Tag: wellness

How to be sure you’re training hard enough

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Are you training hard enough?

We all exercise or train to become better versions of ourselves but we don’t always know how to get better. Years of experience in the gym and other training environments have shown that many people exercise, but most don’t do enough to get real results.  Exercise and training are there to push your body past limits so that it can adapt to the load, making you physically and psychologically stronger and fitter. However, there is also a chance of doing too much.

There are three main variables you can change to dial in your training to get fitter, stronger, or bigger.

Training volume

Volume is often inaccurately described as the duration of the training, however, it’s the quantity of activity performed during training. “It is the primary component of training because it’s a prerequisite for high technical, tactical, and physical achievement.” (Periodization, T.O. Bompa & G.G. Haff). The specifics of the volume will always depend on the sport or activity. For endurance athletes, the main component measured is the distance covered. Resistance training and weightlifting will measure the accumulative weight lifted during a workout (Volume Load = sets x reps x load in kg).

Training Volume graph
Training Volume

How can you increase training volume?

  • If you’re an endurance athlete work on increasing the distance covered per run or week.
  • Each week, try to add an extra rep or two to each set.
  • If you are building more capacity, add another full working set to the exercise.

To add volume, you’ll be adding distance, sets, and reps to the workout. Doing a higher volume workout will impact your recovery time between workouts.

Training Intensity

Where volume is the quantity of work during training, intensity can be seen as the quality of work being done. With relation to resistance training, intensity can be seen as the energy expenditure or work per unit of time. i.e. workout). The more work you do during a workout, the higher the intensity and fatigue accumulated. However, intensity also has a psychological component whereby your ability to handle and overcome mental challenges during a tough workout or training segment.

intensity is measured differently between sports and activities. Endurance athletes will look at average heart rate as they run, cycle, or row. Maximum heart rate will also be used during resistance training but power output will become increasingly important.

Training Intensity graph
Training Intensity

There are two easy-to-follow methods of assessing intensity when training.

REP (Rate of perceived exertion)

Training hard is very relative and you need to find your “sweet spot” for training. Each level of RPE is a guide for progression. Each intensity zone has its uses whether you’re training for endurance or weight training.

RPE Scale:

  • 1-4: This is where you’ll be warming up. You’ll either be jogging very slowly or doing mobility exercises, getting a light sweat.
  • 5-6: The warm-up and speed set intensity. Low intensity and moderate weights that slightly work the muscles to prepare for main activities or work on explosiveness. Endurance athletes will be able to chat but with laboured breathing.
  • 7-8: This is your working capacity. You’ll be doing your working strength sets or running but with shortness of breath and talking in short sentences.
  • 9: Pushing hard and barely able to maintain the intensity of the exercise. Reps are slowing down and form is becoming worse—barely anything left in the tank.
  • 10: You’ve pushed so hard that there is no way you can do another rep. Systemic and muscular failure happens here. Not recommended too often.

While RPE is great for endurance athletes, it can split those doing resistance training. RPE is perfect for powerlifters who work according to their maximal efforts. They tend to work with lower weights at higher intensity.

RIR: Reps in Reserve

If you want to build muscle, you could use the RIR method for your workouts. These are the reps in reserve for each set. It can be tricky to figure out, but so does the RPE scale. The more you use it, the better you’ll get.

You don’t want to start a new training block too heavy, so training each set to about 3 RIR is a good start (this could change in the final set). By adding weight each week, your reps in reserve will decrease and you’ll progressively get stronger.

Ways of altering intensity:

  • Increasing the speed over time or quickness of a specific exercise. E.g. running faster
  • Increase the weight lifted for an exercise.
  • Decreasing rest times between sets and exercises.
  • Performing endurance, interval, and tactical exercises at a higher % of maximal heart rate.
  • Have more intense training weeks before adding a deload week as part of a training block. E.g. 3;1 block to 4:1 training block.

Training Density

Training density is going to involve how often you’re training. The frequency of your workouts will depend on your training intensity and your recovery. If you’re recovering long before the next workout, you might consider adding another workout to your week. However, depending on your goals and program, increasing training frequency will look different to somebody else.

