First I’d like to begin this post by wishing you a Happy New Year! A new decade is upon us. What will it bring?
It’s that time of the year again, where people make resolutions to do all sorts of crazy things. People want to lose weight or quit smoking usually. I’ve wanted to learn Spanish for years. Even now that I have a Colombian girlfriend, I still haven’t made good on this goal.
Which goals were left undone by you last year? How did you prepare? Why did you succeed or fail?
I decided to write a blog post about goal setting as much for you as I am writing it for me. After all of my personal development study, I still miss the mark more often than I’d like.
Goal setting and achieving isn’t easy, unfortunately. We’d all like to set it and forget it. But we know it doesn’t work that way and you can’t get something for nothing.
That being said, I know you want the most efficient route to your goals. Since this is a muscle building blog, I’m going to focus on just that and not the broad range of goal setting.
However, you will see a bit of a cross over. Let’s begin with the foundational advice first.
1. Begin With The End In Mind
I’ve blogged about getting your goal body in place. You should have a clear picture of what you want to look like and most importantly, feel like.
Imagine who you are then. What is your body fat? What is your BMI? How much do you weigh? What do your abs, biceps, pecs, legs, look like? How do people react to you? How do you feel about yourself?
It’s easier to get to your destination if you know where you’re going and what it looks like.
2. Get A Road Map
The best way to do this by far is with an effective muscle building program. If you’re looking for a shortcut, this is by far the best way next to getting a personal trainer.
I’ve said it over and over that the solution isn’t in a bottle. You have to educate yourself and these programs provide the best need to know education on the internet.
3. Get Committed
Commitment is something that seems to be lacking in this world. Especially with all the divorces we see everyday. Commitment is a quality you will need in ever area of life. Cultivating that quality will benefit you in more arenas than muscle building.
Make a firm, ironclad decision to transform your body. I like to say, “Just as the sun rises and sets, I will be the success I want to be.” You must be willing to do whatever it takes to achieve your goals.
Block out any negative influences that will deter you, whether it’s people in your life or images and media you come across. You don’t have to get rid of them, just don’t listen to them when it comes to your body.
4. Set Whole Body Goals
We’re talking about body goals here, but as Stephen Covey suggests, set goals that will affect your mind, body, heart, and spirit.
How will your muscle building goals affect your mind? How will they affect your heart, meaning your human relationships? How will they affect your spirit meaning your sense of purpose in this world?
When you tie your goals into other areas of your life, your connection to your goals become stronger.
Simply put, you can’t achieve a goal you aren’t connected to.
That’s it for the foundational stuff. Tune in tomorrow for the action steps.
The new motto for 2010 is this…
Get Big. Get Ripped. Get Fit With Mitch.
Mitch
Filed under Body Building Tips, Workout Motivation by on Jan 1st, 2010. 6 Comments. 
Ok, yesterday, I covered the foundational things you need to achieve your muscle building goals.
You can check out yesterday’s post here.
Basically, I said you need to get your mind right.
Today, I’m going to cover some of the essential practical steps to achieving your muscle building goals in the new year.
Some you may’ve heard of and some you haven’t.
1. Break Your Goals Down
I take my yearly goals which are pretty big and break them down to quarterly goals. I break those down into monthly and weekly goals. I like to set weekly task lists for myself to make sure I get certain things done on time and correctly. This is a great way to stay on track.
It’s easier to eat an elephant one piece at a time than to try and consume the whole elephant in one bite. Break your goals down and focus on smaller chunks that will eventually lead to your desired result. So if you want eventually bench 300 but you can only bench 185 currently, that can seem a bit daunting. Focus on getting to 195, then 215, then 245, and so on.
The psychological effect here is to get small successes which will get you in positive, winning mindset. This will greatly increase your chances of reaching your desired result.
No surprise here.
2. Set Conditions
This is probably the most powerful goal achieving technique I’ve heard of. It involves setting a condition in which you must achieve the desired result.
