Do you ever read through fitness magazines or watch people at the gym who have the perfect physique and you keep thinking to yourself, "why haven't I gotten to that point yet?" You keep doing the same thing day in and day out yet seem to see no changes or results. This lack of results usually leads to a frustrating attitude and eventually a lackluster effort towards reaching your fitness goals or even staying motivated to even work out. Well, chances are, you're missing one or a few of the key ingredients to reaching and maintaining fitness success. The following tips I have compiled below are the essentials that I think every person needs in order to reach their fitness goals and stay motivated and dedicated to making the positive changes they need in their lives. After training and talking with many of my clients over the past few years, I've found that these 10 tips are the must haves in any person's fitness program!
1. Have Well Defined Goals
This may seem like an obvious must have, but I bet you can walk into any gym and ask a person working out, "what is your goal?" and they will stumble over their words. It's amazing but true - I see it every day at work. If you don't have a goal - a well defined goal - then how do you expect to get to where you want if you don't know where you are going to begin with? Your goal is your finish line; so you need this to be well defined and as specific as possible in order to set out on your path to reaching it.
A few typical goals I hear when I first start training clients are: 1. Tone up, 2. Eat better, 3. Lose weight. Those are pretty vague and have no defined goals that can be measured. Be as specific as possible with your goals! After all, these are your goals! What specific areas do you want to tone up? What are you going to do specifically to tone up? When do you want to be toned up by? What are you going to change with your eating patterns now to reach your goal of "eating better"? How much weight do you want to lose specifically? When do you want to lose this weight by?
If you answer any of those questions mentioned above, the beginning goals of tone up, eat better, and lose weight now look more like this: 1. Have smaller, toned thighs and butt to fit into 2 smaller pant sizes, 2. Eat 5-6 smaller meals a day and cut out more processed foods, 3. Lose 10 pounds of fat in 4 months. These goals are much more specific and defined, and give you a better idea of what you are working towards, so you can make the necessary changes to your strength, cardio and nutrition programs to reach those goals once and for all!
2. Have Patience
Fitness is not a quick fix - never has been and never will be - it is a life change that you commit to incorporating into your life every day to live a better, longer, healthier life. With that said, do not expect to find any successful fitness plan that works over night. It did not take you 48 hours to gain the weight or develop the less than healthy eating patterns, so don't expect immediate results.
One of the tips I give my clients is to set short term goals (daily, weekly, and monthly) as well as long term goals (3+ months) so you can learn to develop patience with your fitness program. Sometimes looking at the longer term goals first can be overwhelming, but if you set smaller goals and can check them off your list of accomplishments daily, it helps to develop patience with your overall fitness program. It also helps to develop a positive attitude that is also a must have for fitness success!
3. Maintain a Positive Attitude
Is your glass half empty or half full? Your mind is a powerful tool and it quits before your body will. Train your brain to be positive and the results you see physically will be astonishing.
One of the tricks I give to my clients is to seek out a positive quote that makes you feel good, keeps you focused on your goals, and gives you the inner strength to power through your workouts even on the days that you may not feel like going to the gym for that training session. Once you pick out the quote, plaster it everywhere you can think of so it will be a constant reminder to you to keep a positive attitude.
One of the quotes I usually turn to is, "Somewhere in the world someone is training when you are not. When you race him, he will win." I've placed it on my steering wheel of my car, on my nightstand in my bedroom, and even taped it to my bathroom mirror. It's a constant reminder that my training is important, and that I can do it. Train your brain with a positive attitude!
4. Keep a Food Journal
Nutrition seems to be the downfall for most people when it comes to having fitness success, and it's because there's just so many temptations out there every minute of every day. And do you really know how much you are consuming? If you're not writing it down, then the answer is no.
In order to be successful with the nutrition aspect of your fitness program, you need to be held accountable for what you are eating. Most people tend to snack more than they realize, or drink more calories than they would expect. By keeping a food journal, and writing down what goes into your mouth every time you eat or drink, you become more aware of how much you are really consuming in a day, week, etc. and you can start to pin point areas of your nutrition that need work.
Now, your food journal doesn't need to be super detailed or cost you any more than $10...it can be as simple as a spiral bound notebook that you write down what you eat and drink daily, and track the calories. At the end of the week, take a look at what you've written and see where you need to make the necessary changes. As you become more accustomed to tracking your food intake, you will see the changes in your body that you have longed to achieve.
5. Keep a Training Log/Structured Workout Plan
Just like you would track your food intake, it makes sense to track your workouts. How do you expect to get better and advance throughout your training program if you have no idea where you started?