How to adjust training density:

  • If your muscles recover a few days before the next workout, adding another workout for that muscle group could improve adaptation. E.g. Training legs 2-3 times a week instead of once.
  • Have more speed sessions or longer runs during the week if you’re an endurance or track athlete.

Relationship between Volume and Intensity

There is a trade-off between volume and intensity. You can add all of the reps and sets you want, but it will impact how heavy you can load the bar. You can also run far but you won’t be running as fast as possible.

Optimal Volume and Intensity

If you’re building muscle, you will be adding loads of sets and reps to your workout to stimulate muscle growth, but you won’t be training very heavily. If you’re training for strength, your reps will be lower, rest times longer but the weight will be much heavier. You want to find the perfect zone for your specific goals.

There is no special variation that suits everybody, which is why well-planned programs make such a big difference.

Avoidable Volume and Intensity

There are two more scenarios that you don’t want to find yourself in. These are often determined by no training plan, trying to follow elite athlete intensity, or being unable to train very hard.

You’ve got the group who often starts too heavy, always trains to failure and ego lifts with way too much weight on the bar. They load the intensity and increase the volume so much that they’re sore for a week, train with a sub-optimal range of motion, and increase the risk of injury.  This approach can also lead to overtraining.

The second group is often the beginners. They are unsure how to train effectively and/or worry about injury or muscle growth way too much. Unfortunately, this is also the zone, where for most of history, women were told to train because otherwise they’ll get bulky. This group of individuals exercise, but not hard enough to make any gains or they get them very slowly.

These two scenarios are avoidable because they’re quite easy to fix with correct education and programming.

Final Thoughts

Understanding the relationship between volume, intensity, and density can help you make those gains you want so much. You want to train hard and often enough to stimulate your muscles and nervous system but not so hard that you get hurt. You also want to ensure that you’re doing exercise at a high enough volume and intensity to make any gains at all.

These variables are changeable for the individual and individual goals, so take the time to learn and enjoy the process of getting fitter and stronger.  

Written by Gary Dunn a.k.a. @geekphysique_za

Should you always keep your muscles guessing in your workouts?

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Don't keep muscles guessing by always changing workouts

If you’re joining a gym, training group, or working out at home, the idea is usually to progress and get better. Some people will progress faster than others and those who don’t progress as quickly want to know how they can speed up the process. One of the myths you might hear is that you always need to keep your body or muscles guessing by doing different exercises each week and workout so that you don’t plateau or get bored. Unfortunately, that’s not how the body works and whether you’re a beginner or an advanced lifter, consistency is the best way to get results.

There are many ways you can write or follow programs to help you get your results but there’s just so much of it to sift through. Here are four simple tips on how you can keep progressing in your fitness journey without chopping and changing workouts and exercises each time.

Progressive overload

The term progressive overload means that you keep increasing the volume or intensity each week or workout so that you can make small improvements each time. This is the better way of keeping your muscles “guessing” or in this case, stimulated so that you keep improving. The slight increase in weight, reps, or sets with the addition of rest time manipulation can stimulate your muscles to keep progressing.

Well-written programs with progressive overload are easy to track because you’ve got specific variables that are changing, so you know when you’re getting stronger, faster, or fitter. You want to keep a consistent stimulus between periods of recovery while tracking the improvements.

For example: If you keep changing your exercises for leg day, you can’t keep progressively overloading your muscles because you keep starting from scratch by doing a different exercise. Without a plan on how to progress those important volume and intensity variables, you’ll find it difficult to improve.

Training cycles

Now that we know you need a good program, how do you make sure that you’re constantly progressing without burning out? In simple terms, every good program is defined by training cycles. These are divided into macro-, meso- and microcycles. These are the periods of training defined by your goals, ensuring that you’ve got periods of progressive overload and periods of deloading, or recovery. Macrocycles define the longer periods to reach a goal, like losing a certain amount of weight in three months. Mesocycles are shorter periods of progressive overload and recovery, taking about four to eight weeks. Microcycles are your weekly routines defined by individual workouts.

