Have you ever set a goal, got ¾ of the
way to achieving that goal (in a relatively short amount of time),
and then plateau never hitting the goal? This is a pretty common
occurrence in every aspect of life. You want to drop 30 lbs to get
in the normal BMI range (BMI is an entire topic of it's own but it is
still an OK health indicator for the majority of the population). So
you work hard and drop 15 pounds in 5 weeks, only to lose 5 more
pounds in the following 10 weeks never hitting you 30 lbs weight loss
goal. Or you want to break a 6 minute mile so you cut your mile time
to 6:30 at first and plateau at 6:25. I'm sure this has happened to
all of us on multiple occasions. This write-up will be a multi-post
article geared towards what I talked about above – improvement or
even better - growth.
Ask yourself the question, what is my
purpose in life? If you are religious your answer would probably be
“spiritual growth” - to grow closer to God, to your
family, friends and neighbors. If you are not religious your answer
would probably be “to live” (in a very generic sense). But I
would be incorrect to say atheists aren't constantly striving for
growth either. However, this is a fitness and health blog, why bring
up the purpose in life? The answer is because everything is
interconnected. Your physical health improves/grows, you feel better
mentally, therefore your mental health grows, this could only lift
your spirit (spiritual growth), all of which makes you more available
to improve your spiritual health even further. So to sum it up,
taking two hours a week (out of a total of 168 hours in a week) to
grow physically, can have a drastic effect on your overall well-being
as a human (physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually).
The topic of the first “growth”
post will be on measurement.
Measurement can go a long way in
growth. When you are little kid you know that you are growing bigger
by always having to buy bigger and bigger shoes, and by measuring how
tall you are. Those are obvious measurements that don't need any
record keeping. In terms of fitness – you can measure your body
weight, body fat %, heart rate, mile time (or any distance), length
or heights (think field events in track and field), or weight of the
object your are lifting. If you want to dig even further you can
measure efficiencies, probabilities, percentages, standard
deviations, or anything you can learn from a statistics class. The
point is measurements are a bulletproof way to tell you if you are
improving or not and recording your measurements in a spreadsheet and
running statistics on them can help you develop a bulletproof way on
breaking plateaus. However, you will have to wait for another post
to hear more detail on these measurements.
The measurements that I want to talk
about today are more generic then the above paragraph. They are
tailored to help you identify what goals you truly want
to achieve aka “how bad do you want it?” What I recommend is to
keep a diary, for most people this would be their smartphone. And
write down every single negative thought or complaint that ever
crosses your mind. Yeah, this is a little extreme, but the more you
write down the higher your chances to grow in the long run. Go back
through all of your Facebook posts, emails, old diaries,
tweets...anything that records your thoughts and look for negative
thoughts or complaints and compile them into one location. You can
probably sense where I'm going with this. All of this record keeping
are measurements. Start tallying up which negative thoughts cross
your mind the most often, and you know the high counts to the most
crucial thing you need to grow or improve on. Not only will this
help identify what goals you truly want to achieve, it
will help you vent and will help your emotional health grow.
So there you have it. Step 1 for
growth – measurements. The next post will be titled “goal
setting” and will cover how to turn your measurements into goals.
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