Your Road Map To Health & Fitness Success

Eating better and exercising can be complicated, but it doesn't have to be. Having a proven plan is the first step to success.

Should you do low carb or intermittent fasting? Do you need to switch to plant based or carnivore? Is cardio necessary and do I need to do HIIT training?

There are many options and information out there, when it comes to an exercise program and nutrition plan. Often we find people jump from one thing to the next based on a post they saw or a headline they read.

There are many paths you can take to get to your destination, but the reason most fail is because they really aren't following a path. They are randomly trying one thing then switching to something else.

While many paths might lead to the results you want, your first step is to create your blueprint or road map. This plan my have to be adjusted as you go, but the main elements are in there that will ultimately lead to your success.

This article will hopefully be a great starting point for you. My goal is to help you put some things you need to do together so they work for you. When you randomly follow workouts you saw online or start a diet that doesn't support your activity level, you start to see how these things can work against each other. This leads to burnout, plateaus, and eventually quitting.

Here are the essentials that need to be planned in your journey. These are listed in no particular order, but I will discuss that at the end. The more important thing is consistently doing these things.

1. Strength Training

You will need to participate in a minimum of 2 strength training workouts per week in order to help build or maintain muscles and bone mass. These workouts should be total body and ideally focus more on functional movements versus body parts.

This is still a foreign concept to many, but training body parts is an old school body building technique. So if your goal is to be a body builder, than you might want to follow a workout that looks like chest day, back day, leg day, etc.

But if your goal is move, feel, and look better but not build as much muscle as possible, you will want to follow total body functional workouts. Each workout will cover movements like squatting, hip hinging, pushing, and pulling.

It is impossible to cover all of this in one post, but this is the type of training plan you will want to follow. As soon as you see workouts split up into body parts, move on to something else.

Of course you need to have good form with every exercise you do, but the goal will be to stress the muscles until fatigued. You don't have to train to failure, but each exercise should be challenging. This is how we stimulate adaptation from training.

2. Daily Activity/Steps

You may have seen the headlines, sitting is the new smoking. While I can't completely agree with this, being inactive is still pretty bad for your health.

When you sit too much, you are restricting blood flow throughout the body. There are many consequences to this from cardiovascular issues to even cognitive issues.

You need to be setting yourself up to move every day. This doesn't mean you have to exercise every day, but you need to be active.

Tracking your steps is an easy way to do this. Your goal should be to hit 10,000 steps per day. This may seem like a lot and you might have to build up to it, but this should be your daily goal. Remember this doesn't have to be dedicated exercise. All movement counts. Start tracking and see how often you can hit this number each day.

3. Cardio

Initially getting steps everyday will do a lot for your brain, body, and heart, but we do need more intensity eventually. This will help lead to further improvements in things like aerobic capacity, mitochondrial function, heart health, energy levels, and more.

We start with something called the FITT formula to guide you with your cardio workouts. This stands for Frequency, Intensity, Time, Type. If you can figure out this combination you know exactly what you need to do each week.

In the beginning your goal should be to hit 150 minutes of moderate exercise every week. Once you hit this goal you can start incorporating more intense exercise like interval training.

But for this article lets start at the beginning. We will start with the 150 minute goal and work backwards. Next, you will have to figure out how many days per week will you realistically perform cardio exercise?

Let's say you can commit to 3 days per week. That means you will have to perform 50 minutes of cardio each workout. So know we can complete our FITT formula.

Frequency = 3 days per week
Intensity = Moderate (get slightly out of breath)
Time = 50 Minutes
Type = Whatever form of exercise you enjoy or tolerate the most.

Then you have you plan to follow. If this seems like too much to get started with you can set a smaller number that is realistic, but for many of the health benefits of cardio exercise, you should be shooting for a minimum of 150 minutes.

4. Nutrition

Of course we can't cover every aspect of nutrition in one short post, but we can review a few important details. Maybe the most important step finding a flexible plan that works for your lifestyle.

You are in this for the long haul. Short term fixes will drop weight quick, but lead to just as fast weight gain if you can't maintain that routine. Losing weight is pretty easy to do. Maintaining weight loss is the real challenge, so this should be the focus from the beginning.

Fad diets that claim whole food groups or macronutrients are bad will be doomed to fail from the start. You don't have to be overly restrictive. You might have to reduce certain things, but knowing that you can still enjoy the foods you love from time to time is essential.

We can look at the foods you eat in two ways. This is the calories consumed in the food AND the nutrients consumed. We have to consider both.

When you cut out whole food groups you will easily reduce the calories you consume, but you also reduce important nutrients you need for you body to function properly.

You must find the right amount of calories to eat that will lead to your body composition goal without leaving your completely drained. A slight reduction in calories under your baseline is usually sufficient here.

Then, with the calories you need to consume your goal is to find nutrient dense foods that hit your required macronutrients (carbs, fats, proteins) and micronutrients (vitamins & minerals).

There are of course many ways you can do this like paleo, fasting, plant based, etc. I would focus more on eating programs that help you get the foods you need versus the claims you hear online for these style of diets. None of them are magical and many can work if they help you with the above.

I know this can be a lot and overwhelming. I did not list these in order of importance. Instead I find they are all necessary and not one more important that the other.

Depending on your current situation, you might be able to incorporate all of these right from the start. Not many can do that. What I recommend for most is come up with a plan for all of them, but choose which 1 or 2 you want to start with. Then you can start to add more and more things in as you feel ready.

Coming up with the plan is often the hardest part. If you need help with this you will want to check out our 8 week challenge. We lay the entire program out for you, so it is much easier to get started. Then by the end of the 8 weeks you know exactly what you need to do to continue and be successful. Everyone that follows the plan see incredible results.

To learn more about the program click here.

Categories: : Exercise, Nutrition, Programming