Depending on your goals or training ability, these cycles, especially mesocycles will look very different. For those who are brand new to training and exercise, these training cycles can take a lot longer because their bodies adapt but also recover much faster, especially for the younger population. Intermediate and advanced athletes might have a four-week mesocycle with three weeks of overload and a week of deload because they tend to push their bodies much harder and need more recovery.

A good program will include well-defined mesocycle blocks within a larger macrocycle (e.g. 12-week transformation program) which ensures that you’re always progressing. You should still be doing the same exercises but with more reps, sets, or weight, or a combination of the three followed by a period of less load to ensure that you’re progressing and recovering effectively.

Keep the exercises the same during a mesocycle and track their progress instead of chopping and changing every week.

Consider stimulus vs fatigue

Stimulus to fatigue is a term popularized by Dr. Mike Israetel, a bodybuilder with a Ph.D. in Sport Physiology. Exercise is used to create a stimulus that will drive adaptation and performance but it will cause a certain amount of fatigue. Your goal is to get the most stimulus out of exercise without causing so much fatigue that you can’t recover before training again.

The relationship between these two variables is very important for progressing in your fitness journey. The better the stimulus, the more you will progress. However, if the stimulus causes so much fatigue that you can’t recover before your next training session, your progress will be negatively impacted. You also don’t want to have so little stimulus that you’re not driving any fatigue or adaptation. Fatigue is an important part of the process. You can look at this relationship from the perspective of the whole workout or even individual exercises.

Depending on your goals and training split, you want to recover from your overall workout by the time you reach that same workout or muscle group again. If you had an intense leg workout consisting of squats and accessories that fatigue the hamstrings, glutes and quads, you won’t be doing deadlifts for a couple of days. Both the squat and deadlift train large muscle groups but also fatigue the central nervous system in a big way.

You don’t just want to recover from your workouts, but you want exercises that have a great stimulus that causes a good amount of fatigue but not so much that you can’t continue the workout or recover before the next one. If you want to grow your legs, it might be tricky to continue the workout after many heavy squats, but if you had leg press or hack squats as your main multi-joint compound exercise, you have enough energy left to do more high-quality accessory exercises in the rest of the workout.

If you’re writing your program or talking to your coach, learning which exercises cause a good amount of stimulus with a good amount but not too much fatigue, you can find the exercises and workout split that gets you the best results.

This concept is at time complicated yet also simple, and can be expanded on in a much larger article, but not today.

Limit confusion

We only have so much time in the day to work out. If you don’t have a program that tells you exactly what to do, you can get confused and waste time. If you’re starting a good program, you can start lighter and get the hang of specific exercises. By the time you get to the last week of the mesocycle, you can push harder in the exercise to drive more stimulus into the muscle and recover effectively. If you’ve got a new exercise for the same workouts each time, you’ll be wasting time looking for new equipment you’re not used to using, learning the ropes, and not going heavy or intensely enough to drive that important stimulus.

All of this confusion will also cause frustration, making it less effective and you probably won’t stick to it after not seeing any results.

A well-written program with similar exercises in a mesocycle will provide you with a better stimulus-to-fatigue ratio while driving progressive overload. If you stay consistent with these important variables, you’ll have a better chance of getting the progress you’ve been working for.

Improve your bench press with these helpful accessory exercises

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Bench press accessories can boost your lifting potential

Whether you’re new to the gym or an intermediate to advanced lifter, you probably want a big bench press. However, with everybody having a different body shape and coaches having different approaches with loads of content out there, it can be hard to sift through it all. All of this content usually just tells you what the issue might be and how to fix it, but only when you’re already on the bench. 

Did you know that accessory exercises are more than just workout fillers? When building a program for something like the bench press, it’s not enough just to add movements after the main lift for the sake of it, but accessorise your program with movements that help you lift better. 

Here are seven sticking points and an accessory or two for each to help you get a bigger bench: 

Accessory exercises to improve your bench press

Accessory movements are those exercises that should help you stay injury-free but also help you get stronger. Getting stronger doesn’t mean that they need to be heavy or super high volume, but can be as simple as adding it to your warm-up.

Plant/Root your feet

When lifting, especially when lifting heavy, you want to be as stable as possible. A better bench press starts with good foot placement and making sure they’re not all over the place when pressing. Unless you’re doing Larson presses, you want your feet rooted to the floor. 

