It's that time again when everyone creates their new goals for the year to make them a better version of themselves. Whether it's quitting smoking, losing fat or spending more quality time with friends and family, it's always a tough ask to change what can be a big part of your life - especially now we're back in yet another lockdown! So how do we go about giving ourselves the best chance to smash our goals through a challenging time? Well, like you'll see through Gymshark's 66 day campaign, it can take 66 days to form a new habit. You should use this as a frame of reference to guide you and motivate you to see your goals all the way to the end. Below I'll give you my three best tips to smash your exercise and health based goals.
I think the most important one, that's really relevant to a time with a lockdown is to readjust your goals to fit your new situation. Without a doubt, access to a gym makes smashing goals so much easier. But at the moment we don't have that for at least another month, so how can you adjust your goal to compensate for the lack of facilities. A good example here is lets say your goal is fat loss, and you wanted to achieve this through weight training. Well the average person won't have access to the same sort of equipment as a gym does - unless you're fortunate to own a home gym! So instead of weight training, you could work on improving your bodyweight exercises and strength in them, and also get into running. While adapting to keep working at your goals, you may also find a new passion for another type of exercise. So really, it would be a win win! I've also had some clients carry on exercise throughout the week with friends and family. This is also great because they can introduce you to new types of exercises and a different point of view on why you're wanting to smash your goals. You'll be surprised how beneficial it is for you to have external motivation from friends and family members.
Another top tip I have is to really focus on your diet. The one thing I have constantly repeated is that lockdowns and working from home seriously reduce how active you are in the day. Without that commute to work (which could be cycling or even just walking between tube stations), and the lack of walking you would do around your office or shop you may work in, you're far more inactive now than what you used to be. And quite simply, less activity means less calories burned. The less calories you burn, the less your body has to rely on your fat stores for energy to support your body. Therefore, we need to be a lot more strict with our diets to make sure that it reflects the lack of activity we may now be doing (if only Netflix could burn calories for us!). You should still be aiming to have 3 substantial meals, a couple of light, healthy snacks in between and plenty of water, but you may want to change the size of the portion on your plate, or maybe change where you get your calories from. You may want to try less carbohydrates on your plate and more protein. These are only tips I may give to my clients and you shouldn't take them for gospel. For professional dietary advice consider contacting a registered nutritionist.
The final tip I have for you in this blog is to increase your step intake throughout the day. The average steps that we need daily is 10,000, however like I said above, we are far more inactive while stuck at home. This creates a bigger need to stay more active, and that can be done by adding more steps on top of that magic 10,000. You'll be surprised how many calories you can burn from walking. On average, ten thousand steps a day can equal 400-500 calories. Add that up over a week and you could easily burn 2,800-3,500 calories. Burning 3,500 calories a week roughly equates to losing 1 pound of fat. Now that doesn't sound too bad at all does it.
Thanks for having a read of this blog, and as always if you have any questions on what I've discussed then get in touch!