How to Make Informed Fitness Decisions in 5 Steps
Being a positive person is great, but it gets you nowhere if you never act on your intentions. The one thing that gets people the furthest in fitness is impulse. It’s always what sets people back the most, as they will give up without thinking twice about it.
Achieving your fitness goals isn’t rocket science. It’s more simple mathematics than anything.
Save yourself from an unsuccessful fitness transformation!
Here are five steps to help you start making better fitness decisions today:
1. Forget everything you think you know.
It’s the self-believed facts that blur people’s vision the most. With the human body, there are some facts that can appear as false under the right circumstances. You may be right, but under the wrong pretence, or you could be completely wrong.
Either way, you have facts in your head and they are backed by different resources. Some may not be very reliable, so you may be assuming facts that are horribly incorrect.
Start over. Think about all the mistakes you made along the way. Nothing was truly perfect in your fitness regimen before, so something new is sure to work better. Don’t get comfy with your current results, because you could always be doing better.
2. Figure out your exact short-term and mid-term goal.
What is your goal for the next three to six months?
What is your goal for the next one to two years?
Those are the two windows of time to plan. A short-term goal will be a precursor to a mid-term goal. Many find solace in achieving many short-term goals, as it shows they are on path towards the mid-term destination. Don’t fret too much on the little battles along the way, just make sure you are continuing to close in on your mid-term goal.
Never plan for the long-term. You can make a second mid-term plan after the first one is complete. This will make it easier for you to take two huge fitness transformation leaps in a short time period.
3. Look for any signs of a plateau in your diet or training plan.
Uneducated fitness enthusiasts will not know what to do when they hit a plateau in their training or diet program. Make sure you know how to spot a plateau. It’s essentially a stagnation in immediate strength growth when lifting weights, or a halt to weight loss or gain when modifying dietary intake.
A plateau may also occur in aesthetic progression. Muscles may not get larger in size, when they used to grow visibly on a consistent basis. Breaking past aesthetic plateaus involves getting into sub-10% body fat territory and chiselling out certain muscles through isolated movements.
4. Don’t make any more decisions for 90 days.
Many make the mistake of changing diet plans every few weeks. They think there will be no results from the one they are on, or later find out its unhealthy, and it’s on to the next. If this can be avoided, great results will be seen; for beginners, the first 90 days offer some of the greatest muscle growth and fat loss results imaginable.
5. Reset for a week and make another run.
After your 90 days is up, give yourself five to seven days off from intense training. Stick to light weights, do light workouts on different days for upper and lower body parts, just do cardio, or stay out of the gym.
After your short break, get back at it with a new program. This one doesn’t have to be as time-sensitive, but track progress on scheduled intervals to prevent falling off track. This helps in more ways than people realize. For instance, someone is more likely to get back on track with their weight loss attempt after slacking off for a week and returning to see their latest weigh-in erased their past month of hard work.