Just as increasing your body weight and size—whether knowingly or unknowingly—takes some time and commitment to fattening dietary habits and laziness towards exercising, taking your body composition towards the opposite direction will also take time and commitment. And when you intend to achieve the perfect body within a short time, the amount of dietary and workout discipline required becomes tough to attain.
While sculpting your body to give it your ideal figure involves regular workout and well-balanced diets, how do you ascertain that you are engaging in the right exercise types? How do you determine that you are doing those exercise types the right way and at the right time?
Also, how do you regulate your diet to ensure you get the proper nutrients and the right number of daily calories your body needs without starving yourself or overfeeding and thus countering the good effects of your workout routine? And how do you motivate yourself to actually stick to healthy workout and dietary habits?
Below are tips that will help you safely and effectively build and maintain dietary and workout habits that will remould your body to your desired shape.
- Find Your Inspiration
This is where you ask yourself why you want to get in shape? Is it so you can look smart in your wedding tuxedo? Is it because you are planning a hiking trip? Maybe you read a success story and now want to become fit too? Is it to impress a girl you met yesterday? Or perhaps it’s because you want to reap the many health benefits of physical fitness.
Whatever your motivation is, make sure it’s something tangible, something that wouldn’t wear off easily. Make sure it’s passionate. Your motivation is what drags you through the bad days when you want to give up your quest for fitness. Without it, quitting becomes easy.
- Get an Education
Educating yourself on fitness can come in many ways:
- Hiring a Personal Trainer
Personal trainers are experts in their field. When you meet them, their bodies say a lot about how competent they are. They will consider your health conditions and goal and then guide you through the types of exercise you need to perform as well as when and how you need to do them. This ensures that you get the best result out of your workout routine without inflicting any unintended harm on your body.
When hiring a personal trainer, you might want to hire one that is qualified in coaching you through rehabilitating both your workout and dietary habits. Otherwise, enlisting the help of a nutrition coach is also recommended to help you maintain a diet that supports both your health and workouts.
- Enrolling on a Fitness Course
A fitness course basically does the same thing a personal trainer will do for you. In fact, when you enrol on a fitness course, you may be assigned a personal trainer. In this case, you benefit from both formal education and the one-on-one practical aspect that comes with having a personal trainer. In some cases, fitness courses can be taken online–like some of the courses from NRPT.co.uk.
- Examining Yourself
This involves identifying what made your past attempts at getting in shape fail, setting fitness goals and milestones, building new healthy habits, understanding and being patience with the results of your training, understanding which time of day you are most motivated to exercise and which exercise makes you happy, and so on.
- Leverage the Support of the People Around You
Sometimes inspiration and education are just not enough to keep you going. That’s why you need the help of other people around you, especially those who are pro-fitness. Here are some ways you can leverage other people to challenge yourself to see your fitness goals through.
- Befriend people who are better at fitness training than you and train with them. They won’t only challenge you, you will learn a lot from their experience.
- Place a bet with a friend that if you don’t achieve a fitness milestone by a predetermined date, you will give he or she a fixed amount.
- Tell everybody your fitness goals and become motivated by the fact that you don’t want them to see you as a failure who abandons his or her goals.
- Join a fitness community
Becoming fit is not a day’s job. Don’t break yourself trying to achieve it in a short time. Plus, you will be defeating the purpose of becoming fit if you let your body slack after you have attained your desired body composition. Fitness is an ongoing process. Therefore, never quit working out.
