Are You Fit Enough?

Most people want to be fit and healthy, but what does this mean? Health is relatively easy to comprehend. You are healthy if you have no medical problems and nothing that will decrease your expected life span. Some level of physical fitness is obviously tied into personal health especially when you consider factors such as strength and cardiovascular fitness correlate well with living a long life, along with enabling you to perform daily tasks. With the health part covered, how then do you determine if you are fit enough?

You can be sure that your fitness requirements differ from almost everyone else. Think about it, every athlete has different requirements even if they play the same sport. There are different positions for every sport and different ways of approaching the position based on your strengths. In daily life we all have different tasks that require some form of fitness, be it lifting something, bending down to pick things up and moving around in general. You need to decide how much strength, power, speed, aerobic endurance, mobility, flexibility etc. you require, not only to live a healthy life but to fulfill the requirements of your individual lifestyle.

Check out ExRx.net to help decide your fitness requirements and ask yourself which you have reached and which you need to start working towards. Make sure you are always fit enough for the task at hand.

Mental Mastery Response

Please read and re-read this Mental Mastery article from Chris Shugart. It really explains the four stages of the health and fitness lifestyle. Really stages two and three will be the hardest to overcome.

Stage two, Conscious Incompetence is tough and as Chris writes "this is the biggest issue in the fields of health, fitness and bodybuilding." He goes on to give a couple of cures for this stage including self-directed anger. The key though is realization that you are rationalizing poor decisions. Identifying your rationalizations and choosing not to allow them is a direct step to stage three.

Stage three, Conscious Competence means you have taken control of your decisions and are now living a healthy lifestyle. Moving to stage four, Unconscious Competence requires time. Make enough of the right decisions for a long enough period of time and your won't even have to think about it anymore. The trap though is falling back into stage two. If you haven't quite made it to stage four and begin to allow yourself one or two small rationalizations they can snowball and you find yourself back where you began.

Be patient, be dedicated and work your way through the stages.

More motivation from other sources

Check out FitBuff, one of my posts is featured this week. They feature a number of different blogs under different categories.

I have also come across a few different motivation for health and fitness related blogs in the last few days.
The Educated Athlete covers categories such as mindset, leadership and emotions.

Simply Fitness has a post on Motivation for running when you don't want to! The tip about getting yourself to exercise everyday by simply getting out the door with your exercise gear on is brilliant and something I definitely think works. I have usually gone for just making myself do a warm up when I don't feel like training. This works for me because the warm up has the effect of getting me moving and clears my mind. This in turn makes me feel better about the training I have planned so I invariably end up training properly and successfully. By simplifying it further to just making yourself get outside with your gear on I think you are further increasing you chances for success.

MusclePost also has a post about motivating yourself to work out. The are some useful and improtant tips like tracking your progress, setting goals and changing your workouts to continue the callenge.

Adherence to the Plan

Any plan is better than none. In health and fitness even a relatively poor plan can create good results if you believe in the plan enough. Plans don’t need to be complicated to be effective in fact the most effective are simple and easy to follow.

There is simply no point in creating a complex plan that incorporates every possible training system and convoluted nutritional program. It is not enough however to say, “Just eat well and exercise.” The plan must have some specifics. The number of training sessions you’ll complete in a week or month even if you don’t necessarily designate the exact days you’ll train on. A list of food you can eat and a list you’ll avoid, without counting calories or macronutrient totals. These are the beginnings of a plan.

Next you need to plan the type of exercise you’ll do. From aerobic based jogging and swimming to heavy strength training you have a huge range of options and plenty of different approaches can be chosen. Find a few that suit you and your goals best. This shouldn’t be too hard using the internet, t-nation and men’s health have a huge range of articles and there is plenty of running and aerobics based sites out there. Once you’ve found the plans you like and established that you have the time and equipment to perform them, try following each of the separately for a month or two. At the end of each time period evaluate your results, what you liked or disliked, what worked or didn’t work and your adherence to the plan.

This process can be followed for nutritional plans as well. Make sure to give yourself enough time to evaluate each plan. If you change them around to quickly your body won’t be able to adjust and your results will be hard to judge. Once you’ve been through a few different plans you’ll know what works best for you. You can then take your knowledge and create your own plan specifically tailored to your needs.

