Prior planning and preparation prevents piss poor performance, or words to that effect.

I was cycling along the other day thinking to myself that, no matter what, in any capacity your effort is always repaid. The more effort you put into something, the more you get out. The longer you make that investment of effort, the longer you’ll be reaping the rewards for. It’s a closed loop cycle (no pun intended). There I was riding head on into the wind, tempted to let the watts drop, but something in the back of my mind was saying ‘keep this effort up, an you’ll become stronger’, and being stronger would help me battle the wind next time, or allow me to cycle through it even faster, which will help me become stronger, and faster and stronger and faster, all because I kept putting that effort in. Similarly, on the flip side of the coin I would say I could have halved my effort, made myself really comfortable, and just took my time getting round the course but the only return I get with this is an easier session that gives me less stimulus to develop any fitness, strength or endurance. It could potentially be seen as a complete waste of time and a bad investment as far as my fitness journey goes.

We know not all effort is physical, and where your fitness journey is concerned whatever your end goal is, nutrition is going to play a big part of that which, we know some people struggle with this more than others. Some people can nail nutrition effortlessly, but you can bet your last fruit pastel they’ll struggle in other areas, others put no effort in with nutrition, and just try to override the calories they consume with calories they burn which, in principle does work, but if you’re not fuelling right, its very likely that you’re not going to be performing at your best.

A lot of it comes down to maintaining focus on the bigger picture you’ve set yourself. It’s always a case of giving up what you want right now, on a regular basis to set you up for what you want most. We see it time and time again where we’re confronted with the ‘it would be nice to’ or ‘I wouldn’t mind’ gang, its few and far between these days to have a ‘I Want to’ or ‘I’m going to’ client, one that’s prepared to invest the effort in the areas they struggle with the most.

They say failing to plan is planning to fail, and to me, that is making a plan in itself, just one with a negative outcome compared to what is actually desirable. It’s always difficult writing this type of article because it feels like I’m getting on at people in general when its actually the opposite, we don’t want our clients getting caught out by the same trap as other people, going to other gyms doing other things.

Richard introduced me to a series of emails whereby 2% of people do things ‘the difficult way’, whether that’s taking the stairs vs the escalator or lift, or parking shy of work and walking the rest of the way in instead of getting up earlier to secure the space next to the door, and sit in the car for 15 minutes waiting for the shift to start. It’s getting less and less these days that anybody would make anything difficult for themselves. My own mentality for training is to push myself as physically far or as hard as I can with whatever it is I’m doing. I don’t stop pedalling the watt bike at the point I don’t think I can carry on, I pedal until I can’t carry on. I don’t stop lifting weights when I think its heavy, I stop when I stop being able to lift them. The idea is to stop when you’ve done enough, not when you’ve had enough.

Obviously depending on what your programming looks like, and what the reasons for your training are, the way you approach it is massively different. If you’re training for a marathon running event, you don’t need to be lifting weights resulting in crippling soreness for days afterwards, similarly if you’re training to be maximally strong, then you don’t need to be smashing miles and miles of cardio, BUT, you do need to put effort into doing some. These are all things that are figured out whilst formulating your plans, but regardless of the plan, effort is universal and to get anything out, you need to be putting something in.

Inevitably effort looks different to different people purely because we as individuals are better at somethings than we are at others and everyones strengths and weaknesses are different. That’s why our small group PT sessions are designed to test you, they’re designed to challenge you physically and mentally, if you’re good at something, we can make it more difficult for you, if you’re not so good, we can simplify it and this approach ensures that you’re working to the best of your abilities, and exerting the amount of effort required to make those changes you’re looking for! If you’re always finding that you fail to plan, then plan to come along to our Small Group PT sessions, and make your failures a thing of the past.