All of your accomplished goals will be a result of long term sustainability and adherence. Opposed to setting a goal weight or establishing the perfect poundage to bench press, most should be adding structure to benefit their health or fitness intent. Everyone has room to improve at any and everything they do. Assuming you’ve reached your peak is leaving untapped potential.
A workout program is irrelevant if you do not dedicate consistent time to implement it. Just as most work 9 to 5, you should probably carve out a training window on specific days and times that establish a routine. The same can be said for your diet and meal preparations. If you leave these tasks to whenever you get around to them, they’ll likely be skipped more often than you would like.
I’ve been strength training for almost two decades. I’m immensely smarter today than I was when I began. Some of this has been through study and some has been through trial and error by simply making my life and routine more efficient, more structured. I can provide clients with advice and helpful brainstorming but ultimately each individual will have to be the guinea pig and identify the routine that keeps them locked in the best. What has historically worked to perfection for me may be overwhelming or painstakingly boring for you. It also may be exactly what you need. To this day, I still look for ways to tweak every diet I do, every strength training cycle I do.
Towards the beginning of 2020 I switched my weekday workouts to weeknight workouts. I have a odd sleep schedule and would notice lethargy and procrastination on Tuesday and Thursday when I train during the day. In order to provide a little more rest for a more intense workout I shifted my training time to the evenings following a few hours of sleep. With this transition, I was also required to shift how I prep my meals a bit so I’m not staying up to all hours of the night playing catch up. I have noticed a boost in my performance, recoverability, and intensity while exercising but it does leave me rushed and crammed for time late at night getting ready for bed and the early 415am wakeup call I have. There is a tradeoff here but I can and will explore ways to be more efficient with my post workout meal late at night, there is always room to improve every aspect. Over the next few months that is what I’ll be working to iron out before I do another weight loss cycle. It’s a process, and until I live it a little day to day I won’t know how it’ll turn out. I make adjustments, commit to them, and assess the result. This cannot be done without consistency.
As I’ve developed a respectable amount of strength, I’ve discovered it’ll take my knees a little longer to recover from a intense squat day. First few years of my training I could probably squat every day or at least every other day. Now that I’m lifting a few hundred pounds more on a regular basis, it’s usually 3 full days before my legs and knees feel fully fresh again. This again, is a evolutionary process in my training. I’ve designed my own training to account for this extra recovery time so I can try as intense as ever without running into chronic fatigue or constant joint irritability. This is something each individual will have to assess within themselves and it’ll likely be a ever changing process. Your exercise selection, duration, load, volume, etc will dictate how well you can recover. Typically as we get older in our training years we get stronger and our capacity for greater volumes improves. The tradeoff here is normally going to require more of a recovery window to avoid too much accumulated fatigue.
The main point of this post is that success here is a long term plan. If you want to lose 30lbs in a month you’re likely going to fail in the short and long term. If you expect a trainer will teach you 20 years of knowledge in 120 minutes of time per month then you have unreasonable expectations. It’s a long process. Grade school takes 8 hours a day for 12 years of your life to get some basic common knowledge, learning in general is a very slow evolving process. If you have a sound strategy and create sustainable structure that encourages slow steady progressions along the board then you’re probably going to do well.
