1. Make Exercise a Priority
Most gyms you step into are full of 20 – something’s “challenged” by schedules that center around working out and Instagram.
When you are a bit older though, just finding time to train becomes the new struggle once you add a career and a kid or two in the mix.
To stay on track you need to prioritise your health / fitness with good time management. In my experience it helps to apply one of two things: do first things first (make exercising the first thing you do in the morning) or at least schedule when you are going to workout, early!
2. Organise Workouts Into Your Daily Lifestyle
The key is to consider ALL your obligations and make sure you have given yourself adequate flexibility to change workout times should something else arise. That way being forced to skip a workout doesn’t mean you won’t train again until the New Year.
3. Use Better Metrics To Measure Progress
There’s more to a workout than the amount of weight lifted or the number of reps increase, but how did the workout feel? Did each rep feel easier than last week? Scale weight tells you very little on its own. How do your clothes fit? Has your body fat % come down? Something we always keep an eye on during our programmes.
4. Don’t Get Hurt
Injury probably side-tracks more workouts than anything else when you are over 35. If avoiding injury is your goal (and to achieve consistency it should be) you need to follow a few rules and stick to them, no matter how “good you feel”.
- Avoid very low reps. There’s absolutely no need to ever perform a one-rep max if your goal is to burn fat and get leaner. Fact is, anything below 4 reps typically isn’t necessary, but can be good fun.
- Make reps harder not heavier. While adding more weight to an exercise is great for progression, tricks that increase tension and force the muscle to work harder without additional load (drop sets, supersets, etc) are safer and perhaps even better for muscle growth.
5. Shift Your Thinking
There are so many out there that love to talk about “the grind” and “sacrifice” they make to achieve their goals.
If achieving my goals and being healthy was such a terrible process and found it to be such a grind, I simply wouldn’t do it. I am guessing you would be the same.
The reason I’ve kept up my lifestyle, health and fitness is because I LOVE it. And not just the working out – the eating clean and feeling good. Focusing on finding something and a lifestyle you love is the number one thing you can do to faster consistency. We want to do the things we love, but also need to consider the things we need.
But there’s no law that says those two things can’t be done at the same time.
Have a great week,
Paul
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