You read a lot these days about what you should do to improve your fitness, but sometimes looking at things from the opposite direction can be just as informative. In this article we describe how to fail at achieving your fitness goals. So, here goes.
Don’t have a specific goal
Seriously, if you don’t have goals how can you miss them? It’s very safe. Why would anyone target a specific body fat number or amount of muscle they’d like to build? I mean who wants to hold themselves accountable anyway?
Don’t measure your body composition
The best way to fail at achieving your fitness goals is not knowing your body composition in terms of the proportion of muscle and fat. It’s so much easier to guess or just use your overall weight as your gauge. Using your weight alone helps you fail fast because you won’t know if you’re losing or gaining muscle or fat.
Don’t monitor your body composition
Even better, don’t monitor your body composition regularly, because then you’d know whether you’re making progress or not. You’d also start correlating what you did that caused the change and adapt for the better.
Don’t employ a scientific approach to your fitness
Science is for nerds right? Why would anyone want to know how muscles work, what fuels they burn and when they burn them, or how to optimize your nutrition for training and recovery. Just wing it. It’s much easier!
Exercise that fat off
One of the best ways to fail is to convince yourself that you are going to exercise off all that fat. You’ll just have to work harder! Do cardio for hours on end each week so that your muscles don’t have any glycogen stores for your lift. That way you’ll be weak as a kitten. You won’t be able to do many reps or sets, and your weights will stay nice and light. Do cardio right before your workout to fail the best.
This is such a fantastic way to fail because the math doesn’t work. A pound of fat is 3,500 calories. If you could run at a pace of 6 MPH (which is really fast) for one hour you’d burn 557 calories. You’d only have to do that about 6.3 times to lose that pound of fat. Oh, and keep eating indiscriminately because it’s obsessive to control and track what you eat and when you eat it.
Don’t show up
Let things get in your way of getting in your lift. You can’t lift if you’re on vacation right? And there’s other things that come up that cause you to miss your lift. Not showing up is a spectacular way to fail.
Waste your time in the gym
Fling heavy weights around and do your reps really fast! Cheat whenever possible. This helps you fail 2 ways; 1) since the weight is more than you can safely control there’s a good chance you are going to injure yourself and then you can’t train or 2) doing your reps nice and fast insures the least muscular hypertrophy, so your gains will be slow if anything at all.
Take long breaks in between your sets. Play on your phone. Text your friends and relatives. Talk to everyone in the gym. All of these will ensure the easiest workout possible because you are so rested!
Don’t follow your coach’s instructions
I mean yes you’re paying a coach, but they can be unreasonable! And besides, you’re the boss. It’s your body and you do what you want!
- They want you to eat a specific number of calories and macro profile, and track your food, but that’s ridiculous and hard. Eat whatever you want!
- They suggested certain supplements that are just too darn expensive or you’re sure they won’t work for you. Why waste the money!
- The way they want you to do an exercise is too hard. Just do it your own way!
- They gave you a list of things to do on your own. That’s just crazy. I mean why should you take the initiative to be accountable to execute some things by yourself? Just leave and go have a glass of wine!
Complain and blame your coach
Don’t make the leap to realize you are at least 50% (and usually more) responsible for your progress or lack there of. Blame everyone and everything else for your lack of progress.
Don’t level with your coach. Why would you want to tell them how you are feeling, or how you feel about your progress or the training? What things you’d like to be doing that you aren’t? What you enjoy doing and what you don’t?
Don’t think about what you could be doing better, or maybe question what behaviors might be holding you back because realistically, this is probably what’s holding you back.
Don’t listen to others who’ve been through it successfully. You might learn something that could help you.
Summary
In all seriousness, if you don’t want to fail at achieving your fitness goals, leave the behaviors above behind. Contact us to learn about positive behaviors.
