Welcome to the Fitness Roller Coaster Ride, please enter the ride quickly, secure all lose articles and carry ons and fasten your seat belt tightly. During the ride you will experience ups and downs and a few dreaded plateaus along the way.

And so it goes with weight loss and fitness. There will be days when you hit a personal best and you feel like a million bucks. There will also be days when you just don't feel like going to the gym or the scale goes up and you feel like all the hard work you've put in has been for naught.

Today, I just experienced one of those down moments after my weekly weigh-in. Despite having what I thought was a good week, I didn't lose any weight. I stepped on and off the scale at least 6 times, hoping to see at least 1 pound come off but each time the scale stopped, it still read 194.

Stepping off the scale for the last time I felt dejected and wasn't looking forward to my morning workout at all, what was the point? But even as I wallowed in my self-pity, I knew that going to the gym was exactly what I needed to do. The scale may not show the progress I was expecting, but I know I'm getting back into shape and can feel the tone of my muscles getting firm again.

This is the part of the roller coaster ride where it's almost too easy to get off, when you don't see the progress you expect. But, with a little mental toughness, this is also the point of the ride where you can cinch your seatbelt a little tighter and say to yourself "I'm going to make it through this." And when you do get through it, you'll experience the exhilaration of reaching a new personal best or weight loss goal and the ride will be fun again.

I tightened my seat belt and made it to the gym. The workout wasn't my best, I still was thinking of my weigh-in. But, I still made it to the gym and that's the important thing. I didn't give up and I've re-focused my energies on working hard and eating right. I know that this ride isn't automatic, I have to do my part to pull out of the lows in order to reach new highs.

So this week, my personal roller coaster is starting a new climb. When I weigh-in next week I plan on being higher up that hill than when I started. Between my personal motivation, and that of my family and friends in the Turbulence Training community I have all the support and encouragement I need to reach my next peak.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services just put out new physical activity guidelines. I haven't had a chance to look over the actual guidelines, but the biggest area they are stressing is that adults get 2 1/2 hours of moderate activity in a week, or 1 1/4 hour of vigorous activity a week. Do you think Turbulence Training would qualify as vigorous??? They do also recommend some type of strength training 2 times a week.

There's no doubt about it, Turbulence Training gives you the best "bang for your buck" when it comes to getting results from short, vigorous, activities.

These physical activity guidelines offer recommendations on how much activity and what types of activity different groups of people should be getting. The separate it out between children (should get 1 hour of activity in per day), adults (2 1/2 hours per week) and older adults (same 2 1/2 hours as adults).

You can read the press release from HHS here.

I'll be reading over the guidelines this week and will post any thoughts or comments I have later.

Prad Pilon, the author of Eat-Stop-Eat, has a fantastic blog post about ideal weight goals versus ideal look goals.

Brad makes a lot of sense (as he normally does) and I've now figured out what my ideal look should be, a 31" waist with 51" shoulders.

Those are pretty lofty numbers to be shooting for, but I know that when I reach them, I will be in great shape and have a killer body.

During yesterday's strength training session, I tweaked my knee during dumbbell squats. It just felt like a light pinch over my right knee cap, nothing major but I need to watch it and not over train. Since I tweaked my knee I wanted to try and minimize any impact on it for an interval session today. The obvious choice was to hit the pool and do my intervals in the water.

I really enjoy swimming. Growing up in Miami/Ft.Lauderdale, everyone had a pool in their back yard as well as the gorgeous beaches. Living in Cleveland, I'm right off of Lake Erie so I've been in and around water all my life but it had been quite awhile since I'd spent any time in the water.

It's a humbling experience when you first get back in a pool and try to do laps. When I was younger, I could literally swim all day long but time and inactivity caught up to me. Training for the SEAL Challenge helped me find my swimming grove again and by the time I took the SEAL Challenge, I was back into good swimming condition though I still hadn't reached my ultimate goal of swimming a mile.

Well, it seems swimming is no different from running or weight lifting, if you don't do it for a while you lose that conditioning (was this really unexpected? no, not really) and have to start over.

Even though the swim was harder than I had hoped, I still did decent intervals. I warmed up by swimming freestyle for 3 minutes. That was an achievement itself. I was questioning my ability to do sprints after that light warm up.

After warming up I swam 25M (one length) as fast as I could freestyle and then I'd slowly breast stroke back and rest for a minute or two. I did 6 sets of this routine and WOW was my heart pumping after each sprint.

I may switch to swimming for all my intervals, not only do I feel like I got a great cardio workout, my entire body feels like it got a great, low-impact workout too.

Who knows, by next summer maybe I'll be sporting a Michael Phelps like body from swimming so much!