It’s NEVER too late to start! 🏃🏽
Whether that be dropping ‘X’ amount of pounds before a wedding, or stepping on stage in ‘X’ amount of weeks. Big picture: Nothing changes, if nothing changes!
This time last year my client Mason started preparing for his 2019 contest prep!⠀
1. A big issue we face in today's society is the desire to achieve ‘X’ goal without delay, or setbacks. This leads people to approach their goal in an unsustainable, extreme manner (e.g. cutting out carbs/eliminating foods) and once the goal has been achieved… they revert back to their old ways and gain everything they lost back! It’s not about just getting to the end goal, rather building skills/knowledge/habits that you’ll maintain for LIFE.
2. Similar to how you need navigation on your phone to know where you’re going, same goes for your nutrition! You can’t expect to make progress, yet have no way to quantify how much you’re consuming. This can be a meal plan to help you better understand food selection/develop structure, or counting your macros to gain a deeper understanding of macros (carb/fat/protein), micros (vitamins/minerals) and nutrient timing.
3. Set appropriate goals and be realistic! There’s this idea that you have to go BIG to change, but the reality is it’s actually small changes overtime that accumulate. Being realistic and setting micro/macro goals will allow you to calculate an appropriate rate of loss. The less fat you have the slower (0.5-1%/wk) you can take rate of loss, the more fat you have the more aggressive (1-1.5%/wk) you can be. Rate of loss is also going to be dictated by your deadline!
4. Protein is the most versatile macronutrient we consume. While all macronutrients require metabolic processing for digestion, absorption, and storage, the thermic effect of protein is x2 that of carbs/fat. General recommendation for protein is to consume 0.8-1.5g/lb of LBM. TOTAL protein intake depends on the individual/context, but switching to a higher protein diet is one of the quickest ways to improve body composition.
5. It is pretty evident from a number of the adaptations that occur with resistance training that there are several health-related benefits outside of bigger muscles. Whether training for sports performance or health enhancement, much of your success will be attributable to the effectiveness of the exercise prescription and the individualization of the program. Resistance training has been shown to reduce factors associated with coronary heart disease, diabetes and osteoporosis, depression, improve glucose metabolism and much, much more.⠀
6. There’s levels to this. A majority of the population aren’t competitive athletes with timetables: So if you need, or want to, or realize you need to cut back and work more minimally to get quality work in over the long term… Then make the required adjustment. Most recent literature tells us that there’s a dose-response relationship of volume to results all the way up to 10+ sets, per muscle group, per week. Does that mean more work = more gains? Well it depends on the person. Some may need more, some may need less. Understanding the dose-response relationship will allow us to maximize results.. But understanding the opposite end of the spectrum, minimum effective dose, is just as important. If you have something you want to progress with over time, but aren’t in a huge rush for, working at the minimum effective dose can be useful as it is less likely to make you overly fatigued/under recovered and can allow you to push harder in other areas you find more important. This may look something like 3 to 5 sets/week for a lot of people depending on training level of advancement. Super easy to get done and while the results might be slow and weekly progress is less noticeable, it will allow you to consistently get the work done.
Proper preparation, prevents poor performance... or in this case, poor outcomes! Set yourself up for success, do something today your future self will thank you for!
And remember... Nothing changes, if nothing changes.