Your body is super smart and responds well to diet and exercise - for a certain period of time. But if you continue to do the same workout routine over and over again, with little or no changes to the weight, reps, and exercises, then your body is going to get bored and say, "sorry, I'm not showing you any more changes." To avoid this monotony in your routines, simply keep track of what routines you do in a spiral notebook like you do your food journal. Now you have the ability to look back on what routines you did on what days, and can avoid repeating workouts over and over again.
6. Track Your Heart Rate with a Monitor
Every person's body works differently, so you can't necessarily take a cardio program that worked for someone else for fat loss and expect to get the exact same results. This is where heart rate training and knowing and understanding your own metabolic zones comes into play.
Basically, every person burns body fat more efficiently in certain heart rate zones, so it's important to know what zones work best for your own body and make sure that you are performing your cardio workouts in those zones to see the results you're working so hard towards achieving.
One of the best ways to continue to see fat loss is to continue to improve your VO 2. What's your VO 2? It's how well your body responds to aerobic (requires oxygen) exercise. You need oxygen to burn body fat, and having a higher VO 2 means your body can uptake more oxygen during a workout...i.e. you can sustain longer periods of cardiovascular workouts thus increasing your body's ability to burn fat. Pair this with a metabolic test that accurately measures your optimal heart rate training zones for fat loss, and you're well on your way to blasting off that stubborn fat!
7. Keep Variety in Your Workouts
Ever heard the quote, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result"? Well, you should think about your workouts with this statement in mind. Not only will you get bored and lose motivation if you have to repeat the same routines over and over again, but so will your body. Once your muscles realize that you're repeating the same movements over and over, the results that you once got from those exercises will start to diminish because your muscles are hitting a little thing called muscle memory.
So switch it up! You can still follow a similar structure (i.e. total body weight training on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, cardio on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, rest on Sunday) but change up the exercises in your total body circuits and the intensities and durations of your cardio sessions. You need structure to be successful, but you do not need monotony in your workouts!
8. Get Enough Sleep
This one is a results killer! The recommended amount of sleep per night for the average adult is 8 hours....do you get 8 hours of sleep consistently each night? If not, you may be sabotaging your hard work in the gym and on the nutrition front.
A study performed by Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin revealed that subjects who slept less than 8 hours per night had higher levels of body fat and also reported higher levels of ghrelin (the hormone that stimulates hunger) and lower levels of leptin (the protein hormone that triggers satiety and can also regulate your appetite).
How do these hormones affect your weight? Getting less sleep causes you to feel less satisfied after eating and also increases your appetite. So if you are active, be sure to snag a few extra hours of sleep so you can avoid these hidden results killers!
9. Drink Sufficient Amounts of Water
We're all probably used to hearing that the average person needs to drink at least eight glasses of water a day, equating to about 64 ounces of water. Now reports are surfacing that an average adult should be consuming about 96 ounces of water on a daily basis, and even more if the individual is looking to lose fat or is exercising regularly.
DO NOT skip on this - especially if you want to perform at your physical peak and get your results! Remember that water makes up approximately 60% of your body weight, so you need it! Not only does water quench your thirst, but it also regulates your body temperature, decreases your appetite, helps your liver function properly, helps improve your metabolic functions, and even helps with endocrine gland function, just to name a few. So drink up and drink up often!
10. Hire a Professional
When you're sick, do you call in your own prescription for medication? Or what about when you have a tooth ache, do you pull your own tooth? No, you go see a PROFESSIONAL who specializes in these areas of your body. Well, guess what...personal trainers are professionals in proper exercise and training for your body, so why would you try to accomplish this on your own?
Sure, you can look up the bare basics of strength training exercises and probably pull some cardio routines out of a book, but if you really want to get the absolute best results for your own body, then go see someone who specializes in proper program design for many different body types (i.e. a personal trainer!)
Until you understand your body and how it reacts to certain exercises, nutrients, supplements, etc. you're going to stay at a certain "maintenance level" when it comes to your results. If you really want to kick it up a notch, then invest the time and money (it's well worth it!) into seeking professional help from someone who spends the majority of their days studying and researching the human body and how it responds to exercise, nutrition, and supplementation. I promise you will not regret it.
So there they are, my personal top 10 tips for your fitness success. I encourage you to read this article, then read it over again and really let these tips sink into your mind. You can even print out this article and post it in a few visible places throughout your home and work space so you can constantly remind yourself what changes you need to make in order to really take control of your fitness destiny.
To your fitness success!
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