A friend of mine told me about this and it absolutely changed the way I looked at goals. A great condition for you may be to get a personal trainer or get a dedicate friend that won’t let you quit. Or maybe tie your goal to a specific reward like a vacation or competition.
The idea here is to not leave yourself with a way out. If you limit your options to success or bust, you will be a lot more likely to succeed.
3. Focus on Performance Rather Than Outcome
Vince offers a great strategy in his No-Nonsense Muscle Building book which is to set performance goals. What he means is that you can’t always guarantee the outcome (e.g. weighing 180 in 6 months), but you can control your performance in the tasks that you need to go to get to that result.
Your outcome goal is a result of a lot of factors. Some you can control such as nutrition, training, recovery, and education. But there are other factors you can’t control like Life. You never know what may happen to detur you.
So instead of focusing on your outcome goal (e.g. a certain weight, certain look, milestone on certain lifts), you should focus on your performance. Your performance includes getting the right amount of calories, pushing yourself on each rep, getting the right amount of recovery time, etc. These are things and you can control which will positively move you toward your goal.
The rest, as they say, is out of your hands. Accept it and move on.
4. The Little Things Count
These last few things are the small hinges that swing big doors. They are often overlooked but shouldn’t be underestimated.
- Write your goals down – daily
- Visualize your results 5 mins a day
- Tell people about your goals – this creates a success only condition
- Track your progress and make periodical adjustments
And there you have it. Some of the most efficient and effective ways to achieve your muscle building goals. In my next post, I will share my muscle building goals with you and how I plan to achieve them.
Get Big. Get Ripped. Get Fit With Mitch.
Mitch
Filed under Body Building Tips, Workout Motivation by on Jan 2nd, 2010. 2 Comments.
Hey if your read my post on how to set goals and achieve them, this will be a personal follow up to them.
Writing this out for you to see is creating a condition – I have to come close or risk looking like a fool on my own blog!
So here we go…
Mitch’s Fitness Goals for 2010
- Gain 20 lbs
- Run 2 miles 3x week
- Achieve my “look”
- Bench twice my body weight
Not a laundry list, but their targeted to what I want to achieve through lifting.
Your list may or may not be long. As long as each item on that list is important to you, that’s all that matters.
I feel a little short last year. Here are my goals for last year
- Bench 280
- Leg press 1200
I got up to 245 on the bench and 1000 on the leg press. I fell off from these goals because neither of them were tied directly into what I really want to achieve through lifting which are to achieve the body I’ve always dreamed of and have full confidence in the way I look.
This may sound like insecurity, but I like how I look now and I’m proud of the progress I’ve made. The body I’ve built is a testament to my willpower. However, though I’ve come a long way, I’m still not where I want to be yet. Don’t worry, I dont want to be some disgusting bodybuilder type. I want a functional, good looking, athletic body.
Being in good physical shape will free me from some ailments I currently battle as well. Next year, I may think about some type of fitness competition, but that’s another time.
I plan to achieve my fitness goals by following the plan I already have which is Vince’s No Nonsense Muscle Building program. When something works, you stick with it, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.
I’ll also be picking up and training a partner which you will hear more about in coming months.
To assist you in your goals, I’d like to know what they are for 2010. By telling people, you’re actually creating a condition and furthering your progress to that goal, so I highly encourage you to share.
Until next time, Get Big. Get Ripped. Get Fit With Mitch.
Mitch
Filed under Body Building Tips, Workout Motivation by on Jan 4th, 2010. 3 Comments.
Flexibility has long been treated like the ugly girlfriend no one wants to talk about. She’s always there, but you wish she wasn’t.
Well flexibility can be more beneficial to you than an ugly girlfriend when it comes to your lifting.
I’ve “always” been flexible, and I say always because I began stretching when I was 9 for Tae Kwon Do. I was able to drop down in splits and do all sorts of crazy stuff guys shouldn’t be able to do up until I was about 18 yrs old.
It really came in handy when I ran track, as I never got injured, and handy again in lifting because I’m able to lift a lot more that people my size and again, without injury.
So that being said, Why should you improve your flexibility if you’re a lifter?
