How to Get and Stay Motivated
Participating in weekly check-ins is one of the many ways in which a coach can help you to successfully achieve your personal fitness goal. A coach will schedule weekly check-ins to help you accurately identify, track, and maintain progress towards your specific goals. There are a wide range of topics that a coach can discuss with you during your weekly sessions together. Regardless of the topic, a coach is trained and prepared to structure weekly check-in conversations that will advance you in moving forward toward your ultimate fitness goal.
Realistic Action Plans for SuPeRSMART Goals
When it comes to goal setting, a frequent mistake people make when developing goals is that they are too vague and unachievable. As a result, an unrealistic action plan is implemented that unfortunately leads to failure. Personal Trainers not only help you to build a SuPeRSMART, but they also help you to stay focused on your weekly action plan and suggest adjustments as needed. For example, if you have an abnormally busy week at work, a certified Personal Trainer will work with you to develop a practical game plan that will enable you to stay on track. By having a Personal Trainer check-in with you on a weekly basis, you are more likely to succeed in following through in your action plans that are built specifically for you.
Two elements a Personal Trainer must consider when designing an effective action plan for you is that it aligns with your SuPeRSMART goal and includes activities that you actually enjoy. A Personal Trainer will help you to identify which physically activities to include in your action plan that will not make you miserable or unmotivated. Throughout the coaching process, you will have the opportunity to share your honest feedback during weekly check-ins with a Personal Trainer to ensure you are consistently progressing forward.
Accountability: How to Get and Stay Motivated
Staying disciplined and achieving long-term goals is easier said than done. It feels great writing out your personal goals, but unless you have the proper tools and knowledge, it is only a matter of time before you start to feel impatient, unmotivated, and defeated.
“Maybe I don’t need to go to the gym four times a week,” you tell yourself, “maybe two is enough.” This kind of thinking is “rationalization.” While there is nothing wrong with minor pivots in your action plan, reviving your motivation and confidence level is extremely difficult. Most people are unsuccessful in achieving their goals not because the goals are impossible, but because they lack the appropriate education, tools, and support that is needed in order to reach their specific goals.
Enter accountability by hiring a certified Personal Trainer. If you are committed toward achieving your goals you must, must have a system of checks in place to keep yourself accountable. A Personal Trainer will not only help you build an action plan that is tailored specifically to you and your goals but can also hold you accountable each step of the way.
Build a Positive and Supportive Community
It is essential to surround yourself with supportive people in both your work and personal life. Although a Personal Trainer is someone who will consistently guide you throughout your fitness journey, it is imperative for you to establish a strong social support system outside of your coaching relationship. During weekly check-ins, a Personal Trainer can provide recommendations on ways you can build and maintain a supportive network long-term.
Negative people are extremely toxic to be around due to the fact that they will do and say anything to try and bring you down to their level of unhappiness. With that being said, there are times where it is not so easy to break free from negative people who can be identified as your family member, partner, co-worker, supervisor, or close friend. Collaborating with a Personal Trainer makes the process easier in creating a positive social support circle by discussing and understanding your current situation. If you are trying to make healthy long-term lifestyle changes, you need to surround yourself with others who believe in you and support what you are trying to accomplish.
One of the nice things is you can do these weekly check-ins from anywhere. With online health and wellness services from places like Measure Backwards your own personal trainer will check-in on your progress, give advice and help you keep motivated to keep moving forward. These weekly conversations can happen over Facetime or the phone, whatever you prefer. Another great thing about these weekly check-ins you that you can discuss changes to your workout and plan out the upcoming week. Say, for example, your shoulder has been feeling a bit tender—well, that is something you can discuss with your trainer, you can leave it to her to come up with some solid substitutes that will keep you on-course without risking injury.
Remote personal trainers also offer a second pair of eyes when it comes to reviewing your progress pictures. Perhaps they will see something that you are missing. Or maybe you just need a little validation to ensure that they are seeing the progress that you are seeing. Either way, the fitness experts at Measure Backwards got your back!
