Planning for Success

Failing to plan is a sure fire plan for failure, when it comes to fitness and achieving the body of your dreams. As someone who has lost a lot of weight, one of the things I learned is that having a few "good days" where you do all the right things, followed by a few "bad days" will never result in the change you want, as they cancel each other out, and your results will show ups and downs and generally just running around in circles Weight loss, fat loss, improved performance all come down to many, many consistent good days, with only the very occasional hiccup.

So how do you do this? All the motivation and desire in the world wont help you if you dont do the hard yards. Its all in the planning. If you don't plan your meals in advance - what happens? Time runs short, or you are caught out somewhere, you take an easy option and before you know it, you've blown your nutrition goals for the day. If you don't plan your exercise schedule, all the excuses in the world come into play.

Try a planning commitment measure over the next week. Each night give yourself a score out of 10.

Nutrition: You should be eating 5 meals/day (or 3 normal meals and 2 snacks). Score yourself 1 point for every meal that you ate as planned.

Exercise - score yourself up to 2 points for this - 1 point if you did the exercise planned - 2 points if you did it with the appropriate intensity. (ie you might have planned to walk for 1/2 hour, did it but didn't walk as fast as you should have=1)

Water - score 2 points for drinking 6 cups (1 point for 3 cups)

Planning - score 1 point if you made sure everything was planned the night before.

Tally it up each day to give yourself a score out of 10. Do you achieve 10/10 each day? If not - there's a clear reason why you are not achieving what you want - look at the areas you are falling down in, and challenge yourself to change this.

Feel free to comment on your scores in the comments section below - I'd love to know how you are going.