Over the years, I have been lucky to have had the opportunity to work with people in their fitness or performance endeavors. Below I mention 5 key factors that are critical to your success. Maybe you will find that one or more of these are lacking in your current training program.
What is Your Goal?
One of the most important factors in reaching your goal is knowing EXACTLY what your goal is. Far too many people have come to me during the initial consultation with no real goal. “I want to lose weight and tone up” or “I want to get stronger and faster” are very general goals. More specific goals like wanting to lose ten pounds before a wedding in two months or increasing your bench press twenty pounds during the summer are more like it. The latter allows us to develop the proper training needed to meet that goal. Being more specific makes it easier to build a program tailored to your goals.
Choosing the right Program
Another key component is choosing the right training program. When people come to me, I always ask what they’re current training program is. Usually it’s a bunch of programs thrown together with no real agenda or a program that was taken off the internet. I shake my head when an athlete comes in and he’s doing a boot camp style training program. Choosing the right program will make or break your success. A fat loss program will look different than an athlete wanting to improve performance. That may sound simple but I see it get overlooked many times. It is also important before choosing a program knowing the number of days you can train, what equipment you need, and if the current place you’re training at now is sufficient.
Writing a five day program when you can only train two days a week is probably not a good idea. Wanting to increase your deadlift in a gym that doesn’t allow banging of weights isn’t the best way to go either. Make sure you’re equipped and have the time before choosing your program.
Tracking your Sessions
Along with choosing the right program is the importance of tracking your sessions. How do you know what you did if you don’t write anything down? Maybe a program years ago yielded great results but you don’t remember it. I have found that printing out an Excel sheet or downloading my program to my Kindle has worked great for me. Keeping track of what you did is critical to your success.
Recovery
Recovery is another critical piece to your success. We see plenty of stuff on the internet about working out hard and doing extreme programs but not much on recovery.
Massage, proper nutrition, chiropractic care are just some of the methods you can use.
Cardiac output and tempo runs are great ways to get training in and help out with recovery. Going all out in your training every day and neglecting recovery will hinder performance, beat you up physically and mentally, or could lead to injury.
Lifestyle
The last component and I believe the most important of all to your success or failure is lifestyle. Your lifestyle or what you do outside the gym will make or break your goal and is more important than any program.
It crushes me when people train hard at the gym and throw it away by making bad nutritional choices, getting little sleep, and living stressed out all the time.
Drinking heavily two days a week and eating fast food weekly may not get you to your fat loss goal anytime soon.
Maybe by drinking more water, getting an extra hour of sleep, or reading the Bible before going to bed to calm you down is your ticket to success. I’m not saying to make drastic changes but little ones every week and see what happens.