If you want your fitness endeavor to be successful the following virtues must be practiced 1.) Desire 2.)Commitment 3.) Goal orientedness 4.) Intensity 5.) Persistance and Perseverance.
Desire is a force of the will which leads people to seek to change their present reality. It is a powerful thing when a person who has long desired to change their body, finally becomes so fed up, that in their their mind there is no alternative but to begin taking the steps to create change. In short, a person has to want to change, and to truly create radical physical change takes total commitment.
Commitment is a dirty word to many in our culture today, but with respect to creating physical change total commitment is necessary. What is total commitment; it is being willing to do whatever it takes to achieve your goal, no matter what. Re-creating your body necessitates a 24/7 commitment. Your food intake must be strictly regulated every meal and snack, every day. You cannot miss workouts just because you are not feeling one hundred percent that day. You cannot miss workouts because you had a bad day or your boss or your spouse is angry with you. Success necessitates that a person overcomes all adversity and sticks to the workout program and eating plan no matter what, without any excuses.
Goal orientedness is having, at the very least, a mental picture of how you want the outcome of your training to be. I strongly advise each and every client of mine to obtain a picture which represents how they want to look. I require that it be a person of similar physical structure who has optimized their physical condition. Constantly meditating on that image keeps a goal visually present and helps immeasurably in fueling the desire to go on to total success
Intensity, if you want to get results from your training, you must train with sufficient intensity. What does this mean? It means pitty-pat workouts will not do the job. I, as a personal trainer have seen people who are wasting time in the gym with low intensity workouts. They go through workouts which do not create results for months, even years, but results will never come unless they put in the sweat and elbow grease it takes to reshape a body. Proper intensity is training as hard as you are capable during the entire length of the workout. Workouts without deep muscle burn will not create change. In my opinion, if you feel no need to grunt and groan at all in your workouts, you are training without sufficient intensity. Sweating is good thing, it is the body's response to vigorous exercise. No sweat in this trainer's book equals insufficient intensity.
Persistence and perseverance. Do you want to succeed? Dogged determination to create results must be practiced for a successful training program. What is persistence? It is doing what needs to be done to create physical change each and every scheduled training day without exception. Intense weight training sessions done as scheduled without calling off and never missing your cardio sessions, this will create change Perseverance is gutting it out, sticking to the program even when your mind tells you that you are wasting your time. There will be times when you think that you are not changing quickly enough and it is at these times that you will be tempted to throw in the towel and quit. Perseverance causes a person to do the work necessary for a long enough period of time to attain one's goals.
