
As a personal trainer in London, I encourage my clients to review their 2022 fitness goals and set some new goals for 2023.
YOUR HEALTH & FITNESS GOALS
The majority of my personal training clients in London want to lose excess body fat. A better goal is to lose fat and gain muscle, while boosting your cardiovascular fitness at the same time. Yes, it’s possible to have it all, if you combine the right exercise programme with optimum nutrition.
QUIT SMOKING
To train for my career as a personal trainer, I did the Premier Diploma Personal Trainer Course which covered a whole range of health & fitness issues, including smoking. I already knew that smoking was really bad for you, but this course spelled out just how much damage smoking does to your body.
If you smoke, I strongly recommend you make it your absolute top goal to quit smoking as soon as possible. I’ve had over a dozen personal training clients in London who smoked, and armed with the knowledge from my PT course I was able to open their eyes to the poisons they were voluntarily inhaling into their lungs.
Did you know, for instance, that some of the poisons in cigarettes are also used in heavy industrial machinery cleaning fluids, and others were used in the chemical weapons used by Saddam Hussein to massacre the Kurds. That should be a wake-up call to quit poisoning yourself.
Consider how much money you can save in a year by not smoking. Why not put that money into a holiday fund and treat yourself to a great holiday next Christmas? Check out my blog posts about wellness holidays around the world.
HOW MUCH DO YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS?
When I ask my personal training clients in London how badly they want to achieve their goals, they often reply, “I really want to lose weight”, and “I’m really determined”, but when I explain to them the changes required to achieve those goals, many lose their enthusiasm and all that resolve melts away like a snowball in the Sahara.
How passionately you want to achieve a goal can be measured by the action you’re prepared to achieve it. If you’re not prepared to eat more vegetables, or walk more instead of driving, or set aside 3 hours a week for exercise, or go to bed earlier and get a good night’s sleep rather than staying up late drinking, or skip the pudding at the restaurant, you’re just not serious about achieving your fitness goals. Only you can make the sacrifices necessary to get fit and healthy.
KEEP A FITNESS DIARY
Record your activity and progress in a fitness diary. It focuses your mind, it forces you to be objective and honest with yourself, it becomes a useful source of data on what’s working and what isn’t, and it actually helps you to change your habits for the better.
Buy one of those big hardback A4 page-a-day diaries. Start by writing your main goals at the front of the diary. For example:
“My fitness goal is to lose 5 stone in one year, starting 1st January 2023. That’s 70 lbs in 52 weeks, an average of 1.35 lbs a week. I am now 20 stone, and I will be 15 stone by 31st December 2023.”
See how powerful the intention is in those words? It’s a specific plan of action, a statement of intent.
This goal statement contains several key elements. It’s specific. It’s got a deadline. It breaks down the goal into bite-sized chunks which you can monitor as you progress through the year. It’s ambitious. It’s certainly worthwhile. And it’s realistic in timescale and total weight-loss.
Keep a note of what you’ve eaten, what exercises you did, how it felt, what triggers to eat badly you identified, what obstacles you came across, and what beliefs you have about your goals. More on beliefs below.
SELF-SABOTAGING BELIEFS
I recommend a book by Maxwell Maltz called Psycho Cybernetics, which explains the concept of self-image more eloquently than any other book I’ve come across. Your self-image sets the boundaries of what you can achieve, it comprises your beliefs and values and what you think of yourself. It’s impossible to consistently outperform your self-image.
If you don’t think you can achieve a fitness goal, that’s your inadequate self-image holding you back. When you upgrade your self image, you upgrade your capacity to achieve your goals.
“I DON’T HAVE TIME”
When you embark on an ambitious goal, don’t be put off by the time it will take to achieve it. The most common excuse is “I’ve got no time.” I’ve got three solutions to this: multi-task, delegate, and sacrifice.
Multi-task: You need to watch your favourite TV programmes? Buy a rowing machine or exercise bike and watch TV while you exercise.
Delegate: Hire a cleaner to take care of the housework. Get one of those magic Roomba robot vacuum-cleaners which memorize the layout of your house, and use their detection systems to spend more time on the dirtier bits. Buy a dishwasher so you’re no longer slaving away at the sink. Send out you shirts to be professionally washed and ironed. Order your supermarket shopping online.
Sacrifice: You say you want to lose the flab and get fit. But are you prepared to sacrifice the cream cakes, fizzy drinks, and takeaways? If not, read on…
RE-PROGRAMME YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND
The power of your subconscious mind (for good or ill) is now well known. Your subconscious controls and defines your self-esteem, self-image, your beliefs about yourself and others and the world at large, and in particular your beliefs about what you’re capable of achieving.
The chief reason people are not prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve their fitness goals (time, financial, effort) is that deep down in their subconscious, they don’t believe the sacrifices will pay off, or they don’t believe they can stay the course. So you sabotage yourself from the outset.
By re-programming your subconscious mind, you start to change your self-image. Visualise yourself as you would ideally like to be: fitter, healthier, with less body fat and more lean muscle. Then work towards this goal.
I wish you the best for 2023. If you want the extra guidance and motivation a personal trainer can offer, get in touch. I train clients face-to-face anywhere within London tube zones 1-3, and also offer a course of online nutrition coaching for anyone in the UK.
(Dominic Londesborough is a personal trainer in London and an online nutrition coach.)
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