Master Your Mindset: The 3-Step Formula for Staying Consistent with Your Health & Fitness Goals

Episode Description: Struggling to stay consistent with your health and fitness goals? You're not alone. In this second part of our mindset series, Josh shares a simple, three-step formula for generating unstoppable momentum, mastering your mindset, and effectively tracking progress. Discover practical strategies to overcome resistance, handle setbacks, and build lasting habits that make consistency feel effortless.

Structured Show Notes:

• Introduction: The real reason consistency feels so challenging
• Step 1 - Generating Momentum: Starting small and building momentum with minimal viable actions
• Step 2 - Mindset Mastery: How to shift from negative discipline to positive preparation for predictable setbacks
• Practical Mindset Examples: Handling weekends, social events, stress eating, and cravings
• Step 3 - Effective Monitoring: Tracking behaviours versus outcomes, and practical examples for tracking success
• Recap and Encouragement: Get started, stay realistic, and build consistency over intensity

• Building consistency
• Mindset mastery
• Generating momentum
• Tracking health and fitness habits
• Overcoming resistance in fitness
• Fitness motivation
• Healthy habit formation
• Transformation Fit Podcast

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Transcript

Hey guys, welcome back to this week's podcast. Today's podcast is the second in a two-part series all about how to improve your mindset. So if you have't already listened to the last episode, I'd recommend that you go back, you listen to that one. It's the one that's uploaded before this one. So you've not got too far to scroll down and that will set the stage for what we're going to be discussing today. So in today's episode, we're going to focus specifically on how to become more consistent with your health and fitness goals. And there's a three part process which is going to help you to do just that. We're going to begin with focussing on generating momentum. Most people never achieve their goals because they struggle to get started. And that's because getting going is the hardest part of this. I want you to imagine you're on the park and you've got your kids or your grandkids, or maybe think back to when you were a kid, and you'd go on the merry go round and when you start spinning that merry go round, it's very slow and it feels very heavy, okay? But as you start to get that merry- go round rotating, you begin to be able to walk a little bit faster. And then eventually, you can start to jog and then you can run and by that time, the merry- go round is spinning around and all you need to do is keep tapping it to keep it rotating and the momentum just carries it as it goes and helps it to be consistent. And that's exactly the same as your health and fitness goals. Whenever you start something, it's always going to feel like there's a lot of friction and there's a lot of resistance, and sometimes it can feel quite uncomfortable. Okay? But once you get over that initial hurdle, that initial resistance, and you break through that, it's a lot easier for you to speed up, and it's a lot less effort for you to stay consistent. So I want you to remember that, okay? The first thing we want to focus on is just getting that initial momentum, okay? And that is done through what we call a minimal, viable action. Okay? So that is something, a habit, a process, a step, something that's so small that it kind of avoids you from feeling that heavy sense of resistance when you begin. So when a practical health and fitness scenario, if you're struggling to develop a training schedule, if you're struggling to exercise consistently, then don't tell yourself that you're going to start training four days a week, weight training, and cardio, and you're going to drive across town to the gym, get changed, do your workout for an hour, an hour and 20 minutes, drive back. No, no, no, no, no. That's going to be too much resistance for you to get started. So much so about it. You might do it once or twice, but it's going to be difficult for you to keep up with that. So what we would do in that scenario is instead of committing to that, we would commit to a smaller version of that. So we would break that down, stop looking at that four day training routine as the beginning of the process, and start looking at that four day training routine as the end goal. And we'd start with something that's super simple. So it might be that you walk for 10 minutes, okay? It might be that you jog down to the park, you have a little 10 minute body weight routine on some of the park equipment or just using your own body weight and then you walk back. Okay? It's something that is so small, but it just begins to set the wheels in motion and begin that process of exercise, okay? Momentum is about lowering the bar of expectations to create those early wins, okay? You don't need to do everything. You just need to do something that you can repeat. And as you do that more consistently, you will naturally be able to progress for our increase for time, increase the intensity, and move it closer to that end goal of training three, four days a week in the gym. Okay. So generating momentum to begin with is the most important part of becoming more consistent. Next up is developing the right mindset. And most people have a negative relationship with discipline. They look at being disciplined with their goals as somehow being harsh on themselves. But by focussing on becoming more disciplined, it's not being harsh on your current self. It's actually being kind and caring to your future self. So that's just a simple mindset shift that we can make to start thinking about discipline as something positive, not something negative, okay? And most people don't relapse with their health and fitness goals because they're lazy. They do it because they don't prepare for predictable setbacks and that then has a knock on effect on your mindset and knocks your confidence. So whatever happens with your health and fitness goals, they're always going to be setbacks, okay? So that can be overeaten on weekends. That can be social occasions. That can be travelling with work. It can be stress eating, for example. And instead of looking at those things as