Plan For Success: Using Contracts as The Springboard to Your Health Goals

A great way to make sure you commit to something is to create a contract or pledge with yourself. This is great for people who need a certain level of accountability to follow through with their plans. You can make the contract as simple or as complicated as you like, and it can be useful to place your agreement somewhere visible so that it’s not ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

I know that I have several goals I’d like to achieve in the coming year with relation to my health & fitness. However, targets such as “gain 5kg of lean muscle mass” are more long-term aspirations. They serve as something to shoot for, but if we don’t have a sub-set of goals, our motivation can drop when times get tough.

Using my weight goal for 2013 as an example, sub-goals of mine include:

• Revisit my nutrition plan:

I intend to draw up a range of protocol variations to suit factors such as two-a-day training, single-sessions, rest-days, etc. These will be intended to keep my body guessing and, hopefully, stimulate new growth.

• Rewrite my training protocol:

I will incorporate more periodization into my program, specify ‘rest weeks’ everyX months, and move between sacroplasmic and myofibrillar hypertrophy phases.

• Look at my supplement regime:

Do I really need to be taking this supplement or mixing that powder? I want to cut down to the bare essentials, so as not to load my body with unnecessary junk. Remove ‘pre-made’ products from my supplements and select only the best.

These three ‘sub-goals’ will ideally lead me to achieve the larger one. When it looks like you’re not moving towards your ultimate target, you need to address your ‘process’ and look at whether some of the smaller goals you’ve set yourself are working as well as they should be.

Also, ALWAYS REMEMBER, good goals are S.M.A.R.T …

Happy Planning!