Six Tips To Ensure You’ll Have Professional And Slick ‘Before & After’ Photos

1. Don’t make too much of a big deal about it! Limit photos to a maximum of four angles

• Take one photo with the camera facing directly front on
• Take one photo with the camera facing directly back on
• Take one photo with the camera facing directly side on (any side)
• Take one photo with the camera facing you at a 45 degree angle (half way between a front-on and side-on photo but favoring the front-on)

You do not need any more angles than above and if you don’t want to take as many as 4 photos, just simply take a front on photo (or possibly a 45 degree angle photo).  In my opinion the 45 degree angle photos are the most flattering.

2. Take progress photos along the way but not too frequently (think once a month)

If you’re taking progress photos once a week you will end up seeing a lot of fluctuations which are irrelevant to the overall progress you are making.  Once a month (at the same time of the month) is best.  That is, unless your aiming to achieve your goal in 10 days or something crazy like that!

3. Take the the before photos, progress photos and after photos at the same time of the day (and ideally the same day of the week/month)

Don’t take your ‘after’ photos just before going to bed if you took your ‘before’ photos just after waking up.  They will look different but not for the reasons you want them to look different.  In order for any type of tracking to be reliable you need to do the measuring (which in this case is taking photos) at standard times when there is least likely to be fluctuations caused by stress or tiredness.

4. Use basic digital photography techniques.

Find a very plain background (ideally white) and avoid including anything that will bring clutter into the photo such as pot plants, furniture, posters on the wall and so on.

If you want your photos to look professional then it’s best to ensure the photo doesn’t look like it was taken in your lounge (even if it was taken in your lounge)!

5. Wear a bathing suit or fitness clothing – don’t wear anything overly flash (or weird) though

Don’t wear a Borat suit, and guys, don’t wear hot pink shorts.  Just wear an ordinary bathing suit.  And make sure you wear that same clothing (and do your hair the same way) for each photo thereafter.

6. Don’t worry about how unflattering your ‘before’ photos are – they’re your before photos.

There reason you are taking these photos is to track the progress you will make.  Don’t try and make the ‘before’ photos look good!  Instead, take an accurate representation of how you look, and then wait till the ‘after’ photos for giving your best, photogenic smile.

Note: Holding up the front page of a newspaper has been said to be an effective way to ‘time stamp’ a photo.  The arguement is that if the date is not matching the newspaper date then the newspaper will be old and yellow.  This is actually flawed in the days of Photoshop and personally I think the ‘holding up newspaper’ photos can lack class, but that’s up to you.

“Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall, Why Haven’t I Made Any Progress?”

Although Garfield will say bathroom scales are the worst enemy, there are many who will argue that the bathroom mirror is more of an enemy.  As the saying goes, “the mirror doesn’t lie” or does it?

Mirrors can be a more reliable way to track progress than the bathroom scales

A person can weight more than they did a month ago and yet look slimmer and harder than they did when they weighed less.  The main reason for this is rather simple.  Fat, being less dense, weighs less than muscle.  So if you lose body fat but gain muscle at the same time you can weight the same (or sometimes more than you did before) and yet look and feel better.  So if all you do to track your progress is measure your weight on the scales, you may be getting quite the wrong picture of things.  Having a look in the mirror may actually be a better way to see if you’ve been making progress.

Unfortunately although our mirrors might be accurately portraying the way we look, our interpretation of our reflections are usually skewed due to a number of factors such as:

Our bad photographic memory
If you put a frog in a pot of cold water and put the pot over a fire the frog will be oblivious to the fact that it is being boiled alive because it can’t tell the the water is slowly changing from cold to very hot.  This is similar to the way we look at ourselves in the mirror.  We don’t actually realise that what we are seeing today is different to what we were seeing 3 months ago.

Lighting and angles
Lighting in a lot of bathrooms can be quite unnatural (so that you can clearly see yourself).  In the real world lighting is usually a lot kinder on our appearance.  Also (and probably more of a problem than lighting), the angles in which we can see ourselves in the mirror are limited to, well, one angle – straight ahead.  It is very hard to get a good view of yourself side on, and even harder to see the back view!

Our harsh self-criticism
You will usually find that your most harshest critic is yourself.  It is so easy to look into the mirror and immediately push yourself down.  Sometimes this is due to self esteem issues, more often than not however, it is done subconsciously because one is so desperate for change they are withholding any credit to force themselves to try even harder.

It is for these reasons that I personally don’t recommend judging results by looking in the mirror.

A much better solution to the bathroom mirror is before & after pictures.  Get a friend to take a photo from front on, side on and your back, and then do some follow up photos in a few months time.  If you’re too self-conscious you can just use a self-timer in order to have the picture taken, but beware of the whole ‘self-criticism’ thing.  It is better for a friend or relative to judge the before/after photos than yourself.

One last thing, I don’t by any means say you should completely avoid looking in the mirror.  Taking a look in the mirror can be a great confidence and motivational boost.  What is important is that we don’t use what we see in the mirror to measure and track our results.