Because you’re about to drive with your legs, having your feet under your hips as much as possible is a great place to start. Make sure your heel and toes are planted to keep you connected and stable. 

Accessory Exercise: Ankle mobility

For most people, getting their feet planted under their hips is hindered by ankle mobility. As a warm-up, grab yourself a plyo box or bench, and place your foot on top as if you’re about to do a step-up. Instead of stepping up, lean forward so that your knee goes over your toes. As your heel lifts off of the bench, lightly force it back down as you breathe through the stretch. Do this for one or two sets of 30 seconds for each leg. 

Leg Drive

Yes, you’ll be using your legs during the bench press. If you have your feet planted, you’re already most of the way there. Using leg drive in the bench press is very different to squat or deadlift. Even though some people drive their hips to the sky like a glute bridge, one of my favourite ways to drive with my legs is to drive them along the floor toward my head and shoulders. 

When competing, you’re not allowed to have your butt lift off of the bench, so driving your hips to your head and shoulders could help. The technique will not only help keep your hips down but drive your traps into the bench and even improve your arch. 

Accessory Exercise: Bulgarian split-squat 

Everybody’s a least favourite exercise in recent times, adding the rear leg elevated split-squats to your warm-up can help you get the feeling of the correct leg drive. Usually, you’re focusing on the leg drive from the front leg to work on the glutes and hamstrings, but focusing on the stretch in the quads and hip flexors on the leg elevated behind you can help with your bench press. 

With the back leg balanced on your toes, drive through the back leg for a couple of reps and sets, teaching you to transfer the force through your body to the bar. 

Bracing

Bracing during any lift not only keeps your spine safe, but because of the tremendous pressure in your abdomen, you’ll be surprised how much more you can lift. 

How to brace

  • To breathe properly take a deep breath through your mouth with minimal chest expansion forcing air into your stomach and holding it, then brace your core muscles as if you are preparing to take a punch in the stomach.
  • Bracing is an all-around feeling, so if you’re tired after a run, place your hands on your obliques and feel them expand as well as your back muscles, expanding your whole trunk. 
  • If you’re an intermediate lifter and start wearing a belt, you need to feel the tension pushing into the belt all around. 

Accessory movement: Planks

Do your elbow planks and side planks. Not only will you learn to brace and hold in the right positions, but you’ll also learn to tense your entire body as part of the core bracing. Don’t just try and keep your body straight but dig your toes into the floor, brace your core, and tighten your shoulders as hard as you can for at least thirty seconds. 

Don’t neglect your abs, even if you’re not exercising for aesthetics.

Elbow position

You want as much of your body under the bar as possible when benching, including the elbows. As an easy rule, you want your elbows at a 45° angle, especially on the lowering phase. This position helps your arms stay connected to your lats, giving keeping that tension you’ve built. If your elbows flair out, you’ll notice an immediate decrease in power. 

Warm-up: Neutral grip dumbbell bench press

Close grip Dumbbell bench press: When lying on the bench with light dumbbells, have your palms facing each other instead of towards your legs. Slowly lowering the weights, imagine your triceps resting on your lats as you get into the full chest stretch. Press up explosively, using your triceps, chest, and lats. 

Accessory exercise: Close-grip bench press

A popular bench accessory where your hands are as narrow as possible (narrower than chest width), lower the bar slowly with your elbows staying close to your body and only press after the bar touches your chest. 

Gripping the bar

As we mentioned before, you want as much of your body under the bar as possible, including your wrists. If your wrist is bent too far back, you lose a lot of the tension and drive you’ve worked on so hard. 

Try placing your hand on the bar and then twisting your thumb into the bar. The bar will mostly be in contact with the padding under your thumb and pinky. Trying to death grip the bar will force your wrist back and put tension on the forearms while you try to focus on pressing.

Accessory Exercise: Finger curls

Hold onto a barbell hanging in front of you. Extend your fingers let the bar drop and curl the bar back up by flexing your fingers. 

The bench press grip is more for control instead of a death grip. 