something we want to avoid, okay, a problem, we want to see those things as challenges, because what we've always got to remember is that people try to avoid problems, but people love overcoming challenges. So stop framing those setbacks as problems and let's start framing them as challenges that are there to be overcome and beaten. So practical examples of retaining the correct mindset would be, instead of just saying, oh, every other time I' failed on my diet, it's because I've overeaten on weekends, but this time it's different. This time I'm really motivated. This time I've got to do it. Let's not BS ourselves, okay? If you know that you are one of these people that are susceptible to overeating on weekends because you have social occasions, family time, then instead of saying, we're going to avoid that, let's think of it as a challenge that we've got to overcome. So a practical example of how we might overcome this is if it's a Saturday or a Sunday when our social gatherings are or when we tend to overeat, let's make a plan so that on Friday before and Monday after we set ourselves a lower calorie target, which enables us to kind of average out over those four days and still be on plan when we look at our weekly average calories. So we've not said that we're not going to go out on Saturday, we're not going to go to that gathering. But what we have done is on the Friday and the Monday, we've reduced our calorie intake to ensure that even though we're going over our allotted calories on the Saturday and Sunday, we're still on track when we look over that kind of four-day average period. So that's just a simple way of becoming more positive around these setbacks and not saying that's never going to happen, but making a plan that is going to enable us to work around those things. Another example of this would be, if you know you've got a busy week coming up, can we identify maybe two days that we can train, that we can do some exercise instead of dwelling on the free to four days that you can't? And if you're a stress eater, or you get a lot of cravings in the evening, let's say, chocolate, things like that, a simple plan that we can put in place ahead of time is not saying, oh, yeah, I'm not going to stress eat anymore or I'm not going to eat chocolate anymore. It would be saying to ourselves that, okay, we are going to allow ourselves to have that chocolate bar, but first, we're going to have a pint of water and we're going to have 30 grams of protein, okay? And if we say to ourselves, yes, it's fine to have chocolate. Yes, it's fine to have some crisps or sweets or whatever it is that you cravings are. Let's add in some water and some protein before succumbing to your cravings, and then that way, you're still on plan because you've planned to do it ahead of time. And the great thing about the what I call the protein ritual before you do that is you will naturally eat less of those foods that you're craving because you've filled up on a bit of water and a bit of protein beforehand. So that's a nice little nutrition tip for you if you struggle with that. So we've got to rewire our mind here. Use planning, positive self-talk to mitigate those challenges in advance. Don't say they're never going to crop up again, because history tells us every other time you failed and you're diet and your training programme, it's been because of these reasons. So let's think about them before they happen and make a plan for when they crop up. That ensures that the second part of the free step process, your mindset remains resilient and remains consistent. And then the third part of this is monitoring our actions and monitoring our results. So what you track, you can improve, what you ignore, you repeat, okay? So people often drift into failure when they stop paying attention to those actions and to those habits. And when I'm talking about monitoring, I don't mean obsessing over every minute last detail. What I mean is, let's bring daily, regular, consistent awareness to our habits, okay? So that we can see the outcome of those habits. So tracking behaviours and not just outcomes helps with building consistency. So, an example of tracking a behaviour would be tracking our calorie intake and our daily step count. An example of tracking an outcome would be what we weigh on a daily basis. Most people get obsessed with tracking outcomes when in actual fact, it's for behaviours that we want to track. So some examples of positive behaviours that we can track. So can we implement a journalling practice where we focus on maybe one win of the day, okay? So we ask ourselves, what was one win that I had today to do with my health and fitness? That builds confidence, that builds self-awareness, and every day we will try and focus on doing one small thing that we can class as a win in our daily journalling practice. Another example of this would be tracking our calorie intake. You know, I'm not saying track every single day, although that is clearly beneficial for achieving results, specifically with weight loss. But can we just start to track two to three days a week to begin with? That routine helps to create accountability with what we're putting into our body. And then some emotional trackings as well. So how did you feel before you exercised? How did you feel after you exercised? What are the differences in your mental state and your physical state before you train and after you train and conversely, how did I feel before I at at chocolate bar and how did I feel after? Start to log and track those behaviours, those thoughts, that self talk, and that then helps us become more consistent. Another example of tracking would be wearing a wearable, like whoop or a Fitbit or something like this that can help you monitor your health and your fitness habits on a daily weekly basis. So there's just free steps that we can take to become more consistent with whatever it is that we're trying to achieve within our health and fitness. The most important thing, guys, is just getting started and generating that initial momentum. Don't set the bar so high that it's intimidating and overwhelming before you've even began. Just focus on getting started and then focus on building and progressing our routine thereafter. I hope that's useful for you guys and I'll see you on the next one. Take care.