Success in the gym starts between the ears
Over twenty years in the fitness industry, I have seen many people come and go within the gym, with varying degrees of success. Those that succeed have on thing in common, mindset. If you get your mind focused on a goal and consider how you are going to achieve it, then the likelihood of success increases dramatically.
Obesity and metabolic syndrome are on the rise, despite the efforts of the government and media to raise awareness. We are every more sedentary, spending so much of our lives seated and immobile. Our diets are comprised of increasing levels of sugars and refined, processed food. I’m sure this comes as no surprise and you are well aware of this. The challenge it to replace these bad habits, with better ones. To succeed you need a well formed goal.
We are creatures of habit and the habits we form can either be productive and help move us inevitably towards our goal, or they can be negative and form barriers that will hinder our progress and limit our chances of success.
Do you know what you don’t know?
Is ignorance defeating all your best effort?
A step-by-step approach to success in the gym would look something like this…
Set a goal
Plan you route to achieving the goal
Establish your starting point
Get going
Create small habitual changes, one at a time to make the route easier
Measure progress
Create more small habitual changes
Focus on how you will look and feel when you have achieved your goal
Keep going
Measure progress
Attain your goal!!
Set a new, bigger goal
…and repeat
Habits are very powerful, so much so that they are hard to break and form. The New Years Resolution approach to fitness rarely works. This is were you realise come September that you are unhappy and unfulfilled and a goal starts to take shape. However starting on the journey now with some small changes is too much hassle, so you decide to wait until 1st January and join the millions then who will make the radical “everything is going to be better this year” transformation. It starts to unravel usually around the end of January, but in reality it was doomed to failure back in September.
Habits are the way you behave. Without establishing new behaviours, lasting change will always elude you. New habits need to be formed one at a time. Numerous studies suggest that if you try to establish one new habit, the likelihood of lasting success is about 80%, try two at a time and it drops to 35% increase this to three and your success rate plummets to only 10%. In my experience the failure rate achieved through changing many behaviours at once is 100%.
A good starting point is to write down on a piece of paper your current bad habits and try to replace them with good ones. Focus on the habits that are going to help you reach your goal. Picking your nose might be a bad habit, but stopping picking your nose is unlikely to help with a your goal…unless you do it a heck of a lot!
To permanently establish a new habit, the goal needs to be emotional. You goal needs to get you excited. You should try to take some time out each day to relax and focus on the goal. Try to imagine how you will feel once you have achieved the goal, how your life will be different, imagine what it will be like living in this new goal.