Bar placement

When lowering the bar, we are often too worried about where exactly it should land. With everybody having different body shapes and arm lengths, there’s a spectrum. If your elbows are at the right angle and you’ve got your grip sorted, the bar will touch your chest where it needs to. A good range is somewhere near your nipple line and mid-to-upper chest. 

Accessory exercise: Inverted row

Inverted rows are a great mid-workout accessory. Setting up a bar in the rack at different heights can help you increase or decrease the difficulty. If your body is straight, even if your knees are bent can help you pull yourself to the bar. Where the bar touches your chest is often going to be where it lands during pressing. It’s also great for strengthening the back muscles in the same position you would be pressing. 

Training frequency

After deadlifts and squats, you often feel like a few days, if not a whole week, is necessary to recover from the workout due to much larger muscle recruitment and weight lifted. Your chest and arms have smaller muscles and the impact on your body is much less. That means that you can recover faster, and can train sooner. It’s time to ditch the “bro-split” and get some more chest training days into your program. 

Depending on how long you’ve been training, adding a second or even third chest workout can benefit you. 

How to increase bench press frequency

You don’t just want to jump into doing 3 bench press days a week. Start with adding an extra day about 2-3 days after your workout, especially if you don’t feel sore anymore. 

A common way to split two bench press days is by adding variations like doing one heavier day of conventional bench press and a lighter close-grip bench later in the week. If you’re just splitting 8 sets of bench presses into two workouts with 4 sets each, the volume isn’t going up and won’t help you. When splitting your workouts, add two working sets to each of them. 

Conclusion

There are many different cues and accessories to add more weight to your bench press. These are just a few easy accessories you can add before or during your workouts to help improve your pressing technique and strength. 

Finding out what works for you is always going to be more important than clear-cut advice, but this is a great place to start. 

How can yoga improve your gym workouts?

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Can yoga help improve your gym workouts

Multiple times a week, we get up and go to the gym, whether a commercial or private gym or in the garage. While some of us like building muscle, others work towards getting stronger. There are also those who like to get flexible and “centred” with yoga. But did you know that you can combine the chilled-out vibes of yoga to improve your weight training?

While yoga focuses on flexibility most of the time, it can also help you become better at lifting weights and building bigger muscles. It’s not just the physical adaptations that benefit from yoga; we have all heard about its mental benefits, too.

Mobility and flexibility

You don’t have to do the splits or touch your forehead to your toes, but some form of mobility and flexibility is always a good idea.

Flexibility is the ability of your muscles, tendons, and ligaments to extend into a wider range of motion, but statically. Mobility refers to your ability to move your body in a broader range of motion, and to be more dynamic. Everybody can be more mobile, especially when doing specific sports, but only some people need to be super flexible. Powerlifters don’t need to squat as low as Olympic lifters, and sprinters should be more mobile than distance runners.

Man doing warrior yoga pose under rocks at the ocean
You don’t need to do the splits for yoga to help with gym workouts. Photo by Dave Contreras on Unsplash

Yoga is often relatively static, but some versions allow you to move and become more mobile in those different poses. You can move from pose to pose before getting into those tricky static positions, but you don’t need to go to extremes with awkward and complicated poses. Find a good yoga routine or class once a week. You can become more mobile, even just a little bit, to improve your lifting range of motion because, in most cases, the muscle growth happens most when it’s in a lengthened position or stretching against an external load, also known as the essentric part of the movement.

Leaning into some mobility work through a yoga class can ensure you can perform better during workouts or competition.

Better breathing for workouts

Breathing keeps us alive, but did you know that the way you breathe during a workout can improve performance? Not only do you want to catch your breath between sets, but you also want to breathe properly while lifting those weights or brace your core before and during a big lift.

Yoga has specific breathing methods that can help you control your breath before, during, and after your workout to maximise your effort and help you recover while you’re not lifting. Suppose you’re lifting heavy weights, being able to breathe with your diaphragm, and holding that to brace is essential for better performance in the set. It’s essential to control all those muscles when you’re busy lifting to keep you safe and performing your best.

Man meditating on rocks
Practicing specific breathing skills can help with your workouts. Photo by Jaspinder Singh on Unsplash

Whether it’s an energising breath to wake you up before lifting, relaxing breaths between sets to lower the heart rate and get oxygen flowing again, or bracing or breathing during reps, yoga can teach you to control your breathing.

