Welcome to my first 2017 blog! I am often asked how do I do my job as a GM of a technology company, travel weekly, and still find time to eat right, train and compete as a bodybuilder at the national level (July 2016, I took a first place men’s 60, light heavyweight class at Master’s Nationals in Pittsburgh).  The simple answer is that I am a combination of organized, committed and consistent. The focus of the blog is to drill into and share the “how I do it”, a collection of applied experience which I have gained over the years.  These blogs will be brief, I am not into long winded anything, we are all short on time, both to write and to read the blog, so I want to deliver suggestions that may help you on your journey as they have helped me on my journey.

Let’s start with some comments around being organized and what that means.  Organization is one of my strengths and the key to my skills “stack”.  I don’t know a single successful bodybuilder or competitor that is not organized.  As corny as it sounds the old adage is right; “we never plan to fail, we just fail to plan.”  Food is the most critical part of your training, and for many people the hardest to get right consistently.  Getting your ass to the gym is the easy part of the whole equation.  I am often asked how I manage my food when I split my week between two different cities?  It requires organization and some advance planning, but it’s not that hard.  Think through your week before it gets there.  What constraints are there?  Are there meetings that will interfere with training?  How do you engineer in all the training sessions to work around this?  Is there a business dinner or social commitment?  Just a simple look ahead into the week’s activities saves a ton of scrambling and frustration and allows you to rearrange food and training to cope with the conflicts.

So let’s talk about food prep.  This is one of the easiest thing to do.  The best way is to do all the food prep for the week at the same time.  I do this generally on Sundays.  This actually saves me a ton of time because I can prep beef chicken, fish rice, etc. in big batches.  I take the bulk cooked food with me on the airplane in big zip lock bags in a carry on.  During the week all I have to do is meal “assembly” by weighing out the food in containers that I take with me when I leave the apartment in the morning.   If you wake up in the morning and ask yourself “What am I going to do for food today?” you are way behind where you need to be.  If you ask that same question after you left the house for the day, you will most likely not be able to get the kind of food you need and it will cost you way more!  There is no excuse for not being able to do food prep on the weekend.  Yes, there are weekend distractions and commitments but even with those you can still get it done.  Better food and less cost.  So make the commitment to start doing this NOW.  Of course there are always challenges, and at times you have to eat on the run.  In my next blog I’ll talk about how to grab meals on the go when planning for the day just doesn’t work.  There are good and bad ways to deal with it.  I’ll share some thoughts.  Until then, train hard and eat well!

About the Author

Jon Witty is a technology executive, NPC light heavy weight master’s class competitor and co-owner of WillPower Gym in Hillsboro, Oregon.  He has been competing since 2000 and leading sales and marketing teams in technology companies since 1985.  With the schedule and travel demands of his profession he is often asked how he manages to find time to train, eat well and compete. He has decided to share some of his wisdom, insights and experience through this blog to explain how you can “have it all”