Fail to Plan? Then Plan to Fail

Have you ever set off on a journey somewhere that you’ve not visited before, and not set your satnav or looked at a map? Probably not, right? You would plan where you're going with a map or satnav. You’d rarely set off on a journey, with hundreds of branching roads, without a plan for your journey.

Yet, this so often happens with our nutrition. People say, ‘I’m going to eat better’ – and that’s as far as the plan goes. They don’t plan how they are going to eat or what the plan will be for each day. For those of you who have read my first post HERE, you’ll know that I’m in my first week of a sixteen-week body transformation. I’m going to go from soft and flabby to strong and ripped in a little under four months. And I won’t be able to do that if I don’t have a plan.

Over the next sixteen weeks I’m going to let you guys know every trick I use to achieve this goal - tricks that I’ve learned from over ten years as a trainer. For more information on me and my Personal Training career you can check out my #introduceyourself blog post HERE.

Focus, plan and achieve your goals

The Grand Plan

The first stage of planning should give you an overall idea of what you’re trying to achieve – what you’re aiming for. Most people have a general idea, but it’s usually not specific enough. Goals like, ‘lose weight’ and ‘get healthier’ are admirable but not very helpful.

Imagine you’re driving to your friend’s new house – they tell you that they live in London… and that’s all they tell you. Will you get where you need to go? Of course not. You need far more detailed information to help you get there. If you know their street, house number and post code – then you’d get there. The same is true of body transformation.

I want to lose fifteen kilos by July or I want to fit into my old size twelve shorts for summer are much clearer goals than just ‘lose weight’. Make your plan clear, or you’ll clearly be planning to fail!

My clear and specific goal is to be 10% body fat (currently 22%) by the 21st of April while maintaining current levels of muscle mass.

The General Plan

Knowing where you’re going is great, but you also need to know which roads you’re going follow to get there. You need to know the direction; which towns you’ll drive past and which major roads you might go on.

Here is are my guiding rules. These are the five general principles of my transformation (right now):

1. Avoid all carbohydrates for the first two weeks.
2. Eat at least three meals per day that contain meat/fish and vegetables.
3. Drink a minimum of two litres of water per day.
4. Manipulate carb intake when results stagnate.
5. Introduce calorie tracking if results slow.

These points give me the general overview of how I’ll get to the goal I outlined above.

Protein and veg meal all prepped for dinner

The Specific Plan

Finally, you need to plan out the specifics for getting to your goal. Day to day, what are you going to do differently than before?

These specifics are going to change often as your body adjusts to the plan. At the moment I’m focusing on three big specifics.

1. Pre-cook all breakfast and lunches on Sunday morning and Wednesday night.
2. Plan every single dinner and buy all ingredients on Sunday.
3. Remove all junk food from my daily surroundings eg. Kitchen cupboards

Five days worth of slow cooked smoked gammon

The key to success with diet and training, is to plan what you’re going to do every single day. Week in and week out. Make sure you’ve got the right foods available to you, and that you know when you’ll prepare, cook and eat them. If anyone has any tips on things that have helped them diet more successfully, please help me out and let me know!

Yours in health,
Coach Ben #coachben