We all want to be efficient, especially with our health and fitness.
Our immediate impulse: get to the goal as fast as possible. But fast isn’t always better. Speed doesn’t equal great results.
The smarter play is efficiency: getting the right things done in the most effective and efficient way possible. That’s what actually gets you to the goal faster without cutting corners.
That’s what we are going over in this article – how you can get to your goal as efficiently as you can.
Let’s start with #1.
1.) Take control of the controllables
There are plenty of things that move the needle closer to the end goal that you are in control of. You’ve heard them before and you’ll keep on hearing them until you change them.
- Quality sleep (7-9 hours per night)
- Quality food intake (higher protein, whole food choices)
- Boat loads of water per day
- Increasing daily activity
- Be as consistent as possible
These are the borings things people tend to avoid, which is the worst thing you can do because these are IN YOUR CONTROL!
Your body may not respond exactly how others do to the same workouts, exercises, or mobility moves. That is just the nature of life.
These are the big rocks that will jumpstart how your body responds to all the other work you are putting in day in and day out. If you miss these pieces, the work takes that much LONGER, and it’s that much more DIFFICULT.
2.) Push yourself
Far too often people go to the gym and do the same workout, with the same reps, and use the same weight for months on end. If nothing ever changes, why would we expect to see any change at all?
We want to start pushing ourselves closer to our potential. This does not mean we need to be at risk of injury. What It means is that we need to work up to a place where we are challenging ourselves. This is not always easy, but it’s a lost aspect of exercise, finding something that truly challenges your limits.
Think of any exercise. Let’s say you were shooting for 8 reps. The first few reps may feel pretty easy, the middle reps begin to feel more difficult, and by the end the last few were very difficult. Those final reps are often called effective reps.
We want those effective reps to pile up each week and show our body that It needs to change. That is the adaptation process of exercise. Our body recognizes things getting hard and It must change to try and keep up with that demand.
So back to beginning of this section – if we are always doing the same things and never pushing ourselves, our body has no reason to make any change at all. No adaptation is necessary for the current work we are putting in.
I want to also say that this does not mean we have to go crazy every single exercise and risk an injury. What we are trying to get across is that pushing ourselves just a bit harder during our workouts can be a major key to the effectiveness of your programs.
All the effort you put in week over week should be worth It.
Take a look at your past few weeks of workouts. How many sets of a certain exercise would you say you pushed yourself to those hard reps that made you really work to finish them?
A good place to start is by taking 1-2 exercises in each workout and push yourself harder than normal on a set or two during those exercises. From there you can build on that, adding a few more “hard” sets or reps here and there.
We don’t need every rep of every set of every exercise being a 10 out of 10 on the difficulty scale, but taking a few sets of a few exercises can make a big difference.
3.) Get out of your comfort zone
We all love to stay close to what feels comfortable. I am the same way.
But if we want things to change we need to break out of that comfort zone every once in a while. We may have already started doing that a small amount with what we just talked about above, but in this section we are talking about something different.
For the people that come in to work with us, some of them are doing lots of cardio type things – spin classes, running, hiking, or just a lot of cardio in general. Those things are comfortable for them and they enjoy It. Now, I am not stripping those things away from them, but we are going to get them a bit out of that comfort zone and start putting a stronger focus on the things they are not doing so much of – resistance training.
The same goes for someone who goes to the gym, lifts their weights and doesn’t any sort of movement or cardio in outside of that. In those cases we are getting that person to move more on a daily basis, add in a bit of cardio, and start doing some conditioning work in the gym.
It’s about finding what your body needs in order to make progress, not about doing the thing you may be most comfortable with. Comfort can create complacency.
These types of changes are what causes people to notice real change. Our body is so used to the things we do most often that it needs to find a way to get good at these NEW things and the only way It can do so is by trying to adapt and change.
It all plays into the fact that we have to break out of what feels good to us. Doing something completely different will not be easy, we will most likely suck at It for a while, but It’s what will cause movement in the right direction.
Results still take time, but less time if done the right way.
In good health,
Jeff
P.S.
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