There are several reasons why you might be seeking a fitness regime that lets nothing fall through the cracks. Perhaps you’re running a marathon for charity, you’ve set yourself ‘body goals’, or you’re simply looking to encourage more strength, energy, and vitality in your life. Fitness regimes are so successful because they make exercise and training the norm. It’s a routine that you follow daily, weekly and monthly towards an end goal. The perfect fitness regime will leave nothing to chance and will consider all aspects of life in your quest for healthy living. Below are some top tips for planning that complete fitness schedule that’ll be most efficient in getting you where you want to be.
Start With Your Goals
A fitness regime is all well and good, but parachuting it into your work-life schedule will be ineffective if you don’t have some core values and goals that are inspiring your healthy change in lifestyle. Goal visualization is what drags athletes out of bed at 4 am for pre-breakfast runs. It’s what will get you into the gym after a long and stressful day at work after which all you feel like doing is vegetating on the couch. Be mindful of what’s inspiring you so that you’re able to revisit those aims when your motivation is particularly low.
The wonderful thing about setting an overarching goal is that you’ll be able to track your progress towards it using smaller goals. If you want to complete a local triathlon within a certain timeframe, you’ll be able to plan your swims, cycles, and runs, noting your gradual improvements along the way. If you’re simply looking to shed a few pounds, jumping on the scales every week or documenting your body as it changes can be extremely motivational, and help you strive towards your goal.
It’s a Mentality Thing
Goals and objectives aside, your everyday mentality is the key to planning and executing a successful fitness regime. Goals certainly motivate and guide you, but you’ll only be able to plan a fitness regime that works for you with a mentality that is both excitedly ambitious and cautiously aware of your limitations. Ambitious in that you’re not easy on yourself. Exercise should, after all, be testing yet cautious because overtasking yourself can lead to health problems and self-criticism when you inevitably fail to fulfill your plan.
With this in mind, exercise a good deal of self-love and respect when constructing whatever unique and exciting regime you think will take you from A to B seamlessly. Don’t plot unfeasible exercises into busy sections of your life, and don’t let your regime consume you in a way that’ll have you missing out on family time, drinks with friends or even that understated yet incredibly important rest period that’s as valuable as exercise in a well-constructed regime.
Research and Ask for Help
A fitness regime is set apart from simply planning on doing more exercise because it’s a logically thought-through structure of workouts and sessions that target muscle groups and bodily systems in such a way as to maximize the efficiency of your progress. Whether you’re at home in the gym or you’re a complete novice when it comes to weight machines, having a solid grounding in the theory of exercise will prevent you from making errors that will at best limit your progress and at worst cause you a serious muscular injury that will disrupt your best-laid fitness plans.
There are two main ways to access this information: through research in books, blogs, magazines and fitness websites, and through asking a professional in your local fitness facilities. Even asking a fellow gym-goer for a tip here and there can be illuminating and can help you make friends in your regular place of worship to the iron-pumping gods. When it comes to extra assistance, you won’t go far wrong by utilizing the knowledge and tailored approach of the likes of Transform Personal Training specialists, who’ll put you through your paces in a regime custom-fitted to your abilities and aims. They’ll make the planning simpler for you so that when you’re confident, you’ll be able to go it alone.
Don’t Forget Nutrition
Alongside any fitness schedule should be an awareness of what fuel you’re putting into your body. This needn’t be such a structured plan, unless, of course, you’d like to change your nutritional lifestyle as you change your exercise habits. However, it should take into account the profound link between fitness and diet; muscle growth and protein consumption; carbohydrate loading and aerobic energy. Your regime may require a little tinkering to your shopping basket or your fostering of a whole new culinary culture. It’s really up to you, and what nutritional tips you choose to follow.
Most exercise will change the structure of your muscles, subtly tearing them in order make them bigger, or repeatedly training them to change their constitution. Protein is the magic ingredient that speeds this process along, and you should consider upping your protein intake through dietary changes as well as the ubiquitous protein shake, which gives you easy high doses of protein at the conclusion of a workout. This is not to mention a host of more nuanced tips that you’re free to research and act on depending on your fitness aims.
Keep it Interesting
Routines elicit sighs and groans because they can so quickly become humdrum and boring due to their repetitive and unvaried nature. A fitness regime should operate with the flexibility to avoid boring dead-ends that are so uninspiring as to kill the spirit of motivation inside you. Be creative and vary your day’s exercise plans. Fitness training is laborious enough as it is, so be wary of the effect of planning a regime that’ll inspire boredom after a few weeks.
It’s for this reason that personal trainers, fitness gurus, and experienced athletes will regularly run off two separate plans. One plan which generalizes a weekly set of tasks (swim, run, or gym), and another that is week-specific, and expands on those tasks with unique and ever-changing ideas. A monthly swim in a lake or the sea, for instance, makes a much-appreciated break from plowing the same old lanes at your local pool. In the same sense, running in different environments, driving out of town to discover a new exploratory route is rewarding in the sense that you’re experiencing newness as you fulfill your exercise plan’s criteria – two birds, one stone.
Accept Inevitable Disruptions
The best-laid plans can go awry through the hustle and bustle of life’s challenges, and disruptions of myriad forms should be seen as an inevitability that you can’t plan for, but you’ll nonetheless be able to work through in your own time. Sometimes you’ll miss a morning session because you’ve been out at a wedding the previous evening, or you’ll be called into an all-hands-on-deck family situation that demands your full attention. When life presents you with these setbacks, take them in your stride. You’ll be able to get back up to speed with your regime when you’ve got the time.
It isn’t to say that you should begin to give yourself soft excuses not to follow through on your regime. Your willpower should prevent you from taking time off when it’s not needed. The trick to keep your fitness progress ticking over is to have some home-based routines (and maybe some equipment) so that if you’re not able to make it out of the house, you’ll still be able to get some form of workout under your belt to keep you on the path to your goal.
Reevaluate When You Reach Your Goal
If you’ve researched a fully-fledged routine, performing it regularly and diligently for a set number of weeks, you’ll arrive at your goal at some point. It might be that you’ve trained to the point of running a sub-3 hour marathon. It could be that you’ve achieved the muscle tone of your dreams for your beach vacation. Or you’ve got yourself in a position where you’re a valuable asset to a local sports team. Whatever your goal is, once you reach it you may in some way feel that your routine has become redundant.
It may well have; it depends on the longevity of your fitness project. But after some well-deserved celebration and a firm slap on the back in pride, you’ll have time to reevaluate when you want from your fitness life and especially the question of whether you’d like to cease your regime. Do you want to plateau on the same routine, or aim for new heights with a new advanced regime? Individual circumstances will dictate the decisions you make with regards to what your future exercise schedule will look like. In any case, setting new goals, whether they are connected to exercise or not, will fill that space left by your fitness regime, that’s taken you on your journey to fulfillment.
Planning a fitness regime is perhaps the most important step to achieving lofty exercise-related goals. It is motivational and inspirational; it’ll become the backbone of your lifestyle, melding with your day-to-day life in a way that becomes little more than routine. Follow these tips for successful regime planning so that you’re well-placed to achieve any fitness goal you set yourself, whether it be modest or ambitious.
