#043 How to Build Winning Habits

Welcome back to the 43rd edition of the Boats & Logs Lifting Club. I really appreciate you being here. We are the based fitness community that focuses on mastering the basics instead of getting lost in the details.

If you want to be successful and achieve the physique of your dreams, you need to be consistent…
… consistent with your diet
… consistent with your workouts

You know that already.

And, of course, being consistent requires some degree of motivation, but it’s mainly about willpower and a “just do it”-attitude.

However, to give ourselves the best odds of being consistent, we can make our lives a little bit easier by building habits.

Habits will help us to fall back to “default-mode” and don’t require us to spend energy on thinking about and deciding what to do.

And if these habits help us achieve our dream physique, that’s great. Building muscle and/or losing fat already require a lot of energy, time, and dedication. Therefore, we should take advantage of every edge we can identify to make our lives as easy as possible.

And habits can be a great help with that.

Habit 1: Consistent Gym Times

After the initial motivation to go to the gym has stopped, many people find themselves struggling to train consistently.

And this is why you should make going to the gym a habit and not something you decide on a rolling basis whether you want to do it or not.

To make it a habit, you should have fixed times and days when you hit the gym. In the best case, it’s the same time every day, but as long as the days are consistent, that’s a decent start.

An example would be that you go right in the morning after waking up. So let’s say, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you wake up and go straight to the gym. This leaves no room to think whether you feel motivated or not to go to the gym. You just do it. And after a few weeks, it becomes a habit.

It could also be that you take your gym bag with you to work, school, university, … and instead of going home right after you finish, you make a stop in your gym. Again, after a few weeks, it will become a habit that you don’t drive straight home on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but that you make a stop to train before.

Just showing up again, and, again, and again, will help you to establish this habit.

And this will make it far easier for you to consistently go to the gym.

Habit 2: Increased Activity

Truth is, if you work an office job and commute via car or public transport, you probably live a rather sedentary life.

This is unhealthy for your body and your brain.
You need to move!

But there is also a day-to-day impact of living a sedentary life: You can’t eat as much without gaining weight.

The rule is simple:
Low activity → low energy needs → low calorie burn

And if you burn only few calories, you are more at risk of exceeding your calorie budget for the day and gaining fat.

To avoid that (and because it’s healthy), you need to make a habit of moving more and increasing your general activity!

There are plenty of habits you can start:

• Take the stairs, not the elevator

• Get off the public transport 1-2 stops early and walk the remainder

• Ride your bike to work

• Take a walk in your lunch break

It’s always an active decision to be active, but with time, you will get used to it and start forming a great habit that will increase your physical and mental health and help you be leaner by burning more calories.

Habit 3: Meal Planning & Prepping

Doesn’t matter your goals in the gym. You need the right diet to achieve your goals. You can train as much as you want, but if you are not burning more calories than you consume, you will never lose fat. You will also always stay skinny no matter how much you train if you don’t eat in a calorie surplus.

And we are not even discussing protein here…

No matter if your challenge is to gain muscle or to lose fat, you probably have established some negative habits that hold you back from reaching your goals. You are either eating too little or too much.

We need to break these habits because every time you don’t know which meal to eat, you risk falling back into your bad habits that brought you into this situation in the first place.

And we do this by avoiding the situation where you don’t know what to eat.

Therefore, we plan our meals in advance.

It doesn’t matter if you plan the next day, two days, or week. But make a habit out of consistently planning ahead. If you know what to eat, you decrease the risk of not hitting your goals significantly.

If you want to take it further, you can also get into meal prepping. This way, you not only know what to eat, but you already have it ready to eat at home. Starting a habit to use 1-2 hours every Sunday to meal prep the meal will be a game-changer if your gym progress was held back by your eating habits.

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Stay strong,
Boats & Logs

Disclaimer

This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol, please consult a medical professional. These are the opinions from an AI voice.