Everyone should have fitness goals – goals that will help make you feel, look, and perform better. Maintaining good health will reduce the risk of you becoming overweight, developing chronic illness and even serious illnesses like diabetes or heart disease. But, how to you get from where you are now to the peak of your personal potential? Here are 6 goals you can easily reach this year.
Squatting Your Bodyweight
The Starting Strength program is the single best resource for learning how to do basic barbell lifts. No, you don’t want to get big and bulky, but you do want strength. No one gets to age 80 and says, “I wish I were weaker and more frail.” Everyone wants to be stronger as they age. Everyone.
And, Starting Strength helps you get there. The basic lift – the squat – helps you build strength in your hips and gluteal muscles. It’s called “hip drive” and it’s the source of all of your power in just about any activity that requires you to be on your feet. Developing strength here pays dividends.
An easy goal is to work your way up to squatting your own bodyweight. It’s surprisingly easy if you follow a simple linear progression model and should take you a couple of months (or less) to accomplish.
Deadlifting Your Bodyweight
Deadlifting is another lift that’s often neglected, due to an undeserved stereotype as a dangerous lift. The reality is that a properly performed deadlift is the single greatest exercise for back strength. And, most people could use more back strength – especially with the prevalence of back injuries and pain.
Deadlifting your own bodyweight will teach you what it means to be tough, but it will also help teach you how to save your back when you bend over to pick up a piece of paper or an 80lb box.
Losing 10 Pounds
Losing weight isn’t easy. Millions of people struggle with it, but it’s always worth the effort. That’s why most people never really give up. But, with obesity becoming more and more common, there’s another disease that you need to watch for that comes on the back of excessive weight gain – diabetes.
Even health nuts use glucose meters to test their blood sugar. But, if you’re already pre-diabetic, or diabetic, you’ll need something like the OneTouch Ping Insulin Pumps to control your blood sugar while you eat, during exercise, and at night. For some, this is the only way weight loss can occur
As long as your blood sugar is under control, and you’re not doing anything crazy with your diet, your diet goal should be to reduce total calorie intake by about 300 to 500 kcals. This will kickstart weight loss.
Running a 10 Minute Mile
In addition to decreasing calorie intake, you must increase energy expenditure or else your body will adjust your metabolism accordingly. Collectively, this is called an “energy deficit” and it’s the only way known to lose weight. Running a 10 minute mile is a great way to create an energy deficit. It’s easy, doesn’t require special equipment, and almost anyone can get out there and build up their lung capacity to a full-on run. Start slow, and progress to a 10 minute mile over the course of 6 to 8 weeks, running two to three times per week.
Improving Mobility
Kelley Starrett’s Mobility WOD series is one of the best resources on the Internet for improving your personal mobility and range of motion – something that’s essential for any sport, activity, and just for feeling your best. Everyone should be able to do some mobility work on themselves, fixing common aches and pains, improving strength, and flexibility, and becoming, as Starrett says, a “supple leopard.”
May Dougherty is a part-time Pilates instructor and grandmother of two. When she gets some time, she likes to help others by sharing what she has learned. You can find her enlightening and interesting articles mainly on family, lifestyle, health and fitness websites.
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