How to grow a fitness lifestyle
Dear Reader, as a Fitness Trainer and Passionate, I want to help you reaching your Fitness- and Health-Goals by introducing you to my way of «living» fitness (sounds poetic, right?).
Let me get you through it, step by step:
Step 1 – What?
You need a specific goal. And it should include emotions and feelings. If you define your goal based on superficial matters only, it won’t last. If you define your goal based on the opinions or desires of other people, you will perhaps reach your goal (based on how broken your feeling of self-worth is), but you won’t be happy nor fulfilled. Superficial doesn’t mean visual. Visual goals can be deeply connected to emotions. But visual goals should have a story behind it that you can’t see.
When you define your «What», you can do it based on the following questions:
What will my body look like?
What will my body feel like?
How will my life look like?
What kind of habits will I cultivate?
What values will I have?
Write that down. Write a lot. Make it specific. Make it more conceivable and real.
Congratulations. Step 1 is done.
Step 2 – Why?
The «What» should include emotional goals. The «Why» is the emotional goal itself. You can basically take your notes to the questions from above, and add to every answer the question «Why?», then write down an answer that is rooted to a deep emotional craving of yours. When you’re done with your «Why’s», it should be clear to you, that you will feel a lot better by reaching these goals.
You’re done with step 2. Let’s get even more specific.
Step 3 – How?
This is how you implement your goals into actions and habits. First of all you should always do babysteps. If you resolve to do something and you can’t do it, the step was too big. Take a step so small that you can’t say no to it. Start with one push up a day. You might think this is useless, but let me ask you; do you think its better to always want to do 10 push ups a day but never actally make any push ups, or to just do one a day? The next thing you need to know it that consistency is more important than quantity. Why? Because your body learns by repetition. This is how you actually grow a habit (so your brain will start to initiate certain things automatically) and how your body actually gets fit. Yes, your body has to learn first «how to get fit». Your muscles have to learn first how to grow, for example. So it really is better – for your body and your brain – to do every day one push up rather than 50 push ups once every two weeks to get results. You can start doing more in one session if you can keep up with the regularity of your sessions.
The second thing with quantity is, that you can actually do too much. You can actually work out so much that your muscles will rather shrink instead of growing. Working out with the goal to grow muscles should be done with breaks so your muscles can rest. Because that’s when they grow. If you train your muscles while they’re still heavy aching from a previous workout, you don’t give them the time to actually build up. That can lead to stagnation, injury or muscle loss over time. The higher the intensitiy of your training, the more time you need to rest. This is why a strongman athlete for example needs to rest sometimes for several weeks after one trainig session.
Cardio training is different. Cardio is every training that focuses on training the heart muscle. By doing cardio regulary, your heart will learn over time how to transport more oxygen in a specific time span to your muscles and organs so you can for example run longer. There is also a difference between cardio and weight training concerning how your muscles work. But I don’t want to go too much into these details.
If you need help by creating a training program for yourself, it’s best if you ask a professional how, when and how much to train.
These questions can help you to write an action plan that fits you:
How much time do I want to invest into my fitness every week?
Based on my goals, what type of training can I do how often every week (Cardio / Weight training)?
Which exercises can I do to reach my goals (Gym or at home)?
Once you’ve got an action plan, you can actually start doing. If you need help to create your plan, ask somebody that knows how to do it, or me.
Step 3 is done.
Step 4 – Action
This is the hardest part of all. Here are some tips I can give you to help you get into action and really keep going:
1. Make ONE decision
Once you have your plan set, you make the decision to just do it. And you make the decision once. Do not decide again every time whether you should / want to work out or not. Your decision is made. YOU JUST DO IT. It’s easy to say no and hard to keep the motivation if you give yourself a chance to say no every time anew.
2. Plan that life is sometimes not going according to your plan
Don’t overscedule. Find your own way on how much you need to schedule. I personally don’t need a fixed schedule to manage reaching my goal. I just defined how many times a week I want to go to the gym for example and it works for me. My working scedule is different from week to week, I need to be flexible. But I habitually plan every week anew when I will go to the gym. I don’t plan If I go, I only plan WHEN I go.
3. Don’t rely on motivation
If you wait for motivation to kick in, you will never reach your goals. The beginning is the hardest part, because you have neither motivation nor a habit. It’s so easy to just say no at the beginning. This is why you don’t make a second decision about your training plan. Yes, you want it. You do it. Period. It’s completely normal and human to loose motivation sometimes. Or maybe don’t even have it at all at the beginning. Please don’t think that there are people who just have the motivation to work out and you unfortunately just count to the ones that don’t.
The difference between the people who work out and the people that don’t is not their motivation, it’s only the decision they make.
Fortunately, this is a decision everybody can make. So don’t feel bad about yourself because you don’t have the motivation to work out. Only feel bad about yourself for not working out.