WARNING: The today in this post refers to Monday. I was slow to post...
I
am a planner and have always had to be. I went to college with no
financial assistance from my family. I managed to work full time and
participated in activities .
What kept me afloat during this period was setting short term realistic
goals for myself that would ultimately lead to me reaching my ultimate
goal, which, at that time, was graduation.
Setting goals and working to achieve them is very important in any fitness plan. My
long term goal is to be fit. I have an idea of what I want my body to
look and feel like. I know that I want awesome abs. I want to wear a
bikini at 40. I can envision all of this and I know that
none of this will happen next week. This means that if my goal is set
far out, I will not experience any notable success next week. I know and accept this. It
is very easy to set generic goals for fitness. I have set generic goals
and I have heard others talk about theirs. Examples would be “I want to
be fit or I want to eat healthier”. These goals are great, but lack
specificity. With only an abstract idea and no concrete action plan, it
becomes infinitely more difficult to measure success.
In
an attempt to remedy this, I have decided to start setting short term
goals with a definitive measure of success. Reaching these smaller goals
that I set for myself will eventually lead to me succeeding at my long
term goal by creating concrete and manageable steps that can be
tackled one at a time. The goal I set for myself this week is to wake up
at 5 am to workout. I am not a morning person so this will definitely
be a challenge for me. I woke up this morning at 5 and
looked outside. It was pitch black and I decided that a run in the dark
was not for me. That being said, I did not want to stay in bed and feel
like a quitter on my first day. I hit snooze at 5. I got up at 5:14 and
made my bed. I then did an ab workout that I LOVE from Melissa Bender on
YouTube. The video is 10 minutes. There are 10 different ab exercises.
You do each exercise for 50 seconds with a 10 second rest between each
one. This morning was a success!!
