I love watching the Summer Olympics every four years. I rarely watch the winter games–I enjoy the X Games year round. The best athletes in the world come together to compete and show the world what they’ve worked so hard to accomplish in the last several years of their lives. Olympic athletes train for hours everyday for years. Their dedication to becoming the best athlete that they can be is astounding.

The rest of us can’t afford to put our focus solely on being an athlete–let alone an Olympic caliber one. While Olympians may be superhuman, we can still take lessons from them and apply it to our lives. Here are seven fitness lessons that we can learn from the Olympics.

The discipline and mental attitude of an Olympian is what gives them their edge. Most of us can’t even stick to a workout plan or goal for more than a few weeks. They work steadily for years constantly believing in what they are doing. Results rarely come overnight. It takes a strong mind to weather the storms without getting discouraged and giving up.

If we only have one take away, it should be the strong mental attitude; to always believe that we can achieve whatever goal we set forth. It might not come instantly but, we will get there if we stay focused and keep working at it. Worthwhile goals don’t come easy or they wouldn’t be worthwhile.

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Once upon a time, the idea of eating fat to lose fat–or weight–seemed like a pretty silly thing to do; oxymoronic, if you will. I had some weight loss talk with co-workers recently and they thought I was out of my mind when I bashed the Food Pyramid–and this newer Food Pyramid–and recommended a much more simpler system of giving percentages to carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.

This article explains some more fat fighting tips including using fat to fight fat. My basic nutritional guideline is to adjust the percentage of carbs, proteins, and fats that I consume depending on what I’m trying to do–protein usually gets the largest share of the pie.

The seemingly insane idea of consuming 20% of your diet as fat isn’t so ridiculous when you understand a few things. It is true that a gram of fat has more than two times the calories of a gram of carbs or proteins. Obviously eating a lot of fat is not going to do you much good. However, limiting your fat consumption to some ridiculously low level by replacing it with more carbs is not going to help you either.

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The closest thing we have to the Fountain of Youth is exercise. Scientific research has found that running eases the aches of aging. This study tracked people over the age of 50 and found that those who ran about 4 hours a week were able to delay the effects of aging by about 16 years.

I believe the best form of exercise to keep you young is weight training. It’ll help maintain muscle mass and bone density as we get older. Running and cardio exercise is great but, hitting the weights is probably the best bet for staying young. Of course, you can lift weights and do cardio. In that case, you might live forever.

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To follow up my previous post about push-ups and to continue my love for this particular exercise, Men’s Health has a great article about the different variations of the push-up for a more total body exercise. By the time you’re able to do 50 straight push-ups, you should employ some of these variations to your routine to keep things fresh. Muscles respond best when you shock them with new and different exercise routines.

The push-up has the wonderful quality of being able to not only work your chest, shoulders, and triceps like the bench press but, also your back, abs, and glutes. These variations will work even more muscles as they’ll force you to use the often ignored stabilizing muscles.

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Push-ups are considered the best exercise you can do without any equipment. I personally love the push-up and all the variations of it that you can do. I don’t know where the 50 push-up benchmark came from but, being able to do 50 push-ups has always seemed like a feat of fitness. I feel the 100 push-up mark is more impressive than 50 but, I don’t always maintain the endurance necessary for that feat.

Men’s Health has a nice article on just this topic. This particular article uses the bench press to help get you to 50 push-ups in 10 weeks. How long you’ll need to be able to do 50 straight push-ups is largely dependent on where you are now on the fitness scale.

If you don’t want to use bench presses to get to 50 push-ups, I have an alternative. I learned of this technique with pull-ups but, it can applied to anything. It is basically an upside down pyramid. Let’s say you can do 10 push-ups. You can take that down by half to 5. You would say 5 push-ups, rest 10 seconds, do 4, rest 10 seconds, do 3, and so on until 0.

With this technique you’ll have done 5+4+3+2+1, or 15, push-ups. You can reduce the rest period or start with more push-ups. The idea is that this will allow you to do more repetitions with small amounts of rest–almost like doing them straight. You can keep increasing the number of push-ups you start with as it gets easier.

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