It’s important to set yourself on the right path mentally when trying to build muscle, drop body fat or achieve whatever fitness goal you have.
Ask yourself this…
What’s the one thing I can do today that will have the biggest impact to my fitness goal tomorrow?
Example — Reduce body fat
Let’s give an example for someone wanting to drop body fat.
They’re training hard and are eating okay…ish. They hit a plateau and know that something has to change. Whilst it’s easy to say “I’ll just train more or harder, that’ll fix it”. The easiest way to push past this plateau is making one improvement to their diet.
They decide to take a look at what they’re eating. Having tried many times to eat better a new approach will be needed. There one thing for that day is to start to track their food for one week. Just one week, this is a fact finding mission.
One week later a few things have happened:
- They learnt something about themselves.
- They discovered their next one thing action to take.
There’s quite a few options for changes to their eating habits but they discover a habit that doesn’t seem too hard to kick and tackle that first.
Their next ‘one thing’
Each week, when particularly exhausted with a stressful day at work they grab a Caffè Mocha from Starbucks. It’s only once or twice per week but they’ve discovered it’s 720 of generally useless calories. They’re nice, but not that nice :)
They switch to a green tea and decide to choose their next one thing tomorrow.
Result
So what’s happened here. With adopting the process of changing one thing.
- It’s easier to make small changes to what are essentially small habits.
- It’s easier to commit to one thing rather than many things.
- You learn, adapt and improve.
- You’re in control, it feels great. We all thrive on small wins.
Change too many things at once and you’ll not know what change gave you the most bang for your buck. Habits take time to form, so just like you developed the habit of buying a Caffè Mocha a few times per week you need to develop the habit of unlearning bad habits.
All the traits of a successful person who gets results…consistency, perseverance, self-discipline, all require one thing…a change in habits!
Go forth and kick some shitty habits into touch.
