the one thing that was really in the way, and boom, immediate, and massive success.
For some of you this will be harder to do than it is for others. It will help you out a lot to first master the concept of "muscles only contract" that I told you at the top of the page. Start feeling your muscles when they are doing things to start getting the idea of which muscle does what movement.
Once you get the hang of that, then just start listening to your body and you'll soon find it easy to find the limiting factor for almost anything you are trying to do.
You can use this to break through almost any plateau you've had in almost any area of your life. This is one of those Mom and Apple Pie concepts that is always there.
For fitness the technique is to get in the habit of listening carefully to your body right at the point that it is failing you. At the point you are failing, what part of your body is complaining the loudest?
Once you know what part of your body that is, you can then start focusing on that one part, and do so even while ignoring everything else. That is, build a program for yourself that focuses entirely on that one part of your body that you've identified as the limiting factor, and do that to the exclusion of everything else.
And this is the weird reason that you'll often find odd examples of football players talking about making a breakthrough through relaxation techniques, while you'll hear of tennis pros, golfers and dancers making breakthroughs through strength training.
Understanding this concept can do a lot to help you know if someone else's breakthrough will also be a breakthrough for you. When you are reading other people's stories and trying to figure out if those stories apply to you, it helps to see if that person is similar to you.
Don't laugh at me too loud when I tell you this, but I used to go on web sites and tell people that I had discovered the secret to aerobic success. "Buy your shoes slightly too big, and wear 3 pairs of socks when you run, and you'll make a major breakthrough." I'd confidently tell people. (which I'm pretty sure rightfully branded me as a crackpot to everyone else).
The funny thing is, if someone was reading that, and that person was just like me, very large but with relatively small feet, that probably was the secret he needed to hear, the next secret anyway.
And as long as blisters were my limiting factor, no amount of running form techniques, no motivational techniques, no running magazine workouts were going to make 1/10th the improvement that putting on 2 thick or 3 thin pairs of socks did. Trying to do those other techniques before solving the blister problem is like trying to tune the Ferrari before fixing the flat. It's just a waste of time to be focusing on it.
No matter what you are trying to do, there is always a limiting factor, and it is almost always only one thing. And once you know what that thing is, you can make incredible breakthroughs by focusing on that one thing.
That is the biggest fitness secret that I know, one that I've never seen written about anywhere else, and one that I've used time and again to help people make major breakthroughs in short periods of time.
Use it on yourself, use it on your clients. It is a different way of thinking about fitness problems, a way that will give you at least 10 times the results of the standard approach of just saying, "run more" or "spend more time on the driving range"
Here's how to start using it.
Start by asking yourself (or your client) this particular question.
Is there any one particular part of my body that is getting in the way of success more than any other?
If the answer is yes, then you don't focus on the activity, but instead focus laser-like on that one body part and activities designed only to greatly strengthen that one body part (or in the case of blisters, protect that one body part). What you'll usually find is that that activity will produce faster results than anything else you've ever done. Even though it will seem like a strange way to progress. (if you've seen my videos on this, think of Tony Reno going from slowly, painfully skiing down intermediate slopes to whizzing down black diamond slopes after a single focused workout to get a sense for how dramatic the changes can be).
By the way, there are many times when people can vastly improve in ways they don't expect by learning this. For instance, if you have a weak back, you are going to do more for your bicep curls and shoulder press by focusing on your back exercises (the deadlift, the shrug, or side lateral raises, should it be a muscle symmetry issue). That's not the only example, but it is one of the most common. If people tell me their back is a problem in how they do other exercises, I try to get them (with the help of their medical professional) to focus on their back first, and just forget the fact that the other stuff isn't where they want it to be now. By doing that, then once they've fixed the back problem they'll quickly more than make up for the lost time with their other areas.
But if they insist on doing it the other way, it is almost impossible to progress. You body will fight against building biceps that would cause you a back injury if you ever used them.
At other times I find that people have trouble doing the leg press because it is hurting their back. The issue here is that the back isn't naturally padded, but that ends up being the part of the body that takes the brunt of a leg press, just due to the dynamics of the forces. Sometimes a pillow will help, but I've also had great long term success telling people to forget the leg press for a while. Make your back ridiculously strong (usually only takes 2 to 3 deadlift workouts to progress through it) then after you've done that go back to the leg press and you'll find that your numbers went up dramatically.
Is that because the legs got dramatically stronger? No, it's because the back is no longer in the way of the leg's displaying and using the strength that they already had. And the legs are going faster this way than if they were being worked out. Because if they were instead being worked out before the back got strengthened, the back would stay sore, and the legs would never get to do a real workout.
What makes this hard for people is that they keep believing that they progress best by progressing in all areas all the time. It's just not true. You progress best and fastest by finding your limiting areas and removing those limitations.
Either you can use this immediately to start seeing breakthroughs in your fitness goals, or I am willing to wager that you don't have strong fitness goals. Although if you don't have strong fitness goals, I'll also bet that it's only because you were frustrated from achieving them in the past. Once you start practicing this technique then you are going to start achieving your fitness goals faster, and with less effort than you have previously imagined. And after you do that, you are definitely going to start getting bigger goals, everyone does.
Ok, that's my Big Fitness Secret
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