My morning routine includes a workout. After years of randomly working out, I wanted to create a strategy to make my workout a habit. First, I created a set of questions to identify my fitness goals. Second, I added actions to achieve my fitness goals. That strategy became my fitness training system.
What fitness goals do I want to achieve?
What is my fitness objective? Lose Body Fat. Gain Muscle or Flexibility or Endurance. Eat a Healthier diet. I chose to lose body fat to start.
Why do I want to achieve my fitness goals?
What is driving me to achieve my objective? I avoided shallow, generic “I want to lose the muffin top” reasons. To lose the muffin top, I need to drop body fat. I brain dumped my whys and chose the authentic one(s).
How am I going to make my fitness goal a habit?
This is my fitness training system.
- Create a fitness training program
- What type of exercise? Strength training, cardio, Yoga, Pilates, etc.
- Where will I exercise? Home, gym, neighborhood route, hiking trail, bike trail, studio?
- What will I need? Weights, sneakers, bicycle, yoga mat? Do not go into debt. You can perform bodyweight exercises to start, walk around your neighborhood or a park, and someone in your life probably has a bike you can borrow.
- Schedule the workouts and a rest day(s) for the week and what I will complete each workout.
- Start small and easy to build the routine. After 4 weeks of wins, I will begin to increase exercises, weight/reps/sets, distance, speed, resistance, time, poses, or breaths daily.
- If I become overwhelmed by an increase in volume in my workout, I will reduce the number of exercises, weight/reps/sets, distance, speed, resistance, time, poses, or breaths. I will not give up.
- Adjust my diet to match my objective. All objectives do not include candy, cakes, cookies, chips or soda.
- Sleep 8+ hours.
- Set weekly and monthly milestones for workouts
- Show up each day.
- Never miss 2 workouts in a row.
- Plan for disruptions or unplanned events by completing x squats or x minutes of cycling.
- Do not be discouraged by a lack of progress. I am creating the everyday habit. The results will happen if I am committed.
- Track my daily workouts. Exercises, weight/reps/sets, distance, speed, resistance, time, poses, breaths and how I feel.
- Track my weight and body measurements weekly.
- Track my daily food and drink.
- Adjust my system to achieve results
Create your system
Whew! That is a lot to cover but it will work if you are honest with yourself. Be careful about pledging to workout each day for 30 minutes. Start with small and easy. Do not make exercise a chore. Read your Fitness Training System often to remind yourself of your commitment.
Have fun!
Up next week: Home Organization System