No matter what your goal is, whether you want to lose weight, compete, build muscle, or just exercising for overall health, this quick guide can help. When you take that first step towards your goal, you already have confidence. You decided to change something in your life or to try something new. But, after you start you may get to the point where you might be doing the same routine, get bored, and your lack of motivation isn’t there anymore. The number one thing is to remember why you started in the first place. Exercising shouldn’t be something you want to do just to lose weight and then slack off a little after. Exercising should be a lifelong routine, as well as eating healthy. You should be working out hard almost every time if possible. Let’s go through the quick steps to help you stay focused in the short and long term.
- Goals
The first thing is write down exactly what your goal is. If you have multiple goals, that is fine. Write it down and leave it somewhere that you can see almost every day. If you get to a point where you feel less motivated, look at the paper and remember how you felt when you wrote that down, and what it truly means for yourself and people around you. Write down your short-term goal such as lose 8 pounds a month, to long-term such as lose 40 pounds or continue to exercise no matter what. If you don’t have a clear goal, it will be harder to stay focused and push yourself. If you are exercising just for pleasure and just like to be in shape, then write down you will always stay on track and workout.
- Write down your goal or goals, and why do you want to achieve them. If you want to lose weight, write down lose weight, about x amount. Then the reason why such as, because I am over weight and I need to do something about it, for myself now and in the future.
- Action
It can be easy to act in the moment. But what are you doing to keep yourself going for months and even years to come? Some people only act and start to work out because they were “living in the moment”. When you act to change your physical appearance, you are changing your future in a great way. If you want to compete, what actions are you going to take that are different? Are you going to eat a lot cleaner? Workout harder and smarter than ever before? Decide and act. If you wrote down your goal such as lose weight above, the next step is acting. This can be something like shopping for healthier food, working out 4 times a week instead of none or 1.
- Write down at least three things you are going to do, to act in achieving your goal. For example: sign up for the gym, start to eat better today, and throw all my junk food away.
- Consistency
This step, just like the other 2 is very crucial. If you are consistent with your nutrition and exercising, your goal can be a lot easier to achieve. If you are always on and off with eating and exercising, you will just get frustrated why your body isn’t changing like you want it to. What you must do, is learn to make exercising a habit. If you are starting to work out 3 times a week, make that happen all the time. You must stay focused and remember what your goal is and why you acted to start with. Sometimes it can take 6 months, a year, or more to get to your goal. But being consistent and focused will get you there. If you learn to enjoy exercising, being healthy, wanting to truly change, the consistency will come naturally without even realizing it.
- Write down what you are going to do to help you be consistent. For example: make a check list saying 1) Days worked out this week and 2) How many hours’ total in the week did I work out?
- This can be done for a month or two just to help you get into the routine of being consistent. Of course, you can do this if you want for a long time. But, it can help get your body into the rhythm as the weeks go on.