Improves focus and body-awareness

Along with the new breathing skills, you learn about focus. You’re not only focusing on your breathing while getting into and holding poses, but you’re learning to focus on yourself without distraction.

Breathing and internalising your focus means you can feel what your body is doing more accurately. You learn to focus on individual muscles and joints and how they operate together, giving you an advantage when training and competing.

Woman doing lat pulldown exercise
Internalized focus can help with improving individual lifts. Photo by FitNish Media on Unsplash

An extension of this internal focus can eventually teach you about the mind-muscle connection you often hear about.

You know when you’re squatting deep enough or discovering an imbalance while running so that you know what to work on in the future. You could even notice potential injuries before they happen.

Stress relief

For some of us. Lifting weights is our stress relief, but you’re still putting your body through its paces and providing it with a stress stimulus.

By joining a relaxed yoga class or doing a routine at home, you can focus on yourself, help loosen tight joints through movement, and relax your mind through breathing.

You get relaxing meditative yoga classes and routines, but if you love lifting weights, you might like to find power yoga classes, which are based on a form called Ashtanga yoga. Where Ashtanga yoga follows a particular routine, power yoga is an off-shoot which uses many of the same intense poses with a more dynamic routine and can be applied to specific patterns you want to work on.

You don’t need to do long yoga sessions or join a class every day, but the occasional routine can teach you about your body and how it can move without putting too much stress on yourself.

How to turn motivation into self-discipline

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A man and a woman being disciplined with exercise

We’ve all been in the same spot at one time in our lives; that moment you realise that you want to change your life, and often it’s getting a bit fitter, losing weight or sometimes even signing up for something like a marathon. But we often say that we don’t have the motivation to train, however, it’s more about self-discipline instead.

Why are we making the distinction between motivation and self-discipline?

Motivation is the reason you’re signing up for the gym, race and/or training program. Self-discipline is your ability to continuously do something regardless of how you feel.

For most people it can be very difficult to stay consistent with what motivated them and the one thing that keeps us going to the gym, running club or studio on a weekly or daily basis is self-discipline.

So, how do you turn that original motivation into self-discipline? Here are some strategies you can use: 

Turn motivation into discipline

What’s your “why”? (and write it down)

Why do you want to make a change?

There are two versions of this, especially if it comes to weight-loss or living a healthier lifestyle.

The first is that moment you’re seeing yourself in the mirror and realising you want to feel more confident. For some dads, it’s the moment they realise that they’re becoming a father and want to be more active with the kids and family. These personal reasons can be a very strong motivator to help work towards your goals and then it’s down to discipline to continue.

The tougher version of this is when that motivation comes from outside, like somebody telling you to lose some weight, even if it’s a doctor but it can hurt a bit more from somebody close to you.  

Most of us react defensively to this outside source of criticism and those negative feelings can push us even further away from making healthier changes. But, you can still turn it into something positive if you find your internal reason and turn it into a positive future.

What’s going to stand in your way

How many temptations do you think you resist every day?

It can be very hard to know this from the start because we often react on a whim. However, you can watch your behaviour and start to discover these temptations, and then start to develop the self-awareness and self-discipline to combat them.

Woman looking in the mirror at the gym
You are the only person standing in your way to greatness. Photo: Scott Webb via Unsplash

As an example, use your shopping trip to the supermarket. Try and realise which aisles you spend more time in and what you’re grabbing from the shelf without thinking about it. Your self-awareness will realise that it might be the sweets or high-fat foods. You can then write it down and help yourself not to choose these options and instead find healthier snacks.

The same goes for the snooze button in the morning or endless scrolling on social media.

Try and discover your temptations, then write down how you’re going to combat it or replace it with a healthier habit.

Write down your goals

Writing down goals is one of the most important steps
If you don’t write down your goals, they’re only a dream. Photo via Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Now that you’ve got your reasons for making healthier choices, discovered your temptations and know how you want to counteract them, it’s time to write down what you want to achieve.

You should try and keep your goals achievable, but challenging, but dividing them up into categories helps with this application.

