Do AS LITTLE as you can

I’m sure being told to do as little as possible isn’t what you expected to hear first thing on a Monday morning. This is an approach I have used recently when running the business and I believe it has a lot of merit when it comes to your health and fitness journey. I’m sure many of you will relate to what I’m about to say. It’s a Sunday morning and you’ve woke up hangover free. You decide to plan the weeks training going for 6 sessions, you make an audacious target of 12,000 steps a day, prep each and every meal and promise yourself you’ll do some guided meditation each day. I hope some of you are nodding your head or it’ll be confirmed beyond all doubt I am actually just a weirdo... While these goals are admirable you may actually be setting yourself up for failure for a few main reasons 1- Quite simply, it’s hard to maintain. For me the goals above may just about be achievable but if you have 3 kids, a stressful job and want to maintain some semblance of a social life there is simply not enough time in the day to do those things. That is pretty common sense in my opinion however I regularly see people who have been to the gym and average of once every 10 days over the last year decide they are going to do 5 sessions a week. The danger with this is that it builds failure into the plan. As soon as plans at the weekend come up and you miss session number 5 you begging to think of yourself as a ‘failure’ or bemoan the fact you can’t stick to the plan. On the flip side, if you had aimed for 3 sessions a week you’d actually be 1 up on the goal. This isn’t me saying settle for average at all but it is a note to be realistic and give yourself a chance to ‘win’. 2- It doesn’t leave much room to grow. On a similar note to the above, doing too much too soon doesn’t leave you with much scope to improve/do more. Many of you will have heard the term ‘progressive overload’ used before. This is basically the idea of gradually making stuff harder by adjusting different variables. In the gym this may be adding extra reps, doing more weight or adding a pause at the bottom of an exercise. For general goals like weight loss or lifestyle goals this could be things such as: -An extra 2K Steps. -200 Calories less. -An extra gym session. And so on. If you start on as low calories as possible, are doing 15,000 steps a day and 6 workouts it really doesn’t give you much scope to change if progress starts stalling. 3- Even if it works you may still have a problem. I’m being awfully negative here. Let’s say the above plan works a treat and you feel better, look better and have started to move better. Great! So what is it that’s working for you? You have probably changed too many variables here to know what it is that’s actually getting you the results. As the old adage goes ‘if you throw enough s**t at a wall some will stick’. Of course if you do all this in the initial phase you’ll get results. However unless you want to maintain all that year round you’ll probably have to work out what the big rocks are that are helping your progress the most. Change a couple of things, give it a couple of weeks, re-assess whether its worked or not, repeat. Pretty simple? I’d say so. Not to be mistaken for being easy however.