Hey hey! I hope you had a lovely weekend.

After a Friday jam-packed with work, clients, and client-consults, I met my friend and training partner, Tonja for a gorgeous run.  We’d actually planned on doing a sort of balls-to-the-wall metabolic circuit complete with swings, sled pushes, and wall balls, but it was sunny and warm, so we took full advantage.

The rest of the weekend was packed with quite a bit of work – and some fun mixed in, too 🙂  Saturday morning, I got in a killer deadlift session at the gym, before training one of my in-person clients. We had plans that day with our friends, Bob & Megan, but they got rescheduled, and so the rest of the morning and afternoon I worked on client programs, responded to emails, and caught up on what I couldn’t get done during the week. Around 3:00, we met a friend at our favorite local brewery, Tasty Weasel/Oskar Blues for a beer.

Then we headed out to their accompanying restaurant for nachos and tacos. It was delightful.

On Sunday, Shane and I finally bought our Christmas tree 😀

It’s the biggest one we’ve ever bought, and had some trouble getting it in the stand, but nothing a little saw action couldn’t fix – LOL! Now to decorate LOL. The thing is, Shane is just as busy as I am, if not more, which is why we are STILL working on furnishing our house (we also might be a little picky ;))

But anyway – on to the topic of today’s post! I had mentioned earlier that I very rarely stray from my workouts – or my nutrition (but that also accounts for the 20% “room” I give myself on a daily basis,) and I credit this to a few reasons, but one of them is that I’ve streamlined them into automatic habits.

Streamline Your Workouts & Nutrition for Success

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Streamlining the way I eat and my workout routine makes all the difference in the world for me. Every day, instead of relying on my willpower and deciding what to eat or what workout to do, I already know what I’ll be doing, because I made that decision and am not debating it in my mind any longer.

Simplifying your workouts and nutrition not only reduces the amount of mental energy and stress you’ll spend on trying to decide and convince yourself, but at the same time, it also sharpens your willpower, strengthens your get-it-doneness, and sky-rockets your self-efficacy.

Streamlining also allows you to set a goal and focus of your workouts – and my nutrition. For example, I’m currently building my strength in my current workouts, and decreasing conditioning, as I mentioned in Friday’s post. For nutrition, I’m increasing my overall intake and my healthy fats a bit (the increased intake is correlated with my workouts, but the increased healthy fats is for a goal unrelated to training.) By knowing that my workouts are building strength, I’ll be able to focus on seeing improvements in certain exercises.

How to Streamline Your Workouts & Nutrition for Success

1. Decide what you want to accomplish through your workouts and nutrition. 

AKA – set your goals. Think WHY you are starting a workout program and WHY are you changing your eating habits?

2. Make up to 2-3 changes to both your workouts/workout routine and your nutrition.

If you’re starting from scratch – meaning you’re currently not working out at all, I wouldn’t go to a 5-6 workout/week program. That’s likely to set yourself up for poor self-efficacy should one or two workouts consistently fall behind. Or, once the excitement period ends, you stop altogether.

^excitement.

Same goes for nutrition. If you’re currently not making any effort to eat in a way that supports your goals, I wouldn’t recommend doing a complete overhaul to your diet. And actually, I very VERY rarely make a recommendations to “give up” anything – unless you need to do so for a medical reason.

3. Schedule it.

Make it happen! Decide what workout you’ll do, how long it will be, when it will fall in your schedule (after work? after waking up?) Make the decision to NOT go back and forth on the details. Decide on the details now so it’s no longer up for debate.

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Same goes for nutrition. What will you eat for breakfast? Will you make it the morning of or the night before? Will you switch it up or rely on one-two consistent meals? Will you meal prep? What day(s) and what will you do? Make those decisions now.

4. Do it once. Then do it once again.

Once you’ve made all the decisions, got the details in order, and scheduled it, then simply do it! Commit to it on the first day, then again on the second day, and then the third, and so on and so forth.

The key to streamlining your workouts and schedule

is this:

a) don’t make too many changes all at once. A COMPLETE overhaul requiring you to do MUCH more than you previously were is likely to lead to drop out, which only plummets confidence and decreases self-efficacy.

and

b) make sure you’re confident that you can make these habits stick on a regular basis. Chances are you’ll veer from your streamlined routine every once in a while -and that’s totally fine! I never expect a 100% compliance rate from anyone – including myself.

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When do you typically workout?

How do you streamline your workouts and meals?