Feeling Stuck in Your Fitness Journey?

Aren’t you tired of feeling like you’re stuck in a rut when it comes to your fitness life? Well, guess what, girl, you are not alone. So many women come to me because they hit a wall when it comes to fitness and just getting the motivation to keep going, or just even get started or restarted when they’ve fallen off the wagon. But what if you can build the fitness lifestyle that you love with the workouts that you love with the approach that you love?

Some of you don’t believe that’s possible. Well, today I want to give you three tips that’s going to help you to make that your reality. So that way you can wake up every single morning energized, motivated, focused, and feeling confident. And that’s because your fit life is in order.

Envisioning Your Dream Fitness Life

Here’s what I want to ask you. What does your dream life look like with fitness involved? I think when it comes to our goals and what we want with fitness, we’re always looking for the externals. How much weight do you want to lose? Fitting into those old clothes again, trying to chase some phantom version of yourself from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. Honey, that ship has sailed.

Sometimes the best thing to do is just look at where you are right now and how you can improve that stance. Make it healthier. Make it stronger. Go from where you are in the present and more that future you that is empowered in the beauty of maturing and being at a new station in your life versus going backwards.

I talked about the importance of your guttural why. Why that’s so important to you. But there’s a reason why I teach that. And that’s because knowing your why, your guttural why is so important. Now what is the guttural why? That is the why that is intrinsic to your fitness goals.

Finding Your Guttural Why

It’s not the surface stuff. It’s the deep stuff that punches you in the gut that when you say it out loud, it means something. When you say it out loud, it’s like ripping off the Band-Aid. It’s about getting real about where you are right now and what’s keeping you from being there. The things that you need to get over and get out of the way so you can have success towards your goals. That is the guttural why.

So what does that look like? For some of you, it may be being able to keep up with your kids or your grandkids. For my younger ladies, it might be having a body that’s healthy enough to have kids. Or for other women, it may be important for you to have the energy to take your life by the horns and to be able to travel, or be able to work, to be able to be the best that you can be present in your life.

You have to have a healthy body, a healthy mind, and a healthy spirit to do that. And your fitness can lead the way for all of that. Other goals, such as being able to look great in a swimsuit and not be embarrassed when you want to go to the beach, or that upcoming vacation, to be able to hike or to run, or to do things that once winded you, that you want to conquer and feel empowered in. These are all deeper reasons than “I just want to lose 5 or 10 pounds.”

Setting Achievable Goals

Now the second thing that you have to do, once you know the guttural why, is to set achievable goals. We get so caught up in these lofty goals in our culture today. We’ve been sold this lie of fitness that it’s about quick results. How fast can I lose 10 pounds? Can I lose it in two weeks? Can I lose 5 pounds in a week? Can I lose 30 pounds in a month?

What’s the best way to starve myself down to nothing? Maybe I can work out for two hours a day eating like a rabbit and get those results quickly. None of these are realistic nor achievable. Now, you might have some success in seeing that happen, but guess what? The quicker you lose it, the faster it comes back on and then some. Because statistically that’s what happens at a rate of 80%.

How do you prevent that? Smart goals. Smart stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Meaning that your goals again have to mean something to you. You have to piece it out in a way that’s attainable. They have to be something that is relative to you, important to you, and time-bound, and that you want to set a time in which to achieve them.

Embracing Realistic Expectations

One of the things I love to encourage my clients is to think about realistic weight loss. So if realistic weight loss is anywhere between 1 to 2 pounds a week within a month, depending on how much weight you have to lose, that’s about 4 to 8 pounds in an entire month. But you know what’s going to happen when you train smart?

When you eat in a way to be lean, to be strong, and to know that food is your greatest ally, so you’re not starving yourself. When you’re training in a way that’s going to help you to keep muscle on, or in some cases, even build muscle in the face of that loss. That scale isn’t going to move as quickly as you expect it to.

What the world has told you, the fitness world has told you it should be going 5 pounds a week, 10 pounds a week. Not realistic at all. You’re losing muscle and water more than anything when you go that rapidly, unless you have a bunch of weight to lose. But what happens a lot of times when you take the smarter approach is that you’re preserving that muscle tissue and you’re losing fat.

Building a Sustainable Routine

So inches are coming down, you’re getting leaner in places you’re not even measuring. So visually you start looking different. This is why photos, comparison photos, are so important in this process. You start to notice your clothes fit you differently. Smart goals help you to see what’s attainable in a realistic time frame and it keeps you encouraged as well.

And once you’ve gotten your goals, you know your why, you’ve got to set up a routine that is sustainable. Here’s the thing to always keep in mind. Whatever you have to do to lose weight, to change your body, is what you’re going to have to do to maintain it. That’s like going out there like a maniac doing all these crazy fad diets, extremes of the wazoo, working out for hours upon hours a day.

That’s the wrong way to approach body transformation. The right way is taking an approach that you can maintain for a lifetime. The only thing that might change is how much you’re eating every single day. If you want to lose weight, you got to be in a deficit. If you want to build muscle, you got to eat in a surplus. If you want to maintain your weight, you eat enough to maintain your weight.

The Importance of Strength Training

To train, to build muscle and to get stronger, you gotta train heavy. Heavy is a relative term, but let’s say your training program calls for about 8 to 10 repetitions. You shouldn’t be able to do more than that for the set. So you lift heavy enough to challenge yourself in the way to meet that demand. Even if your workout program said 15 to 20 repetitions, by the time you get to that last one, you can’t lift another rep. Maybe 1 or 2 you can squeeze out, but after that, you’re going to fail.

That’s the kind of intensity you need to bring to the table. But there’s no one way to workout. If you’re talking about a sustainable program, you want to look at the things that you love to do. So if you love to run, you like to hike, you like to bike, you like to swim. You love working out on the elliptical, the treadmill. By all means, include that in your training. If you love weight training, go for it. If you love Zumba or exercise classes of any type, dance classes, include it.

Conclusion

There’s no wrong way to approach fitness because at the end of the day, it’s about doing what you love. Now, I do say that all women should be strength training. All women should be in the weight room in some way, shape, or form. That doesn’t mean that you have to lift like the Hulk. Maybe you’re someone who loves functional training and just mobility work, moving your own body weight through space. Maybe you’re training at home and all you have are bands, a couple of dumbbells here or there.

Or maybe you are lucky enough to have a full-scale gym with everything at your fingertips. It does not matter. What matters is that you’re doing the things that inspire you, that you can keep doing day after day, year after year for the rest of your life to maintain the changes that you want. And not only that, scheduling in rest and recovery. Because you can’t train every single day and think you’re going to see your body do miraculous things. But we’ll go ahead and get into that in another conversation.

If what I’m saying to you right now is inspiring you, and you want to take your training to the next level, click here to speak with me for a complimentary clarity call.