Short-term goals: These can be as little as daily or weekly goals, up-to a month. e.g. having a workout two or three times a week, losing that tiny bit of weight or just skipping “that” aisle in the supermarket.

Medium-term goals: These goals can be for the next 3 months or so, which are often personal trainer or gym packages for a reason. This amount of time gives you the perfect opportunity to reach more significant goals which can then become a new healthier habit. This is when discipline will truly start showing its results.

Long term goal: This will be that initial weight-loss goal you set yourself or life goal that you want to achieve. It goes right at the top of the list, but each of your short- and medium-term goals will build up to this one.

When you don’t write down your goals, they’re only a dream.

Embrace discomfort

Changing your lifestyle and habits is never easy. It’s called getting out of your comfort zone for a reason and self-discipline is strengthened through embracing it. That willpower is something you can actually work on.

By viewing self-discipline as an unlimited resource, participants were able to exercise the same degree of willpower after a depleting task as before it, demonstrating the impact our beliefs can have on our actions (Job et al., 2013).

You can do the same by NOT viewing self-control as a depletable resource might give us some of the motivation we need to overcome these hurdles, and our ego.

Staying disciplined running uphill
Embracing discomfort is a major part of staying disciplined. Photo via Jenny Hill on Unsplash

Build new habits

“The key to building lasting habits is focusing on creating a new identity first.” – by James Clear Goal setting, Habits and Self-improvement

You want to start with your goals and making them nice and specific so that you have a map of where to go. Now, you need the process of how you’re going to achieve these outcomes, like going to the gym or not ordering high-calorie junk food to lose those kilos on your goal board.

Finally, you want to change your world view and beliefs in what you’re doing and why. With this new identity, you want to become that person who makes healthier choices, walks more or writes a certain amount of pages a day.

Your process will help you reach your new identity, like adding steps to each daily walk or writing 100 extra words per day.

You want to become the person that reaches these goals instead of it just being something you do.

Use Technology

tying running shoes and using a fitness tracker
Embrace the new age of technology to improve your discipline. Photo via Onur Binay on Unsplash

In a world full of technological advances, we often feel disconnected and want to unplug, but technology can help you keep track of your progress and goals.

You have loads of fitness apps to track workouts, hire coaches and even get free workouts or walk trackers. You have apps that help you track your food and water intake too, linking to the fitness app if they don’t do both.

There are even goal setting apps that just help you write down your goals or track your habits.

Embrace technology, because you’re well-being is literally at your fingertips.

Learn to forgive yourself

Changing your habits and identity to make better choices is tough, especially with so many distractions, like festive season feasting. But, that doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy it with everybody.

You need to learn to forgive yourself instead of feeling guilty and punishing slips in judgement or indulgence like those sweet treats over the holidays.

A good example is that when you’ve had your day of Christmas feasting, remind yourself that it’s just been a day and continue with your healthy path on the next. Don’t starve yourself or try and “work it off” but continue the good habits you’ve worked so hard on.

Getting motivated is easy while building discipline is the hard part, but it doesn’t need to be. Using these tips, you can become more self-disciplined and reach all of your goals.

Sources:

  • 17 Self-Discipline Exercises to Help Build Self-Control on  7 Feb 2020 by Catherine Moore, Psychologist, MBA
  • Job, V., Walton, G. M., Bernecker, K., & Dweck, C. S. (2013). Beliefs about willpower determine the impact of glucose on self-control. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(37), 14837–14842.
  • Identity-Based Habits: How to Actually Stick to Your Goals This Year by James Clear Goal setting, Habits and Self-improvement

How sport helped me overcome impossible hurdles

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How sport helped me overcome impossible hurdles

There are countless movies about sporting heroes, fictional and real life, that overcome adversity. Books have been written about legends of their respective games that came from nothing to make something of themselves. This is NOT one of those stories, but one of somebody just finding their way, and it all started with some sport at school and how exercise helped overcome some hurdles to be just a little bit more independent.

