Reaching Your Fitness Goals
Hello my Lovies,
Today we have a guest post from EvilCyber.com, as you know I’ve written a lot of articles for EvilCyber and now he will be contributing to Loving Fit as well :), please give him a warm welcome.
Reaching Your Fitness Goals
It’s the middle of February and a load of New Year’s resolutions are already forgotten, aren’t they? But what’s keeping people from sticking with them? Here are five points that over the years I found to be rather important to heed when trying to reach your fitness goals.
1. Know where you want to go
A Roman philosopher once said that if you don’t know what port you want to go to, all winds blow in the wrong direction. You basically end up nowhere. This is why it’s so important to know what you want to achieve on your road to health and fitness. Simply saying “I want to get fit” doesn’t cut it, because that could be everything. Find out what “fit” or “healthy” mean to you and form a specific goal out of it that can be measured: lose x pounds, be able to run a 5k etc.
2. Read up, read up, read up
The next step is to educate yourself about reaching your goal. If it’s losing weight, find out about all the different diets out there and which one might work for you. If you want to run faster, investigate what others experienced when trying to improve their running times and what might be a realistic time frame for you to do the same. Going back to the port analogy, this is the point where you know what port you want to arrive at and now you are putting together your map for the journey.
3. Break the big goal into smaller ones
Back when I was rather overweight and started running, my first long-term goal was being able to continuously run for 30 minutes. But from the point of view of then 196 lbs me, this seemed as realistic as planning a moon mission in our backyard. So I broke the “big goal” into smaller ones: reach that corner without taking a break, then reach the next, make it until half-time without a pause and so on. Reaching each small goal showed me that while I still hadn’t achieved the big one, I was doing something right. Smaller milestones keep you motivated on the road to the finish line.
4. Plan on having setbacks
It would almost be a miracle if we reached our goals without experiencing setbacks on the way. It could be a very frustrating day at work that had you fall back into eating six donuts. Or a cold that kept you from working out. Or one of the many other things life throws in our way. If beforehand you acknowledge that these might happen, you can mentally prepare for them: imagine possible setbacks and how you will handle them. Should they then really happen, you already have a plan of action. If it was something like the donut accident, it could simply be telling yourself on that day that you may have lost a day or two, but will continue as planned tomorrow.
5. Be able to stick with it
The most important one I kept for last: Working out three times per week sounds great, but what if you are a very busy mother that barely manages to squeeze all them workouts all into her week? Or when it’s really hard to get up and just do it? Be realistic and take stock of your life in general and see how your new habits can be made to work with it. If doing three workouts per week is impossible, then just do one. If you can’t lose two lbs per week because it makes you feel like starving, lose slower. The biggest part of being able to stick with resolutions is finding out how much change is manageable for you in what time frame. Be a bit ambitious, but don’t try to change too much too fast, because it can make you give up entirely. And that changes nothing.
This guest post way by EC, who writes about home workouts, nutrition, diet and the rest over at evilcyber.com.
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