Thursday, February 9, 2017

Prioritize Your Workouts

When you prioritize your workouts, good things happen. I don't mean make it is the most important part of your day. To clarify, it means decide your health and fitness purpose and input strategies based on that goal. Are you trying to lose body fat and inches? Are you looking to be a faster endurance athlete? Did you decide this is going to be the best year yet health wise and want to look and feel amazing? Whatever your driving force is, your workouts need to be prioritized to meet those goals.


Personally, I have rollercoastered through life wanting to be a leaner, faster distance runner, leaner, faster distance runner.... always pretty happy after achieving my goal at the time. But what I learned from my own experience, as soon as I achieved one goal I was ready for something different. Which meant time to shift gears a bit. 

First time I decided I wanted to be much leaner, my workout priorities shifted to lifting weights and short bursts of high intensity interval training.  I wanted to lose body fat, lose inches and have more definition in my lower body. Initially, that meant my week looked like 3 full body workouts with intervals at the end. As the weeks and months went by, that changed to an upper/lower split. That meant training lower body one day and upper body the next. Again time passed and my program shifted to full body workouts but with a change in the conditioning component. 

The point is that when I had a game plan, everything began to have a clearer purpose and motivation skyrocketed. 

After a few years, my priorities shifted to becoming a faster distance running. Then again the layout of my workouts were based on the miles ran that week. Strength training became less of a priority. Definitely still a big component but not the overarching goal. It was getting the miles in for the week. The weeks priorities included; shorter runs, speed/hill work and resting before the long run of the week. After those key pieces were laid out, then I would input where strength training would help me improve as a runner and not hinder my results. 

Again, having that clear priority list helps make the goal game plan have a greater purpose and simply better execution.

What lead me to this post was a conversation with a female discussing what her goal was regarding the fitness aspect of her life. She knew she wanted to lose some body fat. She wanted to feel great for the summer months ahead. She had been doing the same thing for a few months. She'd attend exercise classes here and there, run on treadmill some days, try a few workouts she saw some fitness professional posted on social media... point is no real set expectations for each workout or overall game plan. She admitted that if she saw something new and looked exciting she would ditch what she was doing to give it a try. To me it was obvious the reason for her lack of results. She didn't have a plan or priorities set in place which lead to inconsistent results.

Simply put ladies the fitness aspect of your life needs to be prioritized. Set your goal, construct your plan of action and be consistent in your efforts.







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