Conventional fitness goals not enough to get your motivated? You don’t want to achieve your first pull-up, lose 10lbs in 8 weeks or walk the Great Wall of China and it feels hard to find something with a strong enough pull to help keep you consistent.
I get it. A lot of my motivation doesn’t come from goal setting either. It instead comes from recognising what I don’t want my life to be like and what the repercussions for me of not doing something really would be.
I work on this a lot with my PT clients because I know how much of a game changer it has been for me. There might not be something specific that my clients want to work toward at the beginning especially if it’s lifting related as they don’t know where they are at yet. That said, there does always tend to be something they want to work away from.
I’ll use myself as an example so I don’t get arrested by the privacy police.
I’ve got scoliosis. It’s a lateral curvature of the spine (I have 2 in fact) and as curves go it’s pretty big. In fact it’s borderline for surgical intervention, which I have thus far politely declined. Spinal health is one of the things that can deteriorate with age and I am conscious that it would be a fairly decent assumption that this is a risk for me. I do not want to be an old lady that has to walk hunched over. It’s happen to me before and seeing someone in that position makes me feel like my heart is about to explode, because I am scared it could be me again. So I’ll do anything and everything I can to avoid that happening. That feeling of NOT wanting something to happen is WAY more motivating than any physical goal I could ever have in terms of aesthetics or performance.
Often, a lot of the things that we really want from life involve us being able to stay the way we are. To continue to be able to move well and without pain, to continue to be able to get out of the chair and off the floor. But our bodies don’t just ‘continue’. They need more and more maintenance as we age to be able to do the same stuff. Without our own intervention, our muscle mass deteriorates and we have to put in more effort just to be able to do what we could do a few years ago. Think about our mobility… how much more effort it feels to use a more extreme range of motion like getting on and off a kids chair or climbing over a stile on a walk.
With muscle mass deteriorating from some time in our 30s, you don’t need to be a bodybuilder to be strong and healthy, it’s all about your average person retaining enough muscle to support their joints and get up and down from the floor without help when they’re older.
Your goals could be something as simple as wanting to be an active granny, or wanting to be able to get stuff off the bottom shelf at Tesco without feeling like you’ve lost a knee cap. It could be being fit enough to go for a family walk to a special place or being strong enough to carry your own luggage on and off a train to visit someone. Life isn’t just about PBs and flexy selfies (although they are cool if you have them!). It’s about being able to enjoy ourselves and live as full a life as possible, for as long as possible.
Lots of fitness love,
Anna
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For more information on classes, personal Training or Flex by AMF, visit my website www.annamartinfitness.co.uk
For group ex choreography visit www.amf.world
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