INTRODUCTION
Are you setting yourself up for failure? When looking to lose a bit of weight, get a bit healthier or even just be more active you might find that you are setting yourself up for failure. What do we mean by this? Well to put it shorty. You might be setting up your diet or workout routine and making it almost unachievable or creating something to can’t continue long term. The long answer? Well, continue to read on and we will go more in-depth.
DON’T MESS UP AT THE VERY START
This is the main one people make a mistake on. Setting themselves a high number of workouts a week. Something like 5-7 days a week. Now some people train that many days, and it can work for them. However for a person just getting into fitness, with a full-time job, family and life then this will not be sustainable.
When starting at the gym you want to aim for a realistic target that will be easy to achieve and also flexible. You will quickly find that hitting the gym 6 or 7 days a week isn’t as easy as it sounds. You notice that life gets in the way. People are busy, jobs, relationships and kids. We recommend that you start aiming to try to go to the gym between 2-4 days a week (You split will depend on how many days you decide to go).
This way you will have an easy routine to stick to, You won’t be putting too much demand on yourself to get to the gym. From here you can then increase it if you feel you need to, bring in more sessions one at a time.
DIET MISTAKES
The next thing that people get wrong is their diet. As we all know to lose weight you have to be in a calorie deficit. However, you want to aim to eat as much food as you can while being in deficit. If you slash your calories too quickly, you will find yourself binging, being hungry all the time and also losing weight too fast and risking losing muscle mass as well.
You want to begin by working out how many calories you are consuming currently then deducted say around 200-400 calories off that. Do this for a week, weigh yourself and see if you are losing weight. You want to aim for a small weight loss. If you have lost too much weight, add some calories back in. Do this until your progress stalls, then remove some more calories. Until you hit your target weight.
You could also download our application and use our free calorie and macro calculate to take all the guesswork out of calories. Insert your details into the app and it will tell you how many calories you can eat a day.
Will this take longer than slashing your calories dramatically? Of course! It will make it much more sustainable, easier to maintain and also allow you to eat a lot more food than you would have been able to. You will be surprised at how much you can eat. Another point to make is upping your food will also allow you to perform better at the gym. More calories equal more energy, allowing for better workouts. It’s a win, win!
FORGETTING RECOVERY
This is a huge one! If you haven’t, check out our article about what you should be focusing on, in that article you will see that we praise recovery highly! Recovery is very important. Allowing yourself to have sufficient recovery will help with energy, gym performance and your overall mood.
Training hard and not allowing enough time for recovery can also lead to injuries and burnout. What it can also lead to, which a lot of people don’t think about is a change in your mood towards fitness. Being tired and aching all the time will make you not want to work out and start to make you have a negative view of fitness.
We speak more about how you should approach fitness in our priorities blog, but these are a few key things to remember. Aim for 8 hours of good quality sleep a night. Rest days are not a bad thing, if you feel you need a rest then take a rest. It will only help you recover. Also, look at getting a sports massage or deep tissue massage once in while to help elevated this niggles and knots.
USING UP ALL YOUR TOOLS TO SOON
When we say tools, we mean things you can do to help you get further into a deficit. Some of these tools are dropping calories, upping cardio or even upping steps. People tend to go into their diet and up everything, go into their deficit as hard as possible. Then when their progress stalls they haven’t got anything else to adjust so they have to decrease their food further. Which ends up affecting mood, Recovery and performance.
We recommend, when starting a dieting phase to decrease food and also increase steps slightly. Don’t bring cardio in straight away (if you don’t already do it! We recommend everyone should be doing cardio but that is an article for another day), Then as you progress stall you can look at either increasing steps, Decreasing food or bring in a few cardio sessions a week. This will give you room for adjustment and allow you to maintain your progress.
CONCLUSION
That is a quick overview of how to make sure you are not setting yourself up for failure. We have also spoken about this issue in a few of our interviews, Jack Gadd speaks about it (you can check out that interview here) and also Max Bridger speak about it at length, and also gives some more tips on how to avoid it (You can check that out here). This is a subject that any good coach or Personal Trainer should care about and help you avoid.
If you want to read any of our other blogs you can check out our blog page where we have hundreds of article about all things fitness! If we don’t have an article about the subject you are looking for then you can drop us an email or a DM on our Instagram and we will try to help the best we can (maybe even put together an article for yourself).
Written by Kieran Blacker
Kieran is the CEO and Founder of Sets & Reps. He decided to make an application that helped people get a gym workout when not at the gym. He designed, Coded and built the application himself.