Get Your Camera Out So You Can Be Sure You’ve Made Progress

Previously on Take Fit I have talked about the advantages and disadvantages of tracking progress using the bathroom scales, and using the bathroom mirror (published later this week). Today I want to talk about one of my preferred progress tracking methods, before & after photographs.

Before/after photos are definitely nothing new. They have been around for decades now as people want to visually see how far they have come. Bodybuilders, and other fitness professionals will always take ‘status photos’ every now and then so that they can see any improvements or deteriorations from where they were last month, last year, etc.

There is nothing more exciting than comparing your own before & after photos. Before you embark on your journey towards six pack abs, or larger msucles or just simply losing weight, make sure you take some before photos.

Some people avoid doing such a thing because they are embarrised by the way they look. This is understandable but now that you can buy digital cameras with self timers there is no reason why such an excuse can still be used. If you want, you can take the photos and upload them to your PC without ever letting anyone look at them. Once you’ve taken you’re ‘after’ photos though, you’ll probably find you won’t mind showing your ‘before’ photos as they’ll prove just how much you’ve achieved.

If you really want to motivate yourself though, why not post the ‘before’ photos up on an Internet forum or (in an even bolder move) show your friends and family. Whoever sees the before photos will want to know what the results are – that way you’re much more likely to treat your goal seriously. If all you do is upload the photos to a hidden folder on your PC, the motivation to succeed is significantly diminished.

Another advantage of taking photos is that you’ll have a reference from then on which you can refer back to at a later time. This can help with tracking your ongoing fitness goals a lot more than just using your memory. And it will ususally be a better reference than the family photo albums.

Look out for an article to be published later this week which will outline some tips to be followed when taking these kinds of photos.

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.

The Secret To Making Scales Your Friend

When was the last time you enjoyed the experience of stepping on your bathroom scales? Most people can share Garfield’s sentiments of those bathroom scales being an arch enemy!

There are various reasons the bathroom scales can feel like an enemy to us;

• We step onto them and find out we weigh more than we weighed before (when we’re trying to lose it)
  
• We step onto them and find out we’ve lost weight (when we’re trying to bulk)
• We step onto them and find out we weigh exactly the same (the disappointment of absolutely no progress)

Personally I’m one of those people who find it hard to gain weight – and for a guy, being underweight is not a good place to be! You might be like my wife who complains of the opposite problem!

Who else has made a concentrated effort to lose weight, gain mass (whatever your goal), only to step onto the scales and be bitterly disappointed?

I find for myself it can be one of the most disconcerting things because, unless the scales are broken, they don’t lie! It makes me wonder whether it’s actually possible for me to reach the goals that I’ve set for myself and I start to think my genes have doomed me to a life of skinny, ab-less geekiness (we may laugh now but you all know how we feel in the moment)!

What we need to realize is that although the scales may be accurately measuring our weight at that moment, it may not be an accurate measurement of our progress.

Don’t step on the scales every single day

Our bodies are not constant. We are made up by thousands of different parts which are always changing depending on how we feel, what we eat, whether we’re relaxed or not and other factors. In fact, it has been said that if a child is absolutely relaxed, even a grown man will have difficulty lifting them up (ever had a child fall asleep on your lap before?).

It is for this reason that I recommend stepping on the scales only once a week and making that either Saturday or Sunday morning.

Why just once a week? You’re much less likely to run into fluctuating weights if you only weigh yourself once a week.

Why not once a month then? Once a month is too long to provide enough data to track your progress. There is too much chance that you’ll weigh yourself at a time when you are not feeling well, or are stressed over something, and this will put your data our of whack for that whole month. Weighing yourself weekly will smooth that out even if you do weigh yourself on days like that.

Why on Saturday or Sunday morning? This may not be the best for all readers, but I find that Saturday or Sunday morning is when I feel the most similar week to week. I wake up after a sleep in and I don’t have to go to work so I’m not in a rush. I find that this will give an accurate picture on what kind of progress I’m making (and it is also for this reason that evenings during the week are the worst time to weigh yourself).

Another important thing to remember is that even if you haven’t lost weight, it doesn’t mean that you haven’t made progress.

Fat weighs less than muscle – that is a fact. If you lose fat and gain muscle there is a chance you’ll weigh the same (or even more) but this will probably mean that you’ll look better and feel better than you did when you weighed less! It’s a funny thing with fitness – we can’t just focus on one particular area. And remember, the more muscle you have on your frame, the higher and faster your motabilism levels will be so your body will help to keep the flab off even when you’re not working out.

So scales (as helpful as they can be to track progress), are not the be all and end all of our success. Sometimes the mirror is a more accurate measurement to go by. Although as we are all so critical on ourselves, it’s quite often our spouses or friends (that we can trust will be honest) who can help us gage our progress.

Next time you step onto your scales, just remember that they can never tell the whole picture!