Adherence Tips: Five For a Healthy Lifestyle Change
We all want a game plan when it comes to change.
Steps to follow for the best and most consistent way to make a change and that produces results.
Continue reading if you want to find out what I think are five of the top adherence tips you have to master for a Healthy lifestyle change.
As this week sped on I noticed a common theme popping up and that was simply the goal is the goal.
How did this come about you ask, well over the past couple of weeks in my bulk I have been having a right shoulder pain on pressing movements. This really started to bother me and while talking to my coach he mentioned I should take a deload week.
Personally I feel as if I have never been good at accomplishing a deload week but the one thing he told me during my check in was simply, remember the goal is the goal.
This got me thinking as the week went on about how the deload week would effect my overall goal.
So keeping that in mind I was thinking about the goal that got me started, how I have continued to transform and set new goals, and adhere to a healthier lifestyle.
Below I listed my personal top 5 tips that have helped me stay consistent, set new goals, shatter goals, and produce a much healthier lifestyle than that one I was leading.
Hope you enjoy!
1. Gritty Goals
This is probably the number one thing anyone will tell you to do when it comes to a lifestyle change. However, let me take it a step further.
A lot of people tend to set a very general goal, such as I want to lose weight. This goal is good but at the same time its missing some key things I personally think can change a goal into a lifestyle.
In essence you can stop eating for a day step on the scale the next morning and BAMMMM you have lost weight. Therefore you hit your goal. Mission complete!
NO, the goal I'm talking about is the gritty, down and dirty, planned out to the T goal. We have all done it already for at least one thing in our life such as college, a job, moving, investments, the list goes on.
Why not your health in order to live or maintain the life you have already acquired?
Something that has helped me adhere to a lifestyle change was taking my larger goal and breaking it down to a very specific image or individual sections of the goal.
For example: I started out with, I want to lose weight. That quickly turned into I want a 6 pack, which turned into I want to really develop my biceps, which trickled to lats, chest, legs, all the way down to getting oblique striations.
This develops ideas and concepts and with google at your finger tips an idea or concept is all you need to get started.
These smaller goals become a road map to get to your larger goal, the road isn't going to be 100% perfect, or easy all the time, its going to challenge you and push you in ways you have never known. Its worth it though, just remember to give yourself enough time to travel your road.
2. Eating Strategy--- Not Diets
If you are going after a fitness goal this is super important. Fitness is more than going to a gym and working out. Its about everyday healthy habits that can enhance your life and the lives of people around you.
Eating we do everyday of the year and its one of the few ways we intake energy into our bodies. That being said, an eating strategy is just like it sounds, a strategy that is going to help you get from point A-B of your goals in a healthy manner for long term success.
This strategy is more than likely based off of your goals, so make it something that works for your current lifestyle, transitioning lifestyle, and future lifestyle.
I have noticed the less my eating strategy has changed the better results I have obtained. This is simply due to consistently and it takes one worry out of my life because I already know I have a system in place. The system allows me to eat and enjoy life but also keep things moving towards my individual goals.
To me, calling a way of eating as an "eating strategy" takes off the negative stigma of "dieting", I also think it gives a person a slightly different view on eating in life.
Myself and a lot of people I know have chosen certain "diets" and effectively use them for 2-8 months and make great progress. However, once we stopped utilizing that particular method and started transitioning back to our regular methods we would put on what we had taken off plus some.
Keep it simple but pick an eating strategy that fits with you like a glove.
My personal eating strategy looks something like this:
Week Days: Planned meals/Meal Prep (Every meal)
Weekends: More flexible with what I eat with 2-3 planned meals
General: IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros) concept ( for further explanation linked is an article by Anthony Collova) , 1-1.5 gallons of water a day, Macro counting
3. Pick Something You Love
Simple but super important.
I didn't realize I would get so deep into the bodybuilding itself to be honest. By no means is bodybuilding the only way to get active and produce a healthy lifestyle.
Now saying this, I knew if I wanted to change how I looked I had to implement more daily activity. So I started with a program that really included almost all types of training. Weight training, Cardio, Yoga, Plyometrics, etc...
This is a great choice starting out especially if you think you need to explore your options. From there you can pick a particular area or narrow your goal based off of what you truly love to be active in. Once you become comfortable or get through your program and find that method of training you truly enjoy, run with it an never look back.
My starting program P90x (Linked) did something two fold for me.
