Most trainers/fitness enthusiasts post about training like an animal and killing it in the gym. I’m by no means opposed to putting in the work but sometimes people miss some crucial components to long term success: patience and learning to listen to your body. The ability to push yourself hard to get fit for summer or blitz the gym in the pre-season is great, but is also often fleeting. However, the ability to listen to your body and be patient are traits that contribute much more to long term success and achievement. Definition of patience – ‘the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, problems, or suffering without becoming annoyed or anxious.’ You may have heard the phrase ‘train smarter, not harder’. This does not mean you shouldn’t put effort in, it means often the room for improvement is not simply in going harder or increasing volume but maximising your training time with proper planning and correct execution in relation to your own personal targets. Patience could mean avoiding bench pressing for a few weeks due to a shoulder injury, instead putting in an extra leg session and committing to a shoulder rehabilitation routine. Eight months down the line, who do you think will be benching more, the person that rehabbed the injury properly (often sorting it early before any lasting problem developed), or the person who ‘persisted’ and pushed through the pain, not wanting to take time out to sort it? Listening to your body may mean changing the structure of your routine and adding an extra day’s leg recovery because they are still aching from a previous workout. You could still train on this in between day but do an upper body/core workout. Patience means taking time to do a good dynamic warm up and putting in some progressing warm up sets before hitting the heavy loads. Injuries are definitely one of the biggest hindrances to people’s yearly progress. Yet people still skip a warm up. Patience is not simply the ability to wait, or to endure. It means the ability to accept times of rehabilitation or perform exercises that perhaps don’t excite you without anxiety, knowing this is the smartest path to take to get you to your goal. The purpose of training is usually to see some progressions. If your goal is to progress, put the smartest plan in place that will get you to that end goal. This will take hard work, consistency, body awareness and hardest of all, patience.
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The Key to Long Term Fat Loss Success Any diet/nutritional change that creates a weekly calorie deficit will create weight loss. However it's not the good times that differentiate the successful from the unsuccessful. I always tell my clients it's how they manage the dietary upsets and tougher times (social occasions, stress, broken routine) that truely determines whether they succeed or fail in meeting their longer term goals. Make damage control and managment of the inevitable imperfections your primary focus and see consistent results that soon add up to impressive changes. See my 'Testimonials' page for some great examples of successful long term fat loss. Happy New Year, time to get some inspiration for 2016! What a mistake it would be to miss this fantastic opportunity for a big motivation and progress boost with your health & fitness. Yes, lot's a people set new years goals and don't meet them, but that doesn't mean we just don't bother trying. In 2015 I hit 3 of the 4 goals I set. If I'd not consciously written them down and planned ahead to meet them I would not have met any of them. 'You miss 100% of the shots you don't take' - Wayne Gretzky 1) Choose 2-5 goals & write them down (put as screen saver or on fridge if it helps) 2) Set a time scale of progress: end date (6-12months), mid term (6-12weeks) & short term target (weeks/monthly) 3) Get someone to hold you accountable 4) Put a written practical plan of action in place 5) Get started on them today, every day counts and every little helps If you'd like help putting together an effective, tailored plan of action, as well a accountability and support have a look at my services and prices page and set up your FREE consultation. 'If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.' - Yogi Berra
'Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect' - Vince Lombardi NFL Coach I see many people putting the hours in but only a few of them getting anywhere. You can't just repeat the same old routines that are not working and expect any change . . . 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results' - Someone Engage your mind with your training like you would any other important activity. From the start of the set until the last rep maintain quality reps for quality results. If you don't know what optimum technique looks like seek advice. If you struggle mechanically to perform correct technique then more ours repeating the same old crappy for isn't going to fix it. Prioritize some time working on mobility/flexibility. Effective exercise does not simply mean move until you are tired. Train with purpose and achieve some actual results! |
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