How has 2012 been for you so far?
Are you already well on your way to achieving your fitness goals for the year? Or have things drifted off course a little more than you’d like to admit?
If the time you’re investing in eating right and training hard isn’t paying off, or you’re frustrated because you think you could (and should) be doing better, today is your opportunity to change all of that.
Today is the day when you wipe the slate clean and start again.
And it all starts with getting clear on the one single thing that you want to accomplish.
As you’ve probably heard more times than you care to remember, setting goals is an important first step when it comes to building a better body.
But as the weeks and months go by, it’s easy to start chasing every rabbit that crosses your path and get distracted by all the new training programs and diets that you read about.
So if you want to set a “get in shape” goal that you stand a realistic chance of achieving, the most important piece of advice that I can give you is this:
Just. Choose. One. Goal.
Regular readers will know that I’ve talked about this subject many times. In fact, I’ve done it so often that I’m worried you’re getting annoyed at me right now for bringing it up again.
But I’m still getting e-mails from people who are following these strange “Frankenstein” workouts, where they try to combine elements from half a dozen different training routines and diets because they’re not entirely sure what they’re trying to achieve.
The result is an unholy mess of a program that goes a long way towards explaining why they’ve been training for five years, are stuck at 19% body fat and still can’t deadlift twice their bodyweight.
Unless you’re absolutely clear about the one thing you want to accomplish, you’ll end up with a training and nutrition program that isn’t fit for purpose. As a result, your progress towards each goal will be so frustratingly slow that it won’t be long before you throw in the towel.
Maximizing muscle growth, for example, requires a surplus of calories. The size of the surplus will vary from person to person, but the fact remains that you must consume more calories than you expend.
But if you want to lose fat then you need to create a calorie deficit — to consume fewer calories than you burn.
The two goals require very different nutritional strategies.
That’s not to say that the strength training you do as part of your fat loss program won’t cause you to gain some muscle. Some people can and do gain muscle while in a calorie deficit.
But for maximum progress, especially if you have a few years of training under your belt, you’ll need to focus on one major goal to the exclusion of everything else.
Set a goal. Stick with that goal long enough to see results. Then set a new one.
Don’t decide to bulk up and then give up after three weeks in a panic because you can’t see your abs anymore.
If your primary goal is to build muscle, then it’s quite normal to gain a little fat at the same time. Don’t expect to stay extremely lean AND add large amounts of muscle tissue at the same time.
Conversely, it’s unlikely that you’ll lose large amounts of fat while simultaneously gaining a significant amount of strength and size. These things just don’t happen unless you’re a beginner, returning to exercise after a layoff, very gifted genetically, or using drugs.
How do you decide what your goal should be?
This is going to depend to a large extent on you and the way you want to look. But if you’re not quite sure which way to go, let me offer a suggestion.
If your body fat percentage is 15% or higher (20% for women), I’d suggest that you make losing fat your primary goal. There are three reasons for this.
Firstly, when your body fat levels are high, your fat cells are already full. If you start gaining even more fat as part of a “bulking” plan, those fat cells get stretched. This leads to the creation of even more fat cells, which is going to make it harder for you to get lean further down the line.
Second, the sweet spot for gaining muscle while still actually looking like you train is to keep your body fat somewhere between 10 and 15%. Once you get much above 15%, your appearance starts to suffer. Keep yourself in the 10-15% range and you’ll still be able to make great muscular gains while looking lean, strong and defined.
Third, when you stay within touching distance of a single digit body fat percentage, you’re never more than a month or two away from looking lean, mean and ripped.
How long will it take to reach your goal?
In truth, I have absolutely no idea. And there’s a good chance that you don’t either.
It’s notoriously difficult to predict exactly how your body will respond to a particular program of diet and exercise. The simple part is figuring out the direction of change (i.e. fat loss or muscle gain). What’s not so easy is putting a precise number on the rate at which that change will take place.
Some studies show large differences in muscle growth from person to person, even when factors such as training, diet and initial lean body mass are controlled for.
Or to put it another way, you and a friend of a similar build could follow exactly the same training program and diet for the next three months.
But individual variations in the rate of muscular growth mean that he might gain 10 pounds of muscle. You, on the other hand, might gain just half that amount.
Predicting your rate of progress is a little easier if you’re trying to lose weight. But it’s still far from straightforward.
As an example, an overweight (20% bodyfat or higher) guy starting a diet and exercise program can expect to lose somewhere between 2 and 5 pounds of fat in his first week.
So he sits down with his iPad, creates a spreadsheet and plots his projected progress using the results from his first week of dieting.
“Great,” he thinks to himself. “At this rate, I’ll be down to 10% body fat in 12 weeks time.”
The only problem is that he won’t.
Basing your future rate of fat loss on how much of it you’re losing right now ignores the fact that both numbers are heavily influenced by the amount of fat you have available to lose.
The fact that there’s a physiological “upper limit” on the rate at which fat can be lost means that your rate of fat loss will gradually slow down the closer you get to your goal.
So in the early stages of your program, you might be losing 2-3 pounds of fat per week. But as you close in on your target bodyweight, this will drop to perhaps 0.5-1 pound of fat loss per week.
To go from being “overweight” to “average” will require willpower and hard work. However, to go from “average” to “lean” isn’t going to require just a little more discipline, but a lot more.
Going from “lean” to “very lean” will require even more effort. That’s why so few people ever achieve this level of conditioning.
Deadlines can be motivating. But they can also be incredibly demotivating if you repeatedly fail to hit them. Not because you haven’t put the effort in, but because they weren’t set properly in the first place.
Forget about deadlines. Instead, use action-based goals to keep you accountable.
What is an action-based goal?
As the name suggests, action-based goals are based on actions rather than outcomes.
So if you want to lose weight, some of your daily action-based goals might be to eat no more than 1800 calories, exercise for a total of 30 minutes, eat at least 500 grams of fruits and vegetables, or whatever else you think is important.
Once you have your action-based goals, create a daily checklist and tick off each goal at the end of the day. Aim for 90% compliance. So if there were 5 goals per day, you’d have 35 goals each week (5 x 7 = 35). A 90% compliance rate means that you’d need 32 ticks each week to stay on course.
Once your goals are in place, you need to act, measure and adjust your approach based on the results you’re getting.
It’s good to have a plan, but don’t stay married to it if it’s not delivering the results you want. It’s the end result you’re after. Stay committed to your goal but flexible in the approach you use to get there.
Finally, don’t let yourself get distracted and confused by too many choices. Try to chase two rabbits and chances are that both will escape.
SHAMELESS PLUG: If you want a complete step-by-step system that will help you build muscle, burn fat and build the body of a superhero, all while spending less than four hours per week in the gym, click here to download a copy of Muscle Evo right now.
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My name is Christian Finn. I run a private "members only" website that will help you burn fat, build muscle and get strong. If you want accurate, honest and in-depth reviews on the latest "hot topics" in the world of fitness, you're confused by all the conflicting advice out there, or you just want some fat-burning and muscle-building training routines that work, click here now to find out how I can help you.
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