Placing goals upon yourself will help you to focus more on your training and nutrition. To further your focus, give yourself a detailed timeline of when you need to accomplish these goals. Simply saying, “I want to be ripped by the summer” will help you to work hard, but allows room to cheat and slack off. If you tell yourself, “I want to be __% body fat so that I can see my abs without flexing by July 4th” or “I want to wear __ size bikini by Memorial Day Weekend,” you will have a clearly defined goal and a deadline to accomplish this goal by. The same can be said if you are looking to add muscle. Instead of taking a body fat percentage, use a circumference measure. “I want my arms to be __ inches around, my suit jacket at least size __, and my thighs to be __ inches around by December 1st.” From there, you can set mini-goals to accomplish along the way. If July 4th is the ultimate goal’s deadline, tell yourself that 3 weeks prior, you’d like to see certain muscles more clearly defined or run a mile in __ mins or have your waist, arms, and shoulders at a certain measurement. Setting these sub-goals will give you positive encouragement to continue working hard towards the ultimate goal. That feeling of accomplishment will be a huge boost, mentally .. Then when the day comes where you are tired or unmotivated, you can remind yourself that you are one day closer to your deadline and have ___ amount of workouts left to achieve this goal — Do I really want to take today off? Of course, you should be mindful of overtraining and realize that recovery time is just as important as proper training. The same applies to the day when you want to neglect your nutrition guidelines.

Of course, if you are training for a marathon, or a Tough Mudder, or some other fitness competition, this helps to motivate even more. And once you feel your fitness level is ready, I strongly recommend competing in some type of fitness competition/event. I don’t necessarily mean a ‘posing-on-stage’ type event, but as I just referenced: Tough Mudder, Warrior Dash, half-marathon (or whole if you’ve already completed at least 1 half marathon), or another one along these lines. There is a plethora of events available these days. These events will push you and challenge your physical and mental toughness.

Also, I believe that people often associate goals for fitness with “bulking up” or “getting ripped” or they must be training for a competition or event of some sort — as I’ve just discussed. This is a common misconception. When someone is happy with their physical appearance, energy level, and overall health; they claim they are just “maintaining” and have no real goals in the gym. This statement contradicts itself. Your goal is to maintain what you have achieved. However, in order to maintain, you must continue to challenge yourself. As I’ve mentioned before, your body will start to accommodate or get used to the physical demands you are placing upon it. Essentially, you are building a tolerance to the exercises — even diet – you have incorporated into your life. Once your body is used to the demands placed on it, you hit a plateau. Once you hit a plateau, you are no longer going to see results and eventually you won’t see what you achieved in the first place. It is also inevitable that you will get bored — which accounts for a large percentage of gym drop-outs. Simply going through the motions at the gym is not actually working out, and in this case; If you don’t use it, you will lose it. 

Additionally, as we age, our bodies change; how we adapt and what we adapt to, in regard to training and adaptation to physical demands. For example, as a young person it was no problem for you to walk up and down steps. However, after a couple years of working out a particular way and not really changing things; your body adapts and certain muscles become strengthened, while others are ignored, joints and ligaments remain mobile and flexible, while others tighten up from lack of proper training. All of a sudden you notice your knees bother you when going up and down stairs or your hips tighten up when performing certain everyday movements. This would be a good time to start incorporating some explosive movements, i.e. box jumps, to start getting those dormant muscles, tendons, and ligaments to start firing. The movements don’t need to be big and intense — start small and work up to it. Another way to improve everyday strength is to incorporate functional exercises into your workout program.

Remember: What you train for is what you get. If you want strength, train your muscles in a way that works best for you and continually vary and adjust what you’re doing in order to increase strength. If you’re training for maintenance, encourage yourself to work hard and progress your exercises but focus on intensity levels and food intake, as well as recovery so that you don’t bulk up or lean out too much.

