“Failing to plan is like planning to fail”. This statement, excerpted from Muscle 101 site, clearly summarizes the importance of planning for achieving success in bodybuilding. For this reason, this post introduces the planning actions you should incorporate into your training program for obtaining your desired results.
Your first step must be defining long-term goals and deadlines for accomplishing them. Write up a detailed plan of what you need to do to achieve these goals and design your program toward the realization of them. Since maintaining the right direction for achieving long-term goals can be difficult, in addition you have to define short-term goals connected to your long-term goals and focus your training to fulfill them. Use the accomplishment of both long and short-term goals to motivate yourself.
In order to check if you are achieving your goals, you have to write a training diary. This will let you evaluate your progress, identify stagnation, and look back to see what programs worked for you in the past or how many reps you did with a specific weight before. You have to write down in your diary accurate records of each workout (e.g. exercises, reps, sets, poundage, rest, tempo), detailed information about your nutrition (e.g. what you eat, number of calories, macronutrients intake) and any other information that can be relevant as for instance how much you sleep. Find a few minutes periodically to review your diary and evaluate if you’re accomplishing your goals in the established deadlines or not. If not, redesign your program as appropriate to overcome this situation.
Your training diary must include also some periodical tracking of your physical progress to determine in you are advancing toward your goals. You can use the scale as an indicator, but don’t focus only on this because it supplies partial information (e.g. you cannot distinguish if you’re gaining muscle or fat). Consider other methods such as taking before and after pictures or using a measuring tape for tracking the size of your key body-parts. In addition, you can also measure your body fat percentage by using calipers and body composition tests as explained in the article “Learn How To Measure Your Success” by Jeremy Likness.
You can find a detailed justification about the importance of planning in bodybuilding and the basic issues for planning your training in the chapter “How to Plan Your Growth” of the book “Beyond Brawn - The Insider's Encyclopedia on How to Build Muscle & Might” by Stuart McRobert, in the article “The Importance of a Training Log” by Matt Danielsson and also in the “Measuring Progress” section of Muscle 101 site.
Your first step must be defining long-term goals and deadlines for accomplishing them. Write up a detailed plan of what you need to do to achieve these goals and design your program toward the realization of them. Since maintaining the right direction for achieving long-term goals can be difficult, in addition you have to define short-term goals connected to your long-term goals and focus your training to fulfill them. Use the accomplishment of both long and short-term goals to motivate yourself.
In order to check if you are achieving your goals, you have to write a training diary. This will let you evaluate your progress, identify stagnation, and look back to see what programs worked for you in the past or how many reps you did with a specific weight before. You have to write down in your diary accurate records of each workout (e.g. exercises, reps, sets, poundage, rest, tempo), detailed information about your nutrition (e.g. what you eat, number of calories, macronutrients intake) and any other information that can be relevant as for instance how much you sleep. Find a few minutes periodically to review your diary and evaluate if you’re accomplishing your goals in the established deadlines or not. If not, redesign your program as appropriate to overcome this situation.
Your training diary must include also some periodical tracking of your physical progress to determine in you are advancing toward your goals. You can use the scale as an indicator, but don’t focus only on this because it supplies partial information (e.g. you cannot distinguish if you’re gaining muscle or fat). Consider other methods such as taking before and after pictures or using a measuring tape for tracking the size of your key body-parts. In addition, you can also measure your body fat percentage by using calipers and body composition tests as explained in the article “Learn How To Measure Your Success” by Jeremy Likness.
You can find a detailed justification about the importance of planning in bodybuilding and the basic issues for planning your training in the chapter “How to Plan Your Growth” of the book “Beyond Brawn - The Insider's Encyclopedia on How to Build Muscle & Might” by Stuart McRobert, in the article “The Importance of a Training Log” by Matt Danielsson and also in the “Measuring Progress” section of Muscle 101 site.
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