Here’s An Easy Way To Succeed In Your Fitness Goals: Working Out Like You’re Running A Business
It amazes me the number of people who genuinely want to make changes to their body (maybe shed excess flab, get bigger muscles) but they don’t set any sort of plan out in order to achieve that goal. People will even head along to the gym and then stand and ponder over what exercise they should do next! To me that is just craziness, those kinds of people are only ever going to make mediocre gains at best.
In order to succeed in your fitness goals you should first of all state your business objective
What is your goal? What do you want to achieve? My advice is to write it down somewhere, stick it on top of your bathroom mirror if you want, just make sure that you set yourself a realisable but challenging goal. Without writing it down you’re already setting yourself up for failure.
You see without writing it down you’re playing it safe. If you don’t reach your goal and it’s not written down you can always make an excuse that you weren’t seriously trying to achieve it. As soon as the pen touches the paper your officially setting yourself a goal.
In order to make progress along the way you must keep a workout journal
If you were to start a business and not record anything down (your orders, shipments, financial transactions) your business would fail. It’s as simple as that.
Humans have wonderfully powerful brains but we aren’t the best at storing statistics – particularly day-to-day statistics. When you workout, write down exactly what you did. Go into detail – the number of reps, number of sets, weight of dumbbell, barbell etc.
e.g. 3×12 Dumbbell lunges (25 kg dumbbells)
On your next workout you can see exactly how you went last time round and can seek to do 1 better. Do an additional set, increase the weight, do more reps, just try and do at least one thing more than you did last workout. That way, at the end of the workout you can be pleased with yourself and the knowledge that you’ve made progress, something you can’t do if you’re just storing these statistics at the back of your head somewhere.
“What if I’m not feeling 100% and can’t perform at the same level as I could last workout?”
That’s fine. Write that down, make a note of it. Then you’ll know as you look back over your journal that it wasn’t a case of having lost progress, but rather you were under the weather on that occasion.
In order to achieve the final goal you must take account of your progress every month
If a business never stopped and did the accounts at set intervals during the year they would be in big trouble financially (not to mention with the tax department) come the end of the year. If a business finds out they aren’t making enough of a profit they will look at ways to change the problems/bad processes in hope to increase that profit.
It is the same with our fitness plans. If after 1 month we weigh the same, have had no change in measurements or no visible change, then it could be best to shake up your workout plan, diet or both so that come next month you can clearly see that you have made progress.
My advice though, is not to place as much importance on 1 month goals, but rather to see that day to day, week to week and month to month you are continually improving your workouts and your diets. Sure, if after 2 months, nothing has changed then it might pay to re-evaluate the way you are doing things. But most of the time it’s just a case of sticking to your guns, making sure you don’t lose progress and that you are get stronger and fitter as the weeks go by.
Finally, don’t give up!
True entrepreneurs usually have a lot of failures but never actually fail. This is because they keep implementing new ideas, new businesses until they find one that works and succeed. Learn from this and you too will become successful in your fitness goals.
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How To Make Progress When You’re Sick
You’ve just begun a new fitness routine/diet a few weeks ago and have been making great progress… then you get sick. You don’t have the same energy levels and it suddenly gets harder to work out, harder to eat well and harder to focus on the end goal.
Stopping working out = stop making progress?
This will inevitably lead to frustration which makes the whole ordeal that much worse. Not only do you slow up (or even go back) on your progress, but you can also get depressed about this which will make it that much harder to get back into the swing of things.
Solution to getting sick: Sleep!
Getting sick doesn’t have to be the end of the world as far as your fitness or bodybuilding goals are concerned. Instead of lamenting over your bad luck in getting a cold, why not take productive and beneficial steps in getting better so that you’re stronger and healthier when you get back to 100%?
Crank up on the Vitamin C (take a lot more than you usually consume), eat garlic, grapefruit and whatever other natural health products that work for you, but most importantly sleep! Don’t make the mistake of trying to get through a workout when you’re sick and run down. Your body is telling you it needs rest and recovery time, not more physical strain and stress.
Sleep aids in your workout progress, not just in getting well again
More and more studies[1] are conclusively telling us that in order to successfully lose weight (or make progress in gaining muscle if that is your goal) we need to sleep more than we do.
When we sleep our bodies are most effective at repairing and renewing. Consequently, the most effective way for you to combat a sickness is to sleep more. Not only will this help us to get back to full strength more quickly but it will also give your body time to regrow damaged muscle tissue and ligaments so that when you get back into full swing you’ll be rejuvenated – you might even find you’ll be making better progress than you were before!
So next time you catch a cold, or some other sickness, make sure you follow some simple rules;
1. Don’t work out
2. Eat better
3. Sleep more!
Easy enough?
[1] http://www.kansas.com/188/story/141661.html
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