Change to a healthier lifestyle through sport goals!

I have a tip for long-term – even lifelong – motivation to exercise and lifestyle change! Many people already live it and it drives them week after week, year after year, to get there and do their best. The secret is to set yourself a hard but still achievable training goal that will take a few months or even several years to achieve. As a side effect, it can lead to a complete lifestyle change and a more muscular, leaner appearance.

Training consciously or haphazardly?

Competitive athletes or people who do sport consciously at a hobby level, usually have goals and work towards them regularly. However, there is a large segment of the world today who appear on the trainings here and there because it is supposed to be healthy and they may even enjoy it, but overall sport is a secondary activity in their lives and they have no serious performance goals. It’s also perfectly fine to maintain fitness! A hundred times better than doing nothing…

However, they miss a few weeks of training here and there, they don’t put in the effort, they only work half-heartedly or go to the gym to socialise, and nutrition and sleep are not supporting recovery and development. The is not much sign of visible progress and improvement.

With performance-focused training, we want to see progress. Both the athlete and the coach. However, this may require changing some of the habits we have had. With one or two well-chosen goals, it will be automatic for hobbyists to show up regularly for training – or at most only miss it for a good reason – and to give their best effort of the day. They will start to improve their joint mobility, for example, adopting more effective training methods, exercises and progressive training plans.

As most of life consists of time out of training, they also pay attention to their lifestyle to support recovery and perform better in the next training session. At the same time, you’ll have healthier eating, breathing, better sleeping habits, less unnecessary noise, less distraction in life and less half-ass work in training.

The good news is that you don’t even have to change everything 100% and push yourself to the limit in every workout, you’ll still develop! Just make a necessary and sufficient shift in the direction you want to go.

It all starts with the desire to achieve a sporting result, fitness goal that at first seems a long way off, but which will eventually bring with it a (complete) lifestyle change and a more muscular appearance, lower body fat percentage, fitter-more flexible-skillful body as a side effect. Which is the desired (aesthetic) goal for many, but not necessarily a performance goal.

For who and what?

Of course, it will be entirely up to you which is that difficult but still achievable performance goal.

Someone with stiff joints might target, for example, a nice squat, bridge or even splits in the long term.
For those who are not particularly interested in calisthenics tricks and lifting weights, but want to gain versatile strength, dexterity and healthy muscles, regular practice of Natural Movements can be an excellent method.
Those who are relatively weak for their own body weight can work for their first push-up or first pull-up. Then why not aim for 5-10-20 reps afterwards!
For those who have been wheezing up the stairs to the second floor, it might be worth aiming for completing a 5-10km run. Then even a half marathon or marathon will be within reach. You’ll get the weird tips from the world to pay more attention to nutrition, breathing and sleep. These will improve basic endurance performance even without training, through improved mitochondrial function. And then this can be enhanced by plenty more training of course.
If you are already in relatively good shape, why not use the strength you have won in the genetic lottery or worked for. Don’t just let that strength gather dust in the basement, look into 1 or 2 more advanced bodyweight exercises (e.g. handstand push up, single leg pistol squat, muscle up, human flag etc.) or improve on your personal best in weight training.
For those who have only trained one-sidedly, improving only a few exercises or movement forms, enter e.g. an OCR obstacle race! You’ll need a lot of things at once: endurance, strength, coordination, tactics, etc.
If you’re not training to be a bodybuilder, but just want to build muscle, you can set training goals that require more muscle mass. E.g. you don’t see many skinny powerlifters, crossfitters or throwers.

When it’s too much…

It’s still a good idea to be careful with this performance-focused training and to do it sensibly, within your current capabilities. The job of a professional athlete is to train, eat, sleep, recover and perform well in competitions. Ideally, they don’t have to do anything else, invest time and energy for other tasks, and all the conditions are there for them to do this.

An amateur athlete, on the other hand, is likely to work, go to school, have a family, cook for themselves, etc., have to put in more effort in other areas, be under more stress, have less time and energy to train and recover. It is very unlikely that you can expect the same pace and level of training and development as a professional. What can be done?

Most training goals are achievable! It is just the time frame that matters. There is now a wealth of knowledge and experience available from the world of training on how to achieve them in a time-efficient way. If we could “lock” an untrained person into a professional training camp for 3-6 months, we could make very impressive improvements.

E.g. going from 0 to 10 pull-ups in 2-3 months is not an impossible mission if that’s all you had to do. In most everyday cases, however, it is worth being more patient. If you look at pull-ups, for example, the journey from 0 to 10 reps can take 1-2 years if you can only train 1-3 times a week.

Why do you train?

If you’re just exercising here and there because it’s healthy, it makes you feel better, that’s totally fine. If you want to see serious progress, however, start thinking and training with a performance focus. Do more for your sporting goals in your everyday life too and reduce the factors that hold you back. In an enthusiastic amateur or semi-professional way.

The point is to improve your fitness level compared to yourself and you’ll also get a lot of positive side effects as a gift that you wouldn’t have thought of in the beginning.

Keep moving!