One: It got me into a routine of everyday I'm going to workout or be more active for at least 6 days a week. As well as introducing me to muscle and some really good techniques for lifting on certain lifts.
Two: With all the types of training that I ended up doing it set me up to incorporate those within in my particular bread and butter. To this day, almost 7 years later, I still use yoga posses to stretch, the stretching techniques, movement patterns, and even some of the moves just to make my bodybuilding workouts a little harder.
4. Start Weak, Work Strong
So in fitness or a transition to a healthier lifestyle both, becoming more active in a day and eating are the two biggest things you can change and start to see results rather rapidly. Note they are two sides of the same coin and one is not more important than the other.
That being said one of these will be easier to correct than another. I highly suggest that in order to adhere to your goal of change, pick that harder of the two and go after it first. Get mean with it and don't let anything stop you from an eating strategy or training.
Yes going after the hard one is super tough and hard.... but maybe look at it this way.
If you can figure out a way to not only change the hardest part of the lifestyle change first by staying consistent and dedicated. When you are ready to add in the easier half its like adding the icing to the top of the cake or the cherry on top of the ice cream sundae.
For instance if you have ever trained before and you go to a leg extension machine you sit down and do leg extensions. The weight stack 9/10 is always on the right hand side.
(I can not tell you on how many occasions my right quad has fatigued quicker than my left. I personally think this is due to moment arm length from each leg to the machine.)
Anyways, due to this happening I started really concentrating on squeezing my left quad and starting the movement with my left leg just letting my right leg follow along. (Only use this when you have been training for a few years and have can fully connect with the muscle group and have good form)
My right quad not longer fatigues quicker, has been growing just as much as my left, and I no longer feel imbalanced after using that machine.
So start working on your weakness first and your strength , at the beginning will be tagging along for the ride, will still be there doing the same amount of work, it's just your focus is shifted elsewhere.
When you can call both, your strength and weaknesses, equal. This is the promise land and you can truly go all out to in both areas to produce even better results.
5. Kill Everything With Intensity
There is no sense in going through the first four items on this list if you are just going to half a** your work, life, lifestyle, change, etc.. when you don't feel like doing it.
This is what will ultimately make or break you. The intensity of how bad do you want to make the change happen is the defining moment and action that can tip the scales on success.
Intensity can mean a lot of things for example:
Training wise--- Your program calls for 25 minutes of cardio... you had a long day, are tired, hurt from your training, want to get home, and you have already done 22 minutes of your cardio. Do you give up right before the end or do you do the 3 extra minutes?
How and what you do in the last minute or how you push yourself when your tank is on empty, or when your back is against the wall is one way to measure intensity.
Eating Wise--- Say you work an 8-5 job, you have meal prepped for the 5 work days of the week, hit your macros and stuck with your strategy it pays off. You have gotten on the scale and you currently have a new low weigh in. Awesome! Congrats! You got through 5 days of following your eating strategy (that can be hard for some starting out).
Lets be real though that was the easy part of the week, those days are more structured and you follow a set plan. The true test are the two days of the weekend. Where you sleep in, are more free to eat when ever and what ever you want. Small family gatherings, Sunday breakfast, ice cream, you see what you do behind the curtain or on the "off days" can make or break you.
In reality there are no off days going after a lifestyle change.
Hold yourself accountable and reward yourself when its appropriate, ( I highly suggest using something other than food as a reward), and bring an intensity about your lifestyle change.
In no time you will live the life you seek and it will be second nature. You will see the changes and goals come to life only to keep you hungry and perpetuate the cycle of change again. Really a lifestyle change can be super simple we just have to take a step back to look at change and the best ways to implement the change for ourselves.
The other thing is simple changes can be hard to identify with a constant on the go mentality and sometimes the best option is to have someone else in your corner watching your back providing feedback. The other person can suggest what you maybe over looking, neglecting, or know of a small change that can make adherence to your change that much easier.
With enough consistency, time and dedication the lifestyle change will take hold to the point it becomes apart of you and you wont have to think about it at all. Everyday actions will be geared towards that lifestyle in every little manner. Just like your heart beating and breathing, it becomes so second nature you no long find it as a burden, find it hard to implement, but you actually enjoy the change.
The change becomes apart of you and in the end you enhance your own life, the lives of family, friends, and loved ones who look up to you and who you have a direct affect on daily.
Hope this was helpful and you enjoyed! Comment or contact me with any thoughts, I'm here to help in anyway or have an open discussion!
Much love!
-The Iron Pulse
(all images are linked back to original source)
