Well, It’s official! My mom and I are entered in for our 12 week challenge with Gold’s Gym. There will be three weigh ins for us, one for each month, and we will also receive personalized meal plans with guided workouts. If you haven’t checked it out yet I suggest you do! It’s an awesome opportunity to get started and I’ll have someone to share the journey with.
Throughout my challenge I’m going to be sharing some of these workouts and plans with you, but I do want to point out that anything I add is something that has been personalized for my goals, my limits and my body. I would encourage anyone who is interested in making major changes in diet or activity like I am to consult their doctor, as well as a personal trainer. They have gone to school for years to educate themselves about the miracles our bodies are and to be able to help people understand their own bodies better. As a recent college graduate I really respect the time and effort it has taken them to accomplish this. But, with those two things out of the way I am counting down the days till the 28th! (6 to be exact) We will then take our before photos, which begrudgingly I will share, and the dreaded fitness test. I am anxious to see how these turn out before we are placed in the hands of our trainers.
Today I want to share with you the foundations for fitness. The things you need to think about and decide before getting involved in your fitness. You may find it strange to think about getting active, but these are the things that can make or break the success of your change. (Warning: this is a bit of a long post.)
Creating your own Fitness Profile and setting realistic goals
The first thing you really want to consider before diving into a workout plan is…
What has inspired you to take this step in the first place?
For me it has been my dream of thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. At this point I know I don’t have the strength or endurance to make it all the way through the mountains, so I’ve taken it upon myself to have a bit of a paid incentive. The weight loss and health benefits that come with it also help with my resolve. It would be wonderful to get back to where I was in high school! What is it that makes you want to change your body?
Next you really need to consider…
How much time can you devote to your health?
We all have busy lives, and realistically we can’t spend every second of our day worrying over what we are eating or if we are going to get our hour of running in. That would be more of a blow to your health than not worrying about it at all. So realistically sit down and map out when you can work out and how much you’d be able to do it. You will want to know how many minutes per day, how many days per week, and what are the best times of day. From there you can begin to evaluate what you are currently doing to improve your health and if it is working.
What is your current workout routine, if any?
How much are you working out? What kinds of workouts are you doing? I really haven’t been doing much in this section lately, but I know some of you may be keeping up with your routine. I do really well working out for about a week and then I get distracted. When I do workout it consists mostly of cardio like running, elliptical, stair stepper.. things along those lines. I know almost nothing about strength training, plus I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to body exercises or weights. I know this is something I’m going to have to get over to reach my goals. Take your time to think about what it is you do now.
How many times a day are you eating?
This question is why I always encourage using a journal. Journals like this food and workout journal called Keep Going allow us to keep track of our progress as we go. Keep Going has my favorite set up so far. You can log meals, workouts, calories, plus your sleep habits, energy levels, and concentration. It’s also a pretty cheap journal if you ask me! From here you can see when you eat, what you eat (including snacks), how many calories it was and anything else. With this you also need to log if you are taking any vitamins or supplements and how much water you are drinking. If you don’t know how much you should be drinking in a day check out my post How Much Water Should You Really Be Drinking A Day?… And Why. When logging water you should also be aware of how much alcohol you drink as well.
Once you have what you’ve been doing blocked out you can ask yourself the important question…
Has this been making a positive difference?
Have you seen change in your body with what you’ve been doing? The importance of knowing this is to understand whether or not your current workout and diet is really right for your goals and your body type. It’s really easy to be doing the wrong type of workout or eating the wrong way and leave yourself disappointed when you can’t see improvement. In my case I have seen some improvement with my weight. I’ve lost around 6 pounds in the last month, which is sweet! Though, for hiking, weight isn’t really one of my major concerns so it’s important that I re-evaluate my workout routine… or lack of one.
Most people should be seeing a change in their bodies every 3 to 4 weeks. If not you may be doing something that is keeping you from the results you want. When you’ve nailed down what it is you should probably change about the way you are doing things now then you can move on to the fun part of creating a new program for yourself!
