5 Health & Fitness Goals during Lockdown
We’re three weeks into lockdown and I’m finally starting to recoup into some form of routine. My workouts are more structured, I’m not eating crap all the time, I’m spending time learning and writing. What has changed for me? I decided to set some specific goals for myself and go after it. Over the years I’ve found that I’m more motivated, more consistent and have more joy in my training once I’ve set a specific goal!
But what is there to do? Gyms are closed, you can’t lift heavy weights as you’d normally like. Hell they even closed of the park workout places! How can I possibly gain any muscle? Well there’s plenty of other things you can focus on. Below I’ve listed 5 areas to work on during lockdown, nailing these will definitely kickstart your progress once the gyms reopen!
- Aerobic conditioning
- Stress Management
- Learn new movement
- Eating habits
- Structural balance
- Aerobic conditioning
This is probably the easiest area to improve as you don’t need any equipment. Worried about your gains? No need! First of all improving your aerobic conditioning will massively improve your ability to recover / grow muscle once you get back to lifting. You don’t need to do long boring steady-state cardio to improve your aerobic conditioning, higher rep ranges lifting or circuits will work just fine.
Goals:
- Run 10,15,20k
- 10.000 kettlebell swing challenge
- Decrease Morning heart rate
- Stress management
What is possibly better for your health then working on stress management and building stress resilience. Practice breathing, meditation, improve sleep and food quality. I’ve written a full article on the importance of this here.
We’re currently doing a DEMO on our 30 DAY STRESS RESET PROGRAM, where we teach you everything you need about managing physical stress and building stress resilience. Message me for more info!
Learn a new movement
Since you can’t do your regular deadlifts, why not put your effort in some new party tricks. Learning a new skill or movement is challenging and fun at the same time, furthermore it improves brain plasticity and can help prevent aging. One of our personal favorites are, planche push up, single-leg squat, human flag.
Eating habits
This is a perfect time to work on your eating habits, instead of opening the fridge every 5 minutes, try some of the following: eat protein 4 times a day, eat 5 servings of fruits and veggies, have a high protein, high fat breakfast.
To stop constant snacking I suggest you use a technique called “episodic future thinking”, which is a complex-sounding term for a technique that’s actually quite simple: Before making a decision, like eating a cookie, first imagine a positive event in the future. Like you looking in great shape in a bikini on an upcoming holiday. Place yourself in the scene and imagine yourself enjoying it. The more vivid the imagery, the better. The process helps you outweigh your long term health and physique goals vs the short term satisfaction of eating a cookie.
Structural balance work
Every year I spend a couple of months doing structural balance work, this enables me to put my body in a better position to lift heavy the rest of the year. Problems we often see are, internally rotated shoulders, poor thoracic mobility and hip imbalances. If you have some specific pain or niggles don’t hesitate to contact us, we’ll probably be able to sort you out!