I try not to take myself too seriously, and anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time knows that I like to have fun and prod at pretty much everything I can, including myself. Sure, my house may smell of rich mahogany and I have many leather-bound books, but I also wrote blog posts on the Health Benefits of Farting and How Women’s Liberation is Ruining the World. Sure, I may talk all big and fancy about things like abdominal anatomy and how to reduce knee pain by working on adductors, but I also giggle like a 6-year-old whenever I hear a good fart joke.

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That being said, I  want to showcase some of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in 2011, just to make sure I can stay humble and not be thought of as too big of a deal (even if it’s just in my own mind).

1. Not making enough time to prepare my own meals

There was a lot of days where I would come to work with an empty back pack and wind up only having a protein bar available, meaning the rest of my meals were coming from either Starbucks, the wrap place in the food court, Subway or Mucho Burrito.

This didn’t help the waist line, or the pocket-book. While I was still making good food choices, the choices weren’t as controlled as they should be. It’s an easy habit to develop an absence of a habit, which is also something that is counter-productive in nature. This coming year, I’m planning on having my meals for the day planned out the previous evening, and ready to go so that it’s one less thing to think about at 5am the following morning.

Hand in hand with this one would be not scheduling my workouts and making sure they were done each day. I have a bad habit of finding things to do and pushing back less necessary elements. Plus, I figure I have to look like I drink the Kool Aid I’m trying to push on everyone else and get my own workouts in on a regular basis. So in 2012, I’m going to ensure I get a workout in each day, be it a heavy strength day, metabolic conditioning, or even just 20 minutes of mobility and foam rolling. It just has to happen before I go home for sleepies that evening.

2. Underestimating bandwidth

A very costly mistake this year, I put Post Rehab Essentials up for sale, and in the first week, had a few requests to make the videos available for download. Being the one to over-deliver on service as much as possible, I put the videos up on a file-sharing site (which I’ll keep nameless), and instead of sending the link to just those who asked for the downloads, sent out a blast email to everyone who had purchased the product, and as a result wound up going waaaaaay over the allotted bandwidth of downloads for the website options in just one day, meaning I incurred a usage charge of a few hundred bucks.

This was a mistake of ignorance on my part, and meant I had a large expense that I hadn’t planned on, which meant my wallet felt a little lighter at the end of the day. Being someone who is very motivated by cash, this was a bit of a nuclear moment for me, however it did happen to lead to a personal record in bench press the following day!

3. Not Re-Assessing Enough

My initial assessments are usually pretty bang-on, but a big downfall is that I typically don’t re-assess enough (in my opinion). Most of my clients are coming in with specific issues that are hard to quantify, but at the same time that shouldn’t stop me from trying to showcase some of the benefits being made or understanding what areas are not seeing benefits. One area I need to pick up my game is in body composition assessments for my weight loss clients. This is something that I’m going to make sure happens more frequently, and I’m even going to build a calendar feature into my computer to schedule my clients testing ahead of time.

Rather than approaching it in a less than random manner for each client, I’m going to build in a systematic re-assessment schedule for all clients, specifically focusing on assessments that are tailored to their goal set, from the first of the year or when they first start training with me, so that I can stay on point and make sure they know they’re getting re-tested at regular intervals.

The funny thing is that I’m a big data geek, so you would think that I would want to collect all the data possible, but it’s something I’ve let fall short for too long. I still do assessments and re-assessments with all my clients, but it’s not frequent enough for my liking, so I’m going to kick it up a notch.

To give an idea of some of the basics of assessment I take people through, it follows a simple flow system:

1. body composition and anthropometrics (tape measurements)

2. Functional Movement Screen (if applicable, if not, skip to part 4) to determine specific areas that may need more addressing.

3. Specific joint or muscle testing, as defined by functional screening

4. Provocation testing of potentially damaged areas that may be cause of referral to health practitioner if positive testing is revealed. If no pain or major dysfunction is detected in earlier stages, skip this stage.

5. Performance testing, goal specific; cardio testing; general physical preparedness testing

4. Not Reading Enough

I’ll admit it, I read a whole bunch. A shit-ton for those interested in the metric conversions, which is slightly more than a bundle, but less than a plethora. However, I don’t think I was able to keep up to the level I wanted to, and as a result I ended the year with more books that I wanted to read than books that I had read. This is probably due to the fact that a lot of my free time was taken up by things like a wedding and trying to figure out how to launch a digital product at the end of the year, but I still want to make sure I get a lot of reading, both book-based and technical-based, completed for a few projects I have coming up next year.

5. Not Writing my Book

This is an on-going issue with me, and one I want to make sure I get busy with in 2012. For those interested, I’m hoping to publish a book that can be used by everyone to build a strong back and re-design the way we train the core. The principles are ones I’ve discussed and have seen the research on, so I know it’s effective, plus I use them with a lot of my rehab, athletic, and general population clients with some really good success.

So those were my biggest mistakes and regrets of the year, but what were yours? drop a comment below, and if we can get 20 comments on this bad mamma jamma, I’ll give away some cool free stuff.