Having clearly defined goals and objectives is just the first step in adding purpose and direction to your life, increasing your self-esteem, and improving your health.

While you’re thinking about what you’ve done and what you haven’t done, take a few minutes to rekindle the fire with new health and fitness goals. Consult with a fitness expert of fitness guru to help you determine your goals. Make them big; make yourself reach for them. These goals serve as a tremendous motivator to exercise regularly, eat right, and live life to the fullest.

Be Creative

A challenging goal causes you to step out of your comfort zone to accomplish it. Make your goal REALLY challenging. Something that you really want, and you’re willing to do what it takes to get there. It also reflects who you are, your values.

Be More Consistent

As simple as getting to the gym, going to your workout area at home, or wherever you exercise. Are you working out 2, maybe 3 times a week? Aim for 5-6 days a week. LIFE is exercise!

Improve Your Strength

You can realistically increase your strength by about 5% per month, even if you’re an advanced trainer. That’s about a 5 lb. increase in the amount of weight you can lift. Set a goal for a particular exercise, like the bench press, and track your progress with a log to see how far you’ve come.

Improve Your Muscular Endurance

Your reps will increase by 2-3 over a month, if you use the same weight for the entire month. Here’s a thought: if you can’t do very many chin ups, set a goal for how many you can do at the end of 4 weeks. Improving muscle endurance is great for carving out definition.

Increase Your Distance
Doesn’t matter if it’s walking, jogging, Stairmaster, biking, indoor, outdoor etc. How long does it take you to walk/run/etc. a mile? 15 minutes? See how much further you can cover in those same 15 minutes.

Learn A New Exercise Or Routine

Add variety to your workouts by adding or replacing exercises with new ones. Try in-line skating. Elliptical training. Jump-roping. An exercise class like kickboxing or Tai-chi. Just try something different. Then be a master at it.

Enter A Contest

Enter fitness contests including run/walks, cycling events, fitness and physique competitions, marathons, powerlifting and weightlifting events, etc. If you’ve never participated at a competition before, find a low-key competitive opportunity, train for it, and for cripes sakes, have FUN.

Enter DIFFERENT Contests

If you’ve been doing 5K runs for a long time, try running a marathon. Or maybe you want a break from it, so you concentrate on developing more muscle to enter into a fitness or physique competition.

Strengthen Your Community – Make New Friends

This comes almost naturally when you’re involved with friendly competition. Be conscious to reach out and meet new friends at the gym and competitive events. The camaraderie with your fellow "competitors" inspires and motivates you to achieve more.

Hire A Coach

The advice of a knowledgeable, competent, personable coach can make your road to success a more enjoyable journey. A good coach advises and empowers you on how to set goals, and craft a plan to achieve them faster.

Keep A Training Log

Record how you feel, physically and mentally, in addition to your training notes (weight, reps, rest periods, sets, etc.). You’ll understand your training better. Are you especially sluggish in mid-afternoon? Then you know you need to schedule your workouts when your energy levels are higher.

Enjoy The Journey

Nothing is more important in reaching your goal than to enjoy the passion of the pursuit. Celebrate the smaller victories along the way, and learn from life’s lessons. Share your success with your coach, friends, and family. You deserve a pat on the back! Keep it up!

So you mosey into the gym, dressed for success, but you’re just not feeling it.  We all have those days.  Our bodies are rested and ready, but the mind just can’t get there.  What to do?  Here are the top 3 motivational techniques to get the most out of a workout.

Find a partner.  There is a reason that having a training partner helps you get big, other than the obvious spotting duties.  Each feeds off the other in a variety of ways.  If you have the resources to have a paid trainer, they serve a similar function.  Bottom line on days you mentally wander, having someone to scream at you is a very good motivator.  Though partners don’t have to scream to motivate. If you train alone, on down days, slide up to someone you know, or don’t know, and work in with them on some sets.  Just having someone standing by you will provide some incentive to work harder than you might have otherwise.  This brings me to the second motivator.

Compete.  This is my favorite.  You don’t have to ACTUALLY compete with someone to do this.  What I do is pick out a couple people who are busting it big, and from a distance I try to “match up”.  They don’t know I’m doing it, or maybe they do.  Doesn’t matter.  But I use their energy to kick start myself.  A variation on this is sometimes I focus on some schlub who thinks they have it happening, and I use my ego to say to myself “no, THIS is how you are SUPPOSSED to do it”.  Speaking of ego.

Ego.  The evil twin of competing.  Part of what allows the newb to do what they are is to have the ego working.  The “watch me” mentality.  I have no idea, when I’m focused, on what’s happening in the gym around me.  To get myself to that point I envision EVERYONE in the gym is looking at me.  Got to make a scene now.  Can’t give this session a walk through.

The beauty of these little mind games occurs post workout.  Often going in unfocused and lacking motivation, after employing one of these little tricks on myself, I walk out having had a better workout than if I were focused from the start.  Such is the power of the mind.  Use it to your advantage.