New year, fit you!

With the new year less than a week old, most resolutions are probably still being kept, with a great many of those resolutions revolving around building a better body. Statistics show that less than half of fitness-based resolutions make it past the first six months, with the main reason being that an effective plan is not followed from the beginning.

If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I don’t like failure, and I don’t like seeing other people fail either – especially any of you guys! So, in addition to new training and nutrition videos to help motivate and inspire you, I’ve also highlighted five ways that you can set yourself up for success this year.



1. Evaluate Yourself.

Take ownership of your resolutions by looking at your life over the past several years and identify any areas as to why this resolution may have failed before. Booking yourself in for a gym assessment, or Doctors appointment, and having your body composition, weight, heart rate, cholesterol and blood pressure checked, will give you a definitive starting point that will allow you modify any areas to help you reach your goal this year.



2. Be specific.

One of the biggest reason why people fail with their resolutions is that their not specific in what it is they want to achieve. ‘Get fit’, or ‘Drop weight’ simply won’t cut it. You need to set a single, specific goal that can be achieved in a realistic time, such as 3 months. For example, ‘I am going to lose 12 pounds in 3 months’, is a realistic and specific goal.



3. Know your plan.

The more you understand your plan, the more effective it will be, and the greater the results will be. I will do my best throughout this year to provide you with accurate and useful information that will assist you in understanding more what it is that you need to do, and how to keep it from becoming boring by showing you ways to keep it challenging, such as new exercises, unique workouts, and tips and techniques to ensure progress.



4. Focus on muscle.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female, the equation for drastically changing your body composition is the same: add muscle and burn fat. To do this you need to be overloading your body in the gym by training the large muscle groups with compound exercises such as squats, deadlifts and bench presses, and go to failure – or close to it – on every set! This will help keep you gaining muscle while losing fat.



5. Performance as a goal.

Focus on improvements in your workouts and how you look and feel rather than what the scale tells you. Perform tests every month such as push-ups for reps, plank for time, one-mile runs, or max pull-ups, to help give you your own set of numbers that you can improve on each month, helping to keep you motivated and dedicated.

Make 2011 your best year ever!