By: Anthony Campo
During my training in the last 10 years I have learned so much. I have made tremendous leaps in my programming, technique, and form that has led to phenomenal gains in strength, mobility and injury rehab/prevention. Though I attribute a lot of my progress to my advances in knowledge in these areas, if I had to pick the most important reason for my success, it would be CONSISTENCY. In the past 10 years I have always stuck to my plan, I cannot remember a solitary instance when I have had to just plain miss a session. I know circumstances happen in everyone’s life that can make training very difficult, but I have always been able to problem solve in one way or another to get in the training I need to continue moving forward. Problem solving is a very important concept and skill, here are some simple ways that have helped me maintain my consistency:
1 – Focus on your main goals. If you have limited time cut down excess parts of your program and still knock out the main stuff. Sometimes 5-10 min of training can still keep you moving in the right direction.
2 – Schedule time off from training that is part of your program. Not only is planning rest and recovery a pivotal component of making progress, it will also give you slots of times to make appointments, and to take care of issues that occur outside of training.
3- Group together periods of training by weeks or months. Develop a plan for a period of weeks or months and view it as a cycle. There is a total amount of work that needs to be completed in this period or cycle, and if you miss one day, just make sure you make up the work amongst the other days.
Hopefully these tips will help you to stay consistent, and always taking steps forward instead of backwards.