Fitness Motivation

Your Target Body

Once you have set a direction for your fitness success by defining your Ideal Body, you then determine the more readily attainable Target Body. The Target Body is both achievable and measurable while the Ideal Body may be neither. The Ideal Body has set a direction, now how close can you get to it with a lifestyle you are willing to live in exchange? 

The best time frame for a Target Body is about three months. Three months is enough time to make differences in your body that will be quite noticeable to yourself and people around you while being close enough to feel real. 

The Target Body is also a moving target. At the end of three months, if you haven’t achieved your Ideal Body, set a new Target Body for the next three months. Of course, the eventual goal is to get a fit body you are happy maintaining. Then the Target Body has served its purpose as the ferry to carry you to the other side and you can leave it behind.

Evidence of Fitness Success 

The Target Body defines three kinds of goals: appearance, performance and behavior. The first step is setting appearance goals, which define in numbers how you will look:  the specific proportions and body composition you want. Then you translate them into the two other kinds of goals: performance goals and behavior goals. Performance goals define the higher level of fitness that is equivalent to the appearance and energy level you want. Behavior goals define healthier habits you are willing to live with for the rest of your life that also give you the desired short term results.

APPEARANCE GOALS

Appearance goals are defined by measurements and, possibly,  body composition rather than weight. The scale is not your friend because it doesn’t tell you the whole story. For one thing, muscle is denser than fat so you can get leaner and lose inches without seeing a like change in weight. Also, if the scale is your only feedback, fluctuations of water weight take away the sense of control you need. For example, sodium causes you to retain water, but just temporarily. So, you could lose a pound of fat a week for six weeks, then go out for dinner and eat Chinese food and gain six pounds of water weight from the sodium in the soy sauce. So when you step on the scale the next morning, you’ll weigh the same as when you started!  But, it’s just a temporary water weight swing. Instead you need goals that have a clear cause-effect relationship with your actions. So, if you have access to a good way of testing body fat percent, use body composition as well as your measurements to set goals for fat loss and muscle gain. If not, then at least use measurements for your appearance goals. Either way, these indicators allows you to set more empowering goals that you are in control of. 

You can use measurements and body composition to set specific goals for how you would like your body to look. By measuring your progress towards these goals regularly, you provide yourself with needed evidence that your program is working. Typical appearance goals for weight loss are losing 12 pounds of fat and gaining 2 pounds of muscle in 3 months. Equivalent measurements changes could include losing 2-3 inches off the abdomen for women and waist for men. Of course, this is just to give you a general idea. In later posts, I’ll go into more detail on goal setting for all the three types discussed here.

Once you have decided upon your appearance goals - a set of measurements and a body fat percentage you would like to achieve in three months – there are two key questions that complete the Target Body:

1 - What higher exercise performance level in the three areas of strength, aerobic fitness, and flexibility will give you that body?

2 - What new, healthier eating, stress management, and self-motivation behaviors do you need to acquire to achieve these goals?

These goals map the path from your current body to the body you want. They make it real and specific to follow the path to your Target Body.

PERFORMANCE GOALS

A major ingredient in the recipe of successful exercise is the focus on performance level.  Your exercise performance level is your body’s capacity to operate at a higher level of work. It is your ability to lift more weight, run a little faster, or stretch a little farther. There are many benefits to focusing on performance. As long as you are training just often and long enough, your fitness level improves more in response to overload than it does to adding more time or workouts. It is that one extra repetition on your hardest set that triggers the response. Performance goals facilitate a hierarchy of progressively higher levels of work in strength and aerobic training and it is these higher levels of work that your body must adapt to by becoming more fit. It does so by increasing the strength of muscles and by increasing your aerobic fitness: your body’s ability to deliver oxygen to working muscles. 

Exercise performance can be measured through a fitness assessment or monitored through your actual workouts. Both are meaningful. Fitness assessments can serve as helpful snapshots of your fitness level. But they are most empowering when they also include goals tied to a timeframe to drive your progress. Then they becoming necessary success experiences as measurable evidence that your program is working. These success experiences create a confidence-building loop with your program. Measurable achievements increase your belief in your ability to change your body, which you can then focus on the next steps ahead.

You can get a fitness assessment from a certified trainer or you can measure performance level in your workout in:

Strength- extra weight or repetitions, achieved with perfect form

Aerobic- a lower heart rate at a specific, measured level of work and time

Flexibility- the ability to comfortably move a limb farther in a given direction

In some ways, the most meaningful fitness progress is that which is accomplished within your actual workouts. Each should be properly guided forward in performance. When this is done, it takes less work to produce a better result. Most people focus on working out harder, longer, or more often instead of focusing on improving key performance indicator exercises measurably. And, it is making every workout the perfect small step forward in these key exercises that maximizes your success in the long run. 

