INTRODUCTION
When starting fitness, when you first start getting healthy and fit, you tend to sort your diet out a bit and start working out or exercising more. However, the more you do it, the longer your journey goes on, the more you will find yourself adjusting other aspects of your life, measuring or supplementing to reach your goals. The issue is that a lot of people can end up focusing on the wrong things. Their fitness priorities are all over the place and they end up wasting time, money and effort on the wrong things. Focusing on the right thing can help your progress so much!
We are going to run through what we think you should be focusing on and where your fitness priorities should lie. Of which you might find of them surprising. Or you might find that this is exactly how you do it anyway. To start with, let us go over what we mean by Fitness Priorities.
WHAT ARE FITNESS PRIORITIES?
I would describe fitness priorities as areas of health and fitness that you need to focus on, the two big ones that most people already know about are Diet and exercises/workout routine. However, there are a few more that tend to get forgotten about. Like sleep/recovery, water and supplementation. However, it is all well and good knowing these but which ones should you focus on? Which ones are more important and which is the most important fitness priorities?
To help you out we have put together a helpful diagram. This should give you a great visual guide on what you need to focus on and what you shouldn’t worry too much about. Some of which might surprise you! As you can see it contains four levels. Each level is an area you can focus on. Below we break down each level and explain why we have put it where it is.
LEVEL 1 - DIET/NUTRITION
Most people will be surprised to see Nutrition at the top, especially above exercise. However, if you have been working out and dieting for a while you will know why we have put it above everything else. A lot of people’s goals are just to lose weight. As we know weight loss is a simple equation. Calories in vs Calories out! This can be done purely based on diet. Bring out calorie input down and you will lose weight. Pair this with good recovery and a workout routine and you will see a noticeable difference.
You can have a good diet but a bad training routine and see results, but a bad diet and a great training routine you won’t. Priorities diet above training and you can get great results with the simplest of workouts. I think the recent Lockdown and everyone working out from home has proved this and made this point even more clear. A great diet and a great workout routine are what you want to aim for.
Another key point is that to have great workouts, Lift heavy weights or run long distances, you need to be fuelled. Where does the fuel come from? Food! You need to eat to fuel your goals! Guessing your food will only lead to disaster. Without the proper fuel and calories, you will find your workouts will suffer. Ask anyone who has done a competition about it. They will say that their workout performance decreases the more they go into a deficit. Along with diet, you also need to be well recovered.
LEVEL 2 - SLEEP/RECOVERY
The long and short of it is that your body would not function properly if at all without quality sleep and recovery. Now, I already know what some of you are saying. “I sleep! Every night!” That might be true, but just think, what is that sleep like? over 7 hours? A good quality? Deep sleep?
So many people under sleep or don’t focus or try to get good quality sleep, which leads them to not recovering properly. Leading to rubbish workouts, going off track on diets and nutrition and even injury. How long and the quality of your sleep affects so many aspects of your life. The main one that most people will notice is your mood! I can’t understand why people don’t set it higher in their fitness priorities! Most people don’t even think about their recovery and sleep.
How to Adjust
The first step to sleep is length. Try to allow yourself to sleep for as long as possible. This might mean you have to go to bed earlier. Aim for a solid 8 hours every night. You will notice the difference almost immediately!
The next step is quality. Now, this is a huge subject and there are a whole host of things you can do, but the one I found helps the most is setting a cutoff point for caffeine (All stimulants in general). My cutoff point is 1 pm (3 pm at a push if I have a busy day). We have created a whole post on caffeine (Click here to give it a read) which goes into more detail about the half-life of caffeine. Cutting off caffeine earlier will allow you to get a night of better sleep, be more relaxed and not so “amped up”. This might mean switching to a non-stim pre-workout (A move I have greatly welcomed).
Another area I could touch on is rest days! Allow yourself a few days off in the week to rest. So many people try to work out 5 or 6 sometimes even 7 days a week. There are no prizes for how often you can work out! Working out more often is pointless if your body can’t recover from the previous session! Allowing your body to relax, rest and recover will improve your progress and also you will find you will have better sessions overall.
LEVEL 3 - EXERCISE/WORKOUT ROUTINE
Training! This is the one that everyone seems to priorities first, even I am guilty of it. When you first start gym you try to go as many times as possible, hit it is as hard as possible every session. However, they don’t understand recovery or nutrition so are setting themselves up for failure.
Now the key points when setting up your sessions is to have a plan! Go in knowing what you want to do, all the Sets and Reps you need to do. you want to do this for the session but also for the week and even a month. This way you can track your progress and then see what needs to be changed or adjusted. The first thing people notice is that they don’t recover as quickly as they thought they did. So need more time to rest (which takes us back to Sleep and Recovery).
My biggest take away from my years of lifting is that if you don’t like doing a certain exercise, don’t do it! So many people do exercises they don’t enjoy because they feel like they need to. However, if you don’t enjoy the exercise swap it out for something you do like. An example is I am not a fan of Flat Barbell Bench Press. it can hurt my wrists and shoulders and I feel as though the bar is restricting me from getting into a comfortable pressing position. So I don’t do it anymore. This shocks a lot of people as it is seen as one of the “Big 3”. Instead, I have swapped it out for Incline Dumbbell Press. Move freedom in the wrists and also my shoulder doesn’t play up as much (I do flat dumbbell press sometimes as well).
LEVEL 4 - SUPPLEMENTATION
Lastly, it is supplementation. as we have said in previous articles, Supplements are exactly that. They are supplementing. You should only take them if you need to. We get asked “Should I be using a protein powder?” or “Which Protein is best for me?” We always respond in the same way. You only need to use a protein powder (or any supplements) if you can’t hit your daily goal with whole food. If you find that you can hit your daily calories and protein without any issue only eating whole food. Then you have no reason to supplement anything else. The same goes for Vitamins and Minerals. If you are eating enough Fruit and Vegetables then you won’t need to waste your money and purchase tablets.
Stop thinking that this one supplement is going to help you reach your goal. If you haven’t got the other levels sorted then forget about supplementation. Get your diet, sleep and training sorted then you can look at supplements. You might find that you will struggle to hit your protein goal without protein powder, and that is fine, you can then supplement in a protein powder. However, you will only know this once you have figured out your diet and calculated everything out (use our free Calorie & Macro calculator to find out).
CONCLUSION
There you go, four things that are just, if not more important than your numbers at the gym. As we have mentioned above, don’t let the gym become everything. Make sure to have a life outside the gym, outside fitness. Focus on you, focus on your health and your happiness more than your numbers. 100kg Bench won’t help you live longer and be happier!
Have you got anything you want to say about fitness? How about writing a guest article or us? We would love to hear and read some article by you all! If this feels like something you could do, send us a message over on our Contact page. Or Send us a message on our Instagram page. Look forwards to hearing from you all.
Written by Kieran Blacker
Kieran is the CEO and Founder of Sets & Reps. He decided to make an application that helped people get a gym workout when not at the gym. He designed, Coded and built the application himself.
One thought on “Fitness Priorities – Make sure you are focusing on the right areas!”
Comments are closed.