Are you feeling discouraged when it comes to making progress toward your health and personal fitness goals? Here are six things you can do to keep yourself going.
Normalize it.
First of all, it’s super normal to feel discouraged about your results when you are trying to achieve any personal fitness goal. It means you really care. I mean, think about it.. if you had to do something and you didn’t care about the results, you were just doing it because you had to, you wouldn’t care about the outcome.
This is not the case here. You are nervous.. you want to know you are doing the right things to get the desired outcome. I get it.. I feel that way about a lot of things in my life. So I’m going to share a few things you can do if you are feeling discouraged or like you need a break.
Don’t Get Lost in the Day to Day.
Once you have your personal fitness goals set, you know your why and you have your plan, it’s easy to get lost in the day to day. You have your daily workout routines, you have your clean eating meal plan and you are on a roll. It becomes routine and after a while it feels a bit effortless, and this is a good thing! Just because it becomes habit and feels easy doesn’t mean it’s not working.
Or maybe you get tripped up and feel guilty or like you aren’t still on your path to achieving your personal fitness goals because you miss a workout once or twice or because you went on vaca for a week and didn’t follow your meal plan. This does not mean you have vacated your goals or ruined your hard work. You can’t allow yourself to think like that. You have to just know that this is a long term effort and a life change and sometimes you need to accept that you will not always be “perfect” and keep going.
Ensure Your Plan is Right for You.
And since we have mentioned this being a life long effort, I should mention that ALL of my clients are set up with a plan they could follow for the rest of their lives, because honestly, that is the plan. If you are following a diet protocol that you do not feel like you could follow forever, it is not the right plan for you. If you are following a workout program you do not feel like you could follow forever, that isn’t the right plan for you either. This is about longevity.. this is about sustainability.
Which also means you are not going to have rapid progress, but you will have progress that lasts forever.
Track Your Progress in Other Ways.
The next thing I suggest is if you are feeling overwhelming self doubt, is to track your progress. You could do it with progress pics, trying on a pair of pants that have given you trouble in the past, tracking performance goals or keep a log of how many times you do your daily workout/ follow your clean eating meal plan each day. There are some other ideas in this post as well.
Take Intentional Time Off.
And honestly, if you are just feeling super burnt out, maybe, and WITH INTENTION, take a rest day or two or a couple of meals off your plan. Just go out for a burger.. have some wine.. skip the gym and go for a walk outside.. If it always feels like a grind, it’s a sign you just need to take a break for a day or two.. not act like this is some kind of free for all because that won’t make you feel good either. But make intentional choices, savor them, and come back to the plan.
Hone in on Your Why.
Lastly, it’s very important for you to come back to your why. There are going to be times when shutting down your work at the end of the day to make time for the gym is going to feel hard. And there will be times when declining wine isn’t going to be easy. But when you have a solid recognition of WHY you want to achieve the personal fitness goals you have set, and you feel very passionate about those reasons, you can draw upon those for strength. Listen to this interview with therapist and life coach, Liz Pessaran, about that here.
Now that you have the tools, which do you feel you can begin applying today?
Let me know in the comments!
Your Coach,
Kyra
P.S. Do you need help getting on a plan that feels sustainable?
Sign up for online personal training with me!