Fitness Tips Body Blog

Hope you have a great day!  And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, well, have a great day anyway!

Clearly, one of my New Year’s resolutions has to be to post to my blog on a more consistent basis. If you want to build muscle, burn fat, or just improve your health and fitness, you need to set goals to give yourself the best chance of success.

Since we’re quickly moving to the end of the year, I am going to talk about goal setting and motivational issues.

After all, isn’ that on everyone’s mind right now - starting off a new year the right way?

We don’t want another year to rush by and end up in the same position next December - wondering what happened to the year and our goals.

And to do that, we need to start off the new year correctly and keep the momentum going.

1 - 7 Steps To Success

Let’s take a look at seven simple steps you can take right now to move you rapidly along toward your fitness goals.

Think on paper: Only about 3 percent of adults have clear, written goals. These people accomplish five and ten times as much as people without written goals.

Step 1: Decide Exactly What You Want. This will allow you to prioritize your tasks to that you are spending the most time on high value tasks that move you closer to your goals. If your goal is to add 20 pounds of muscle, there isn’t much point in using up a lot of you training time by jogging 5 miles a day.

Step 2: Write It Down. Again, think on paper. Written goals are a powerful thing. They have an energy behind them that helps you move toward them that unwritten goals just don’t have.

Step 3: Set A Deadline On Your Goal. Create a sense of urgency and positive pressure. Without a deadline you will procrastinate and do the little things that may damage your short term goals. If you are having "after" pictures taken in three weeks then you are much less likely to swallow that bag of popcorn, than if you are just getting in shape…eventually.

Step 4: Make a list of everything you can think of that you will need to do to help you achieve your goal. Leave nothing to chance. The more planning you do ahead of time, the more likely you will stick to the plan and achieve your goals. The more prepared you are, the more success you will experience.

Step 5:  Organize the list into a plan.  Organize your list by priority and sequence.

Step 6: Take action on your plan immediately. Do something. Get started. Start building positive reinforcement and momentum RIGHT NOW.

Step 7: Resolve to do something every single day that moves you toward your major goal. And with fitness, you have to, don’t you? Whether it is your workout, eating six high protein meals, etc. you should always be doing something that moves your forward toward your goals.

Your weight training routine needs to be designed properly if you want it to help you build muscle and burn fat. That may seem obvious but it’s amazing how many mistakes I see made in the very first step, and that’s the way body parts are split up when using a split routine.Most peope would be better off using a two or three days per week full body routine a lot more often than they do. That’s for starters. However, if you are going to split up your body parts and work them on different days, you need to put some thought into the process so you can avoid overlap that can lead to overtraining, which will kill your bodybuilding progress.

Let me give you two examples of poorly designed training splits and why they shouldn’t be used. Both of these appeared in a recent issue of a popular bodybuilding magazine. This is why I talk about this topic a lot. I see these weight training routines all the time and they drive me nuts!

The first routine suggested training four times per week, on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Okay, so far so good. Usually on a training split like this you would divide your body in half, working upper body on Mondays and Thursdays and lower body on Tuesdays and Fridays. But not this split. It suggested chest, back and shoulders and Mondays and Thursdays and legs and arms on Tuesdays and Fridays.

So what’s wrong with this split? It’s a double whammy on your poor arms, the smallest muscles you work! Your biceps and triceps not only get hit hard four days a week, they get hit hard on consecutive days…. twice!! You hit them hard on Monday when you work back and chest and then hard again the very next day when you work arms. And then this repeats itself on Thursday and Friday. This is a sure fire recipe to keep your arms from ever growing! Don’t do it.

The other routine I read about was similar. It had you working hamstrings, calves and shoulders on day one, quads, chest and biceps on day two, and then traps, triceps and back on day three. This is pretty much the same as the above routine with your biceps and triceps getting hit hard on consecutive days.

Remember, if you are going to devise a weight training split routine, keep in mind that you can’t truly isolate a body part and that overlap occurs. Your triceps get hit hard when working your shoulders (on pressing movements) and your triceps get hit hard on most chest exercises. Your biceps get hit hard on most back exercises.

A couple of easy rules would be to spilt your training into upper and lower body days or have more rest days, such as always following a training day with a rest day. You may also want to stick to the push/pull training split.

Next time you put together your weight training routine, take a momemt to think about exercise overlap. It could be the key to your muscle building, fat burning progress.