Planning to Succeed: How to tackle meal prepping

I reached the point in my training where I realized that if I wanted to see real results, I had to deal with my diet. We’ve all been there: working out harder and harder each week, but never seeing a big change on the scale. The missing link is almost always our diet, and one of the best tricks for sticking to a healthy eating plan is learning to meal prep. Once or twice a week, make the time to get in the kitchen and pre-make a few meals. The easiest way to start is by prepping your lunches. That way you know your workday meal meets your nutritional needs and you don’t get stuck buying expensive (and often unhealthy) takeout. So, without further ado, my list of practical meal prep tips.

Shop with a list (and stick to it).

The most important aspect of meal prep success is having a plan! If you anticipate cooking on Sunday afternoon, take some time on Saturday to map out your meals for the following week. This sets you up for a successful shopping trip to buy all the things you need (and none of the things you don’t). Mini-tip: never go to the grocery store hungry. That’s how you end up with a cart full of chocolate and not much else.

Buy the right tupperware.

I didn’t realize the importance of this until I had disorganized mounds of randomly sized tupperware literally falling out of my cupboards and drawers. Having a set of uniform tupperware will take a little bit of stress off when you’re right in the middle of cooking up all your food. You’ll thank me later. You can find lots of tupperware options on Amazon; this one is my favorite.

Crock pots will save you heaps of time.

Included in this tip are rice cookers, pressure cookers or any other tech gadget that does the hard work for you while you leisurely sip coffee on the couch or do other fun things like nap. You can cook up whole meals in the crockpot, bulk prepare rice, or just prep all of your protein for the week with this ridiculously simple salsa chicken recipe.

Frozen veggies are your friend.

While fresh produce is delicious, let’s be real: it’s Pittsburgh in the winter and that stuff just isn’t looking that good. Frozen veggies pack the same nutritional punch as fresh produce, but they’ll stay good for much longer and if you shop carefully, you’ll end up spending a bit less too. Frozen produce is picked at peak ripeness and immediately flash frozen, meaning it’s going to be even more fresh than what you find at the front of the store this time of year. Another bonus, it’s easy to mix and match frozen veggie options, so you’re not stuck eating broccoli all week long.

Know when to ask for help.

Have you been working on your meal prep skills for weeks and feel like you’re spinning your wheels? It’s probably time to call in the experts. Many of your Union Fitness staff members utilize nutrition coaches and we encourage all of our members to do the same! That’s why we made sure to include a personalized diet plan with for our 8-week challenge participants. Mike Dolce works with some of the country’s most successful athletes on their diets, and he’s putting a plan together for Union Fitness members that are tackling either the Strength Project or the Steel Revolution Spin Challenge. There’s still time to sign up for a challenge and get access to all the training and nutrition tools you need to meet your goals this year.

Take these tips and jump right in! We’ll be adding some of our favorite meal prep recipes to future blog posts, so keep an eye out. See you in the gym!

Wounded Warrior Project

At Union Fitness, our primary goal is to build a community where our members are passionate about fitness, but we also aim to foster a mindset of giving back to the community outside of our walls. We were fortunate enough to host our first (hopefully of many) events with the Wounded Warrior Project.

First, I’d like to thank Luke Koval for reaching out to set the event up with us. Second, I’m honored that we had about 10 veterans show up for the event. Some were experienced lifters, others hadn’t touched a weight since leaving the service or since their injury, and others had never done any strength training. It was a challenge for our staff, but a blessing as well. If it were easier to get stronger… if the weights lifted themselves… we would never learn any lessons from pushing ourselves and digging deeper to find out what we’re really made of. Well the same goes for coaching. If you explained it once and your members got it, then how would you ever get better. Fitness in general is one big puzzle. We’re just trying to put the pieces, very individualized pieces, together.

The second blessing was the fact that due to these veterans’ sacrifices, we were able to spend a peaceful afternoon together going over training, recovery, rehab, and techniques for mental clarity. Lifting, running, spin, yoga, or whatever you gravitate towards is as much or more for your mental health than it is physical.

To summarize, everyone started to filter in around 1pm. As I said, we had ten veterans, but about 20 people in total. Some girlfriends joined us as well as other training partners and friends for moral support. Our coaching staff gave a brief insight into who we are, what we do, and our philosophies at Union Fitness. Then we flipped the script and had the veterans share with us whatever they were comfortable with- training experience, branch, reasons they were here, injuries, goals, etc. It can be a therapeutic experience to discuss some of these openly, but we have to understand that in order to support these men and women sometimes, especially early in their recovery, they don’t want to share much if anything at all.

We let them guide the afternoon, and they really just wanted to get some input on their strength training and technique, so we moved on to coaching the squat, bench, and deadlift. Even some of the guys that had never squatted before were looking really comfortable under the bar after about a half hour of coaching. There were a couple that squatted over 400lbs, a handful that benched over 300, and some really good looking deadlifts too!

Afterward everyone chowed down on some food that the Penn Brewery donated for the event. It’s nice when the local community supports a new business, all for the sake of giving back to our troops. Our next event is already scheduled for January 31st. Stay tuned for updates! And email us at join@unionfitness.com for any details or if you’d like to make any donations for our veterans!