Applying Sport Psychology To Your Fitness Goals
If you’ve not completed a workout for five days in a row, what needs to happen to ensure day 6’s outcome won’t be the same?
We’re all fairly comfortable with the knowledge that it’s easier to start a project than it is to finish one. If I had completed all the projects I had started over the last few years then by now I’d be able to windmill dunk a basketball, do a handstand and have a new bench press personal best!
Sometimes it’s the right thing not to finish a fitness project, maybe we didn’t set the right goal or life circumstances got in the way.
Remember, for health, as long as we are active and consistently doing something fitness related we’re winning!
Yet it’s also aspirational and useful to have the ability and the tools to finish something off and achieve that goal.
One skill is a simple review process to find out what’s been going on over the last three weeks (which will help us understand what we need to do over the next seven days). This process repeated, gets helps us understand what’s going on, and what we need to do going forward.
The saying goes, what gets measured gets managed. Which is a really boring way of saying keep count of what’s important!
The process of tracking and storing health and fitness data has become more and more complex over recent years. Many of us walk around with some serious health tracking gadgets on our arms.
But today I want us to consider out of everything we could measure, what really counts (here are some of my top picks, but you may have your own)
- Steps completed
- Workouts done
- Hours of sleep
- Hours of TV watched
- Units of alcohol consumed
For example, if you’d given yourself a be more active goal, a way you could now review this, would be to count your average daily steps - most people can get this information from a phone or wearable devices.
Or, if you wanted to really get under the skin of things, have a look at how many series you’ve watched, how many hours of TV does that make? How else could you have spent this time?
What story do the numbers tell?
Review your last 21 days, consider what the information may tell you, and decide what you can do and apply over the next 7 days.