Finally, all of the remote trainers at Measure Backwards are experts at goal setting. There are right ways and wrong ways to set goals, and your personal trainer will ensure you are setting them the right way.
Document, Document, Document
People who are already in decent shape, but who want to take it to the next level and get into really good shape, sometimes are not sure how to alter their current regimen and get discouraged because of their slow, often almost imperceptible progress. In these cases, hiring a Personal Trainer is highly beneficial to help develop a strategic workout plan while intently tracking your progress. You easily record information online, so you have quick and easy access to it wherever you go.
Despite popular belief, the number on the scale is not the best nor the only way to measure your progress. For example, let’s say your best friend lost 15 pounds in 1 month by following a workout program that she found online, and you decide to try it since you also want to lose 15 pounds. You completed the program for 1 month and only lost 3 pounds, how would you feel about these results? If you are like most people, then you likely would feel frustrated, mad, upset, and discouraged. However, the scale is not the end all be all when it comes to tracking progress. Working with a Personal Trainer will help you place value in other tools that can be utilized towards making progress. A Personal Trainer will ask you to document your journey through several methods including: progress pictures, checking your body weight, tape measurements, workout progress, how your clothes are fitting, and how you are actually feeling. Feeling validated for all of your hard work, time, and dedication is something we can all relate to and embrace.
Continuous Learning
Instead of giving you an overwhelming amount of information and resources during your very first coaching session, a Personal Trainer will be strategic in how much and what kind of knowledge is share with you during your weekly check-ins. Making a commitment to a healthy lifestyle change is already a challenging process, but working with a Personal Trainer who is intentional in identifying which resources will be most beneficial for you according to your goals will create a constructive learning experience. This method of coaching adds tremendous value in your weekly check-ins and helps build a trusting relationship with your Personal Trainer.
A certified Personal Trainer embraces diversity and will take the time to understand and adapt to your preferred style of learning. Whether you prefer visual, aural, verbal, physical, logical, social, or solitary, a Personal Trainer can alter their style of coaching to ensure you are being setup for success in achieving your goals. Structuring weekly check-ins that are tailored specifically to you will positively impact how much you are able to learn and absorb throughout the coaching process.
With countless amounts of misleading and false information being tossed out into the world today, having weekly check-ins is highly advantageous for you to ask your Personal Trainer any questions you may have. Rather than believing a co-worker (who is not a certified Personal Trainer) who tells you that you should do kickbacks with a booty band on the stair climber to build your glutes instead of doing deadlifts, you can instead ask your Personal Trainer during your next weekly check-in for more scientific based explanation.
Tips for Success
You may think that just because a workout plan worked for someone you know then that means it will also work for you too. Unfortunately, when it comes to health and nutrition, there is no such thing as a one size fits all. For this reason, working with a Personal Trainer to create a personalized action plan is absolutely necessary to reach your goals. However, during the coaching process, you are likely going to encounter unforeseeable struggles. When this occurs, you can use weekly check-ins to have honest conversations with your Personal Trainer to help you with your current struggles and identify possible solutions that you feel would work best.
Let’s say that you are making excellent progress in your action plan and are ready to adjust your plan to make it a little more challenging. By hiring a Personal Trainer, you eliminate the hassle of having to guess the what, when, and how to make relevant changes that align with your unique goals. Personal Trainers can provide recommendations during your weekly sessions that provide you a deeper understanding of your available options and which would be appropriate to immediately incorporate into your action plan. To achieve long-term sustainable change, it is worth the investment to work with a certified professional that is trained to develop and modify individualized plans.
Conclusion
Weekly check-ins with a Personal Trainer are not defined as meetings where a coach talks at you the entire time and tells you what you need to do. Instead, they are open discussions about various topics that directly relate to you and encourage forward progress towards accomplishing fitness goals.