How do you rate your body now?
To get started you need to come up with a baseline. If you had to rate your body right at this exact moment how would you? Understanding how you see yourself and also having a realistic idea of your current body condition can do a WHOLE LOT OF GOOD when getting a life change going. I would suggest rating your body from one to five (one being the worst, five being the best) on these 7 aspects.
- Body composition: 1 2 3 4 5
- Eating habits: 1 2 3 4 5
- Athletic Ability: 1 2 3 4 5
- Cardiovascular capacity: 1 2 3 4 5
- Flexibility: 1 2 3 4 5
- Quality of sleep: 1 2 3 4 5
These give you your baseline to refer back to after you start. Notice it isn’t just about how strong you are or how small you are. It’s about your health over all. It gives you a good starting point for breaking down your long term goals and a good way to measure your progress 3 to 4 weeks down the road.
What are your goals?
Goals can be a hard thing to pin down. Sometimes we end up setting goals that are so unrealistic all we do is get discouraged. One thing you have to know is change will take time! You aren’t going to be able to accomplish everything overnight, but this doesn’t mean we should set completely easy goals either. Take a goal inventory. Ask yourself how important completing these goals are to you, again on a scale of one to five. (one being not important, five being very important).
- Improve Heart Health: 4
- Body Fat Reduction: 3
- Reshape and Tone: 5
- Improve sports performance: 4
- Improve Mood: 2
- Improve flexibility: 3
- Increase Strength: 5
- Increase Energy Level: 4
- Decrease Stress: 3
- Increase Metabolism: 2
- Feel Better: 2
- Other, specify Gain Endurance
Then you can go on to ask yourself what is your main goal? Mine would be getting in shape to thru-hike over 2,100 miles of trail in the Appalachian Mountains. Notice how specific that was? Adding specifics to what you want to do is one of the ways you can set a realistic goal.
By when do you want to accomplish your goal?
I’ve got over a year to complete my goal, but I’m hoping to get there before then because I want to be able to do some other long hikes. If I could accomplish my goal by summer I think I’d be pretty dang happy. Give yourself a limit to complete your goals. It gives you the push to keep yourself going. Also think about some small rewards you can give yourself along the way, like the trick of putting a dollar back for every workout you do and then getting to spend that on yourself!
This is quite a lot to think about before even putting a plan together, which I promise we will go over next week when I get my prep stuff done. Then I can share my fit test with you, what to log for your process and how to decide where you are going to build your program from there! I look forward to hearing from all of you about your goals and keeping up with you as we get into building our programs next week!!!!
Namasté
I love sugar. I always have and I probably always will, but this sweet tooth is something that can (and has) gotten me into trouble. Like most people I tend to intake sugar at an excess, and I’m not talking about the healthy kind of sugar like fruits. I mean fresh baked, icing glazed, white flower, unknown calories, melt in your mouth kind of sugar. The kind that causes cavities, weight gain, low energy and can turn into some serious health problems like diabetes. For all of these reasons I’ve decided to skip on the sweets and pull out my obnoxious tooth if possible. So, my dad and I had a little doughnut adventure while we were out grocery shopping, which has turned into my farewell to excessive, unhealthy sugar. We really didn’t intend to stop off for them, but as we were on our way to buy healthy food we passed a Krispy Kreme with the Hot Now light on. Apparently dad couldn’t help himself and pulled in. So we got half a dozen doughnuts and had three each. Afterwards we swore off sugar until we could reach our fitness goals…. At this point I can’t wait to be on the trail trying to get thousands of calories into my system, but I’m really happy and ready for this decision.
The question “How much water should you really drink in a day” is one of these questions that I’ve found conflicting information on. I’ve heard 64 oz, 8 glasses of 8 oz, it depends on your body size and 1 gallon (which can be extremely dangerous actually). When I talked to Mike (my fitness trainer, whose opinion I trust greatly due to 30 years of schooling and experience) he told me 90 oz a day should be my goal.
AT Fit 