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Goal setting, prevention and spotting a fad diet

Goal setting, prevention and spotting a fad diet

Goal setting – Begin with the end in mind!

Stephen Covey is the author of the best seller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, a book of that has been strongly influential on the way I look at life and fitness goals.

One of the habits is to “begin with the end in mind”.

Begin with the end in mind means to begin each day, task or project with a clear vision of your desired direction and destination and then continue by flexing your proactive muscles to make things happen.

This is a very important notion when embarking on any pursuit, but particularly relevant when starting an exercise program.

You should start with an ideal target or a list of specific goals that you want to achieve.

From there you can work step by step to build, grow and ultimately achieve what you set out to do. It’s great to have a big goal but to achieve it you need a process and a strategy.

Using a footy analogy from my senior coaching years, it was understood that to make the finals you needed to win 80-90 per cent of your games. To win 90 per cent of your games you needed to score 16 goals.

Break that down further and you needed to kick four goals per quarter. Without systems, strategies and a game plan in place to get four goals per quarter, the end goal wouldn’t be achieved.

Maybe you could take the time to reverse engineer your goals and really break them down to some simple starting strategies?

Prevention is better than cure The majority of our personal training clients are aged between 40 and 70 and the vast majority come to us with aches, pains and a body that has had much wear and tear from stress, poor technique whilst exercising, office-desk jobs, poor posture, etc.

The list goes on. No matter what your age, the time is now to give yourself the best opportunity to achieve better posture and an improved body that will move more freely, with reduced aches and soreness and free of injury and pain. Many people seek regular treatment from chiropractors, masseurs, osteopaths and physiotherapists for aches, pains and ailments.

A regular exercise program that includes core, resistance, stretching, fitness and weights helps to reduce and even eliminate the reliance on these treatments. In essence, regular training can be viewed as a complete prevention program.

We all know that if our car steers to the left, we need to turn the steering wheel to the right in order to keep travelling in a straight line, but ultimately it’s not the ideal way to run our car. Likewise in our bodies, when something wears down, if it’s not corrected it can become problematic and maybe permanently damaged.

Prevention is better than cure so if you are not already, start doing something that your body, its joints, muscles, ligaments and tendons will all thank you for in the years to come! Spotting a fad diet I get asked almost daily my thoughts on the varying diets out there and why none really stack up.

According to the Dietitians Association of Australia, “a fad diet is best described as a weight loss diet that promises fast weight loss without a scientific basis”.

The trick with fad diets is they use excellent marketing and branding tools to attract interest, while the overarching theme is generally to achieve rapid (and often large amounts of) weight loss in a short period of time.

Whatever the branding slogan, remember that the general rule of  – if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is – applies for fad diets.

For more information, exercise guidance or if you have any questions feel free to contact me anytime.

 

Justin Moran JustInTime PT

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