Motivation

Motivation
is the fuel for gains.
First appeared on cyberpump.com

Hi guys and welcome to another post. I hope you are all in good health and as happy as you can be. This post I would like to talk a little about motivation and then cover one of my workouts for you.

Motivation is what fuels the fire for what we do in life. We will cover the training part of life and how motivation affects this in this article. Without it you will just drift along having so-so workouts when you should be having awesome ones. Without motivation you will not eat correctly to ensure gains are met from your workouts. You first must have a goal, this could be a vision of how you want to look, a strength or fitness level you want to achieve.
There must be a goal, otherwise what is the point, what is the point of going through the motions. You will be wasting your time, just drifting along; you must have an aim.

Let’s now look at goals and how you would go about setting one and taking the steps to achieve it. Let us say that you will, in one year from now be handed 1 million pounds, on these conditions...

Eat a clean diet every day.
Train harder than ever before. Strive to gain strength every workout.
Never miss a scheduled workout unless you are ill.
Pay attention to recuperation and make sure you get adequate rest. The motivation is, ‘the million smackers’ you would do the things above no problem. The desire for that money would be so strong that nothing would deter you from that path. If you would do the above for the money, why can you not do it just for you? Why can you not do it without the money as a sweetener? Imagine what you will look like at the end of a year with 100% dedication. That has to be your motivation, how many of you out there want to be stronger, bigger, leaner? How many of you are really putting out for it. Ok, so you are training and eating ok but can you give more effort? Can you eat better? Can you instead of missing that workout today because you have had a hard day, train? Better still could you have got out of bed earlier that day and trained before work if you knew things were hectic at work?

So many people just do enough, or what they think is enough, when they have so much more in them. Think for a moment, what do I want to achieve? Are you in a comfort zone, just plodding along? If you are, come on let’s get out of it. Set a goal and set about the steps needed to attain it.
Let me give you an example:

Goal- Lose 10lbs of body fat.

Step one. Have a vision of what you want to achieve.

Step two. Find out calorie levels that are maintaining weight.

Step three. Set out a workout and CV plan.

Step Four. Set a time scale.

From here we make a check list that you review every day, put this list on the front of your workout and nutrition log. Must lose ten pounds. Be in the best shape of my life. I will eat 2800 calories a day from good clean foods. I will do three CV sessions a week and never miss. I will train hard in my weight sessions in order to keep strength and muscle size. I will drink three litres of water a day. My time frame is ten weeks; I will not cheat in that time frame at all. I will eat every three hours and never miss a meal. I will take the food I need wherever I go and prepare them the night before.

Checklists like this can apply to any goal; they have helped me achieve many things in my life. They keep you on track; they remind you of your goal by prompting the mind.
Take that log- book everywhere with you, it will keep you on that goal path. You can go further by breaking it down into a perfect day checklist. Seven perfect days make a perfect week, four of those perfect weeks make a perfect goal- producing month, and the months add up to a great year.

The day to day in your log- book could look like this.

Meals listed one to six, with calories balanced to your goal level.
List your water consumption. Positive mind set, daily thoughts on how you feel and how far you have come so far.
CV work: what day, type and how long. Tick off your meals and water intake day by day; knock something together on your computer. Print a months worth off and stick to your plan, tick off your foods, water, CV and supplements used, if any. Motivation comes from results, do things right, get results and you will become more motivated by those results. If you do not give things one hundred percent, results are little if not at all. You will not stick even to your half-hearted plan for very long. Keep positive, do things right and amazing things do happen when you set your mind to give 100%.

In a movie I saw recently I picked up a good saying “can’t never did anything”. I hope this has switched a few of you on out there. When you get off the old keys today, get to it, write yourself out a plan of attack and get to work.

Now let’s get down to the last workout I did, things are going well, strength is on it’s way back up and the old bod I am happy with. I just want to be a little bit bigger and a little bit leaner, as always. This workout I did today, Monday the 11th of November, I did this in the afternoon instead of the morning, like I would normally do. The reason was we had just got back from Centre Parks, on a weekend break.
For those not familiar with Centre Parks it is a holiday village right in the centre of Sherwood Forest. We went with Chris my training buddy and Gayle his wife and a gang of kids between us all. We had a good rest and the kids knocked themselves out on everything they could get into. Chris and myself found an abandoned bike that had a kid’s bike attached to the back of it. It was a bit like a tandem but it turned and was independent of the front. Well we did our CV on this over the weekend, we got some right speeds going, nearly killed ourselves just missing trees; but we are fit. Louise said we looked like those two out of the movie Dumb and Dumber. You know, the bit where they are on that little moped heading for Aspen.

Anyway to the workout. I did some light dumbbell work to warm up the shoulder joints.
Five pound dumbbells for two sets of lat raises and presses then two sets of curls, all for ten reps. I then do two to three progressively heavier sets on the big movements, squat, bench and dead lift. For instance I will do a set of dead lifts with a plate on for ten reps, then another with two plates on this time for five reps. I will then put another plate on and do one or two reps. In-between each set I stretch and get my head into the workout ahead.
After warm ups on the main exercises I set up all the weights on each exercise for that day. This whole process takes about ten or so minutes from stepping on the gym floor to being ready to train.

That was it guys, workout done, the bad bit was putting it all away by myself, nothing new there Chris. Till next time, remember be happy, enjoy each day, have fun. Ian.