- Increase Blood Flow – means more of those vital muscle building nutrients can get to your muscles resulting in more effective workouts
- Decreased Risk Injury – No one likes to be injured and it’s true what they say, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” (or a hefty hospital bill)
- Increased Range of Motion – resulting in increased weight on your lifts
Those are the top reasons. Now that you know why you should improve your flexibility – Here’s how.
We did a lot of static stretching in Tae Kwon Do before class. Over time, my flexibility improved greatly. As I got into other sports, I realized that dynamic stretching before the sport was a lot more effective.
In football for instance, we did high knees and jumping jacks. Dynamic stretching is what you would normally call a “warm up” routine.
It’s a series of movements designed to mimic the sport and get the blood flowing.
Static stretching lacks this component.
So nowadays, before I lift, I do dynamic stretching and save the static stretching for after. It helps with the “cool down” and lessens the likelyhood of me being sore.
Here’s a sample of the dynamic stretches that I do before a workout
- High knees
- High kicks – take a stiff leg and fling it up high as you can – getting higher with each repetition
- Squat jumps
- Jumping jacks
- Torso twists
- Arm crossovers – cross my arms in front of my body alternating top and bottom
Like I said, these are just a few, but far more than anything I see most lifters doing in the gym. And they all wonder what my secret is…
In addition to doing dynamic stretches, you should warm up on the lift you’re doing. It’s best to lift 1/3 of the weight 10 to 15 times.
Lastly, you should spend a good deal of time in your static strecthing. This is where your real flexibility comes in.
A good rule is 15 to 30 mins each day. When you do this, try to improve from session to session. My friends and I used to have competitions on who could split the lowest.
This served as great motivation for us to reach our potential. The same holds true for you.
Set a goal to touch your toes (if you can’t) and challenge yourself each time you stretch to go further and hold it longer.
Trust me, the benefits greatly outweigh the temporary pain of doing this.
So until next time, Get Big. Get Ripped. Get Fit With Mitch.
Mitch
Filed under Muscle Building Exercises by on Jan 8th, 2010. Comment.
Alcohol is one of those things that has long been a nemesis to muscle builders around the world.
We’ve all heard of the infamous “beer belly” and have seen what it does to people.
Ironically, people work so hard to get rid of that fat and get a six pack when it was a “six pack” that did it to them in the first place.
I’m writing this post because I had a run in with our old friend recently.
By no means am I a big drinker. I may go out for drinks less than 10 times a year and even then it’s usually a Heineken or Mojito.
But this past weekend was a different story as my fraternity had a party.
We don’t have frat parties in the house with beer pong, we rent out clubs and have tons of girls show up.
Free drinks for brothers, and well, you get the picture.
The next day (Monday) I went to the gym for my usual Monday workout. Monday’s are usually hard, but this one beat my behind.
I experienced first hand how unwise it is to drink before you workout.
Alcohol does number of things to your body that are counter productive to your muscle building efforts.
It lowers your testosterone level. We know that testosterone is one of the major hormones your body releases when repairing your muscles.
Alcohol disrupts your sleep cycle, further messing up the release of other hormones like Growth Hormone which is crucial to muscle repair as well.
Alcohol will dehydrate you. Having plenty of water in your muscles is very important to a successful workout since your muscles are made up mostly of water. It allows them to move smoothly which will prevent muscle strains, tears, and other injuries.
Alcohol decreases your energy levels because it is a depressant. I was so tired when I went in to the gym. High energy levels from food and proper rest are very important to a workout as well.
Alcohol is very good at making you fat because it has a lot of calories and it’s easily converted to fat. This will definitely put a damper on things.
These are just some of the things that alcohol can do to you to negatively effect your muscle building efforts. I’ll stay away from the bar the next time I know I have a hard workout coming up.
It comes down to knowing your goals and not doing anything to take you away from that.
What has been your experience with alcohol and building muscle?
Mitch
Filed under Body Building Tips, Muscle Building Programs by on Jan 19th, 2010. Comment.