… And if you need help, ask! You will never be judged if you ask for assistance or suggestions. One of the great aspects of the fitness industry is the constant evolution and state of change. There is no one who knows everything. The best trainers, doctors, physical therapists, etc. are the ones who make it a point to continue their education. The smartest ones are the ones who say, “I don’t know” when they are not 100% sure of an answer. When this happens, it encourages a growth and learning environment. I know I don’t want someone to give me advice when they are only 75% sure of what they’re saying … I like my joints to remain painless thankyouverymuch.

Stay motivated and work hard to achieve your goals. As I have realized time and time again — Time goes by way too quickly; and if you aren’t consistently working toward achieving personal success, you are responsible for not being the best version of you.

Stay focused, accomplish your goals, and train insane.

StayFocused is great for many reasons. It’s primary purpose is outline in its name: it helps you stay focused. It allows yo to add sites that distract you the most. Then, before you sit down for a important task, all you have to do is enable the extension; this will block you from accessing these sites, and therefore, help you stay focused.

It is a great way to increase your productivity online. For the ones with less will power, StayFocused can also put a times on the prohibition. This makes sure that you cannot access these sites until the timer has run out.

I love StayFocused, and for the price of free, you should go check it out too. Who knows, you may find the extension particularly useful.

I love YouTube. It has replaced television for me – being of a greater variety and greater cohesion to my own interests than mainstream television networks ever could be. But YouTube, like so much of the internet, is a stopgap – a temporary plug in the space of nothingness that fills the inbetweens of our lives when we have nothing to do. Life is as much as battle against boredom as it is against starvation, disease and other basic needs. Even the most downtrodden of impoverished people still look for brief moments of entertainment – perhaps moreso than the overcomfortable minority of the “first world”. YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and, for the more knowledge-thirsty, Wikipedia – they all exist as plugs in the great big gaping hole of boredom that can envelope our lives when we have no direction or goal at that moment. It’s a drug that tricks your brain into thinking it’s doing something when in actuality there’s very little outwardly that can distinguish a bored person from one browsing the internet. Like the channel-surfers of old, the internet is this generation’s timefiller between work and real fun.

This is my third term of university and at Kent they have the near-infuriating practice of not doing anything in that third of a year. This is infuriating threefold as my family are paying for this waste of a term, I’m meant to be revising for exams for which I am receiving no support or even the scantest of information and finally I am bored. So very, very bored.

Which is why I crave adventure. Anything. Even the minor thrill of meeting a new person or going for a walk. Adventure in all its shades is nothing more than the endless fight back against boredom and ennui. Today the first thing I did after breakfast was walk to the library, find a seat left abandoned amongst the rows of bookcases and sit down. The book nearest my face was a brief history of Islam and I spent a happy near-hour flicking through a biography of Mohammad’s achievements and actions. I might have been sitting in a stuffy, ridiculously-warm-for-the-time-of-year library in drizzly south England, true, but I was also standing amidst the merchant-folk of Mecca as I joined Mohammad in considering ‘Uzza, Lat and Manah all those thousand-so years ago. Adventure is as much of the mind as it is of the body. You don’t need to jump off a cliff or wrestle a baboon to have an enriching experience out of life. 

There is a wonderful program avaliable for Chrome called StayFocused which allowed you to “blacklist” certain sites and assign a universal time limit which counts down for however long you spend on such sites. I’ve not yet been in a situation where my need to work has been strong enough to warrant sticking to a strict diet of time-wasting internet fodder but more and more these past few days I begin to see a more interesting side to the StayFocused ideology – that of forcing me to ween myself off of the internet as a battleground against boredom and into the ‘real’ world where adventure is as unpredictable as it is enriching. Even if it’s just meeting up with friends or admiring a view – humans are built from the ground up, whether you consider yourself creationist, evolutionist or otherwise, to act and react within a real world and not an online database. If you have fun on the internet you don’t necessarily have fun in real life. So go out there. Turn off the computer screen. Have an adventure.

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