Having been born with a visual impairment that left me legally blind and a doctor telling my parents that I would never read or write left quite a bumpy road ahead. With a mother who overcame the hurdles on her side and pushed me to do more than feel sorry for myself, and a school specially made for visually impaired people, there was a start but it was slow. I was never the tallest and a little bit chubby, while in boarding school for most of the week and there weren’t that many options for physical activity in a school for kids with visual impairments. These factors made it hard for somebody who ate like they hadn’t eaten all day (even though I did) to stay healthy and deal with fat-shaming because nobody could be shamed for their disabilities. After all, everybody was disabled.

I was always a fan of sports, especially cricket and rugby, but my school did not have them, not even blind cricket. The school did have a grass running track like most schools would but it also had a 25m Olympic-style laned swimming pool. We had the usual annual inter-school athletics meets but I never knew you could do more so it was only when I was about fifteen that I just started joining my fitter friends on the running track when it wasn’t even athletics season anymore.

I enjoyed having something to do in the afternoon, having mini competitions with my friends on the track and the bug got me. Not only did I develop a competitiveness to do better than they or I did, but I saw my body change and become stronger. Now, we know the way you look is the least important thing in life but when you’ve got low self-confidence, seeing those little changes makes you feel better.

Now, we can go on about how I somehow got into Stellenbosch University and eventually got my degree in Sport Science where I learned bout everything the body does to be better. I made friends who taught me how to lift weights and lessons that taught me more about the different sports I loved but knew little about. However, we want to know how sport and exercise helped me reach for more rather than sit around and say that I can’t do that one thing or exclude myself from living a more independent life.

Self-confidence

At the most basic level, sports can boost your self-confidence to heights you can barely imagine. It can be as basic as seeing changes in your body and feeling better about how you look in a mirror. But, with myself, I was seeing changes in my performance. Realizing that putting in hard work that was also fun provided me with confidence when I saw the running times go down and the weight I lifted increase. Not every person needs to be a world-class athlete but whether it’s in the gym or just going for a run and going a bit faster, those small wins made me feel more confident and made me work harder to get better next time.

Personally, looking good made me feel confident, but that was in the beginning.  The confidence I got through exercise made me more comfortable to step outside of the disability box I put myself in and try new things in the outside world like going to university on my own, building friendships out of nowhere, trying different types of sports and even karting, which somebody with my eyesight probably wouldn’t usually attempt.

Discipline

My friends motivating me to start running with them was how it all began but exercise is a great, if not the best, way to build discipline. When you start seeing the small changes in your body and performance, you want to do a little bit better each time. Through the constant work on myself, I learned about what discipline was and how when I kept showing up to the gym or work, I would achieve my goals more consistently.

Showing up and putting the work in every day whether I wanted to or not became a habit so, it doesn’t feel like work anymore and I can just keep moving forward and build on what I did the day or week before. You don’t have to wake up at 4 am every morning to go to the gym or sit at your desk, but having some form of routine will help you build discipline.

I used my confidence and discipline to set new goals like going out further into the world, including running long distances on the road without any assistance. I used it to build a career in industries myself and my parents were told would never be possible.

Goal-setting

For most of us, work is not what we want to do during the day, but if we turn it into a bit of competition with ourselves, we can get through it more easily.

Setting goals in the gym while following a program taught me how to set goals for the workday as well. We can all write our day’s jobs into our diaries but what about setting goals similar to our workouts? Being able to do a specific job in less time isn’t a top priority but setting the goal of having fewer errors for a piece of work will automatically make it more efficient. It can even be as simple as finishing longer tasks before shorter ones later in the day when your focus tends to dwindle.

Set goals at work like you would in the day’s workout or training session, and you might see changes coming.

Making unlikely friends

Whether watching a game with friends, being part of a team, or running a race, I’ve met all kinds of people.  I met people to nerd out with when it came to our favorite sport and got to train, and compete, with all kinds of amateur and professional athletes. I even got to write about training for a World’s Strongest Man finalist and Britain’s Strongest Man when the world was falling apart in 2020/21.

Sport has taught me that disabilities don’t matter because as long as you’re doing something to do better, you’ll always have people around who support you, and provide unlikely opportunities.

Along with a strong family behind me who never let me do less than I was capable of and getting my sweat on a couple of times a week, I learned lessons to carry with me for my entire life to come. It helped me become more confident and disciplined, helped me make friends, and gave me a career that some would have thought impossible from the day I was born.