You want to get stronger or lose weight. You’ve heard you should confuse the body or change your workouts every time. You’ve heard about cabbage soup diets and detoxes and who knows what else is coming out from the gurus.
Here’s a tip that helps for long term success: boring is good.
Going into the gym and doing squats and presses isn’t as novel as brand new workouts each time, but it delivers results, and more importantly, satisfaction. You’ll be able to see and track progress over the course of weeks and months, you’ll develop mastery and competence and a useful skill set. You’ll learn what to do and why to do, and in the process get much stronger than the person changing it up each week.
The same holds true for losing weight. If you never plan out your meals, if you eat out often and have no idea what’s going in your body, it’s hard to see where you might be stagnant. Pick a day- Sunday works well- and plan and prepare meals for the week. Eat roughly the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You don’t need to eat the same thing each day, but if each week you have a routine it will become easier to lose weight. You’ll be in control of the food going into your body. It might be a little boring, but boring works.
The overarching theme here is to simply have a plan. If you try and wing it every time you walk into a gym or don’t buy groceries for the week, it makes it much harder to achieve your goals. Your workouts will meander with little direction, and your instincts will tell you to order the pizza since you just got off work and there’s no food and damnit you deserve a little treat. Have a plan for life. Embrace the structure of a routine. It’s okay to be boring.