Remember non-adherence to the plan is the same as no plan at all. Dr John Berardi, a noted nutritionist and exercise scientist works on the 90/10 rule which suggests you need 90% adherence to be able to evaluate a plan’s effectiveness.

Motivation

What is it that makes you train hard? Knowing how you get yourself motivated can be a big help. If you are internally motivated you push yourself because you like the feeling hard training gives you. If you are externally motivated it's the external rewards from training that drive you.

When you first start training you'll likely be externally motivated. Wanting to lose weight, gain muscle, get healthier or achieve athletically are all examples of external motivation. External motivation is great at the start and if you set achievable short term goals it can carry you a long way.

There will be times those external sources aren't motivating enough. Tough times indeed and you'll need to look inside and inspire yourself. Inspiring yourself can be easy if you've kept detailed records about your training. Simply look back and see how far you've come if your destination seems too far away. You might also go back to a particularly good session and visualize how you felt during and after that session. For those that train in a group or with a partner use the energy of others around you to pick you up. Anything you can use to get you excited about training is a motivating force.

Motivation, whatever yours is make sure you make the most of it to ensure great performance.

This article was featured in The Fourth Edition of the Carnival of Improving Life.

A Great Training Session

Having a great training session can be elusive. The key to consistent great training is focusing on the small, simple things that make up each session. Adequately prepare through proper recovery, nutrition and hydration. Make sure you have your training log and the proper equipment required for training, nothing ruins a session quicker than realizing you don't have a vital piece of equipment.

Once you have your pre training routine in place continued focus throughout the session is much easier. Through the warm up, technique should be worked on. The more you properly practice a skill the more automatic it becomes. During the main part of the session small things will determine if the session is a success. Things like ensuring your hand placement is correct on the bar if lifting weights, making sure your shoes are tied correctly and won't come undone and controlling your breathing pattern during every exercise.

Controlling the small things is what separates ok sessions from good and good sessions from great. Some days you'll feel so good that everything will fall into place without even thinking about it. Other days will be a struggle and unless you concentrate on the things you can control they will be wasted training sessions. Reduce the difference between your best and worst training sessions by improving your focus and you can continue to improve even when things aren't going your way.

Planning and Preparation

There are some simple steps to success that must be taken. The first is having a goal. Everyone needs a goal to strive for in their training. It doesn't matter if it's to lose 10 pounds, get your blood pressure under control or achieve something athletically. You need a goal to keep you going, to remind you why you are training hard. Give yourself a time frame and measure everything.

Secondly you need a plan to achieve your goal. Great progress cannot be made without a plan. While your plan should be set out from the start it can and should be fluid. An exercise can be changed if it isn't working, a diet can be tweaked if you are not progressing as you should. Just don't stray to far away from your original plan and evaluate everything at the end of your designated time frame.

Finally we have preparation. Preparation comes in many forms, making sure you can't fail your diet because you have everything cooked, packed and ready to go. Making sure you are physically prepared for each training session by getting enough sleep and following some sort of recovery system. Mentally preparing for each training session by reviewing what you have previously done and blocking out everything else to concentrate fully on the specific exercise you are currently performing.

Once you have a goal, a plan and prepare well success will be made much easier and come much quicker than otherwise.

Strength

Strength. It’s the very foundation of our lives. It influences everything we do and everything we attempt to do. From daily activities like getting out of bed in the morning or putting something away in a cupboard to running a marathon or lifting a heavy weight you need the appropriate amount of physical and mental strength to complete the task. Physical and mental strength go hand in hand. You may have the physical strength to perform a task however if you don’t have the mental strength your body will not be able to fully use its physical strength. Equally if you psych yourself up to the point that you’re more mentally strong than physically strong, injury is the likely result.

It’s amazing how co-ordination issues, balance, body composition (less fat, more muscle) and the ability to move faster and further all improve as your physical strength is improved. The first step to physical strength improvement is mental strength improvement. You can't just expect to grab something and heave it up any old which way and improve so you need to focus on the task and mentally have the strength to perform it properly.

Whether you are training for performance improvements, physique improvements or health improvements strength is the key to it all. You should prepare to improve some kind of strength every time you train.