How To Start Your Fitness Journey
- Fitness Fokused
- Apr 30, 2018
- 4 min read
How To Start Your Fitness Journey
“Where do I start?”
It’s one of the top fitness questions I get asked, beginning any journey is sometimes daunting, let alone one that is health and fitness related, but with the proper information and preparation it doesn’t have to be.
I’m guessing you’ve heard that if you want to make your goals a reality, then you must bring action to your intentions. However, this is isn’t completely true. In fact, it’s literally incomplete. The key is to bring informed actions to your intentions.
So you need a plan.
Here I'm going to outlined the steps to ensure you get off onto the right foot and ensure your success.
1. Understand the maths.
Weight loss, weight maintenance, muscle gain – any and all of these goals involve simple maths. Fat is nothing other than stored energy. The calories in your food are units of energy. Eat too much food (more than you are burning through activity in a day), no matter how healthy it is, and you will store that extra energy as fat. End of story. So to lose weight you must burn more calories than you consume. To maintain weight you consume the same amount of calories you are burning over the course of your day. To gain weight you must eat more calories than you burn in a day. Basically, rule one is that you must have a meal plan in place that helps you understand how MUCH you are are eating. This is why the recipes in all my meal plans have calorie counts based on servings. A golden rule for weight loss is to eat no less than 1200 calories for women and 1600 calories for men a day.
2. Food quality does matter, but not in the way you may think.
It has zero effect in the immediate moment on how many calories you burn. However, the quality of your calories will come in to play over time. If you are consuming fake fats, fake sugars, fake flavourings etc. these things can not only harm your immunity, but damage your fat burning hormone production. To clarify, food quality is not about carbs, macros, gluten, etc. It’s about common sense. Eat whole foods. Avoid chemicals in foods whenever possible. Go organic with meat, dairy.
3. Pick a fitness plan you can live with.
You don’t have to go to a gym. You don’t have to workout for hours. You don’t have to workout hard. But you do have to exercise around 4 times a week. Preferably for 20 to 30 minutes minimum. Now, if you are an extreme beginner I often suggest a walking regimen that progresses steadily with time. 20 minutes a day get out and go for a brisk walk. If you can handle more, the next question we need to ask is what do you like to do? Would you take a spin class? Would you do yoga? Would you do resistance training? Would you try Pilates? Or a combination of all the above? Because while there are definitely fitness techniques I can point to that get results fast, if you hate doing them it does us no good. The best workout is the one you can stick with consistently.
4. Get a coach.
Once you have decided what it is you’d like to do you must make sure you are doing it properly. And having a fitness expert guide you (at least in the beginning ) is very important. It helps to prevent injury and insure best results. If you are concerned that this is expensive, it doesn’t have to be. Yes, you can hire a personal trainer for a few sessions to show you around the gym. Teach you how the equipment works. Create a beginners program for you. A trainer will gradually progressing you to an intermediate level of fitness while you also learn how to train yourself safely and efficiently should you choose to.
5. Embrace the concepts of permission and balance.
Most beginners believe that they have to do it all or nothing and, to make matters worse, they think they need to do it all perfectly. This is a sure-fire way to set yourself up for failure. People are not perfect. You will have setbacks. You will fall off the wagon. So plan for it ahead of time. You can do this by practising what I call the 80/20 rule. (Even if it’s 70/30 the world won’t end.) This basically means that you try to make the majority of your calorie allowance healthier foods, but you allow for 20 to 30 percent of them (daily) to come from your favourite treat foods. This way you don’t feel deprived and you don’t feel discouraged when you have a piece of pizza – which is totally normal and fine. There’s room for less healthy foods in an overall healthy lifestyle.
6. Build support.
One of the top reasons people site for abandoning a fitness goal is lack of support. It could be a bestie, a co-worker, or a running group
Ultimately, the key is patience and fortitude. Be kind to yourself. Be loving. Be fluid. If you don’t like something, then change it. Trust the process. You’ll get there, I promise.
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