BEHAVIOR GOALS

Behavior goals are simply healthier habits you aim to bring into your life permanently. By learning to properly balance what you eat for enjoyment with what you eat for health, you can create life-long healthier behaviors you are happy to live with that also give you the short-term changes in your body you want. This approach, sometimes called “lifestyle management”, is different from dieting in two key ways. 

1) Instead of starting with an idealized plan, you start from where you are and your normal habits.

2) Instead of reinforcing change on the scale, you reinforce the gradual integration of those healthier habits.

Diets presuppose the human ability to massively change habits. Instead of starting with the theoretical, idealized plan of a diet, it is better to start from what your life is. Develop a keen awareness of what your day-to-day normal nutrition habits are and shape gently from there in a healthier direction. You can’t jump out of the comfort zone into something alien and make it permanent. You can create new, healthier habits that stick, though, if they feel close to your normal ones and you integrate them gradually. Then you have a new comfort zone that supports the health and weight you want. 

Achieving a behavior goal means practicing it until you do it automatically without having to think about it. There are four rules for making this happen:

1. You only work on habits that you are willing to live with long term.

2. You do not attempt to adopt more than three new habits at one time.

3. You track how often you practice the new habit until you are doing it consistently 85-90% of the time.

4. You occasionally deviate from the habit intentionally to prevent all-or-none thinking.

Then, the behavior goals dovetail with the appearance and performance goals to support each other and create the healthy, fit body you want with the least time and effort necessary.

My intention with this post has been to promote the Target Body as a general outline to empower you to have a clear direction for your fitness success. In future posts, I will go into more detail on the specifics of setting the appearance, performance, and behavior goals that define the Target Body as well as the programs that are the engine in your fitness success machine. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss anything!

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Design Your Ideal Body

The idea of fitness begins with the Ideal Body.  The Ideal Body answers the question,  “If you could wave the magic wand and create whatever type of body you wanted with no effort.. how would you look and feel different?” It’s a blue sky question- don’t think about the effort involved, or how achievable your goals are- just imagine what you’d want if you could press a button and have it.

While some would say "that's not realistic", the purpose of the Ideal Body is not to be realistic- that would the "Target Body". In a future post, I'll discuss how to set goals to define your Target Body, which is the answer to  "how close can I get to my Ideal Body with a lifestyle I am willing to live in exchange for it". So, save realism for that process. For now, set sail from the shores of the reasonable. This process is to set your thoughts free.

Whether we know it or not, many of us limit ourselves with an unhealthy body image. Imagining an ideal body opens the mind to new possibilities. Rather than thinking something like, “I’m fat, I’m always going to be fat,” you can replace those limiting thoughts with something compelling that gives you the energy to reach for a higher level of fitness. As you create in your mind’s eye your Ideal Body and translate it into words on paper, it becomes your  personal, magnetic vision of ultimate health and fitness.        

As your Ideal Body takes a more crystallized form in your mind, pay attention to its different attributes. Think about how you would look different, taking inventory of each part of your body and the changes you would like to see. Imagine the difference you would notice in how it feels to move around in a body that is trained to a very high level of fitness. Think about the times of day when your energy was formerly low, and what it is now like to have more energy than needed whenever you need it. Create a mental movie of the times when you would really appreciate and enjoy living in a body that is toned and tight, and can perform at high levels.         

You own it. It is the actualization of your own personal ideals about health and fitness, not somebody else’s. 

Answer the following on a notepad or computer document and put it where you can read it regularly to solidify this vision:

How does having your Ideal Body make you look different? Give an inventory of every part of your body that changes and what it now looks like.

How does having your Ideal Body make you feel different? What times during the day were you less energetic before that are now full of energy and vitality? What new feelings of well being are you now experiencing? What physical things can you now do with ease that give you evidence of your achievement?

What is important to you about achieving your Ideal Body? 

Now, the job is to take inventory of all the parts of yourself that prevented this in the past by asking, “what stopped me from having already achieved this?”  For each objection, develop a accompanying strategy that solves the issue by asking “What would have to be different to overcome this now” or “what new resource do I need to develop for this to be different”.

Resources to develop can be physical things such as a space to exercise in, emotional things like the support of another person who believes in you and is focused on your goals, or accountability to a training schedule. Or, the resource may be more internal, like different idea about yourself and who you are. If your self-identity is a “party animal” it will be difficult to change your health behaviors and your body until you develop another self-image that is more consistent with what you want. 

Some resources you may need are simply new capabilities. The capabilities can include knowledge such as that of proper nutrition, or skills of good exercise form, for instance. 

Another set of resources are those of beliefs. If you don’t believe you can change your body, that will block practicing the correct habits. Beliefs are a higher level of change than habits. If you belief you can change your body, you will seek out and utilize the resources that you need. How will things be different when you totally believe in your ability to do it?

Once you have clearly defined your Ideal Body in full sensory detail, identified your purpose behind it, and developed strategies for overcoming your past obstacles, you are ready to start moving in that direction with realistic goals tied to a time frame. That "Target Body" will be the subject of the next post.

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