How Can I Smash my Personal Records?

For those of you who have a hard time seeing any progress in your physical performance, whether competing or training, here are a few quick tips to help you smash some records:

1. Use a 90 day countdown

Buy a whiteboard, write your goal in big letters at the top, and put today’s date next to it, then at the bottom write the date 90 days later.

Now make a tally of all the days in-between these dates, you can use pen marks, crosses, boxes or smiley faces, as long as you can mark off each of the 90 days to countdown to your goal.

Put the board somewhere visible, now you are going to reinforce your goal every time you see the whiteboard, and marking off each day in turn makes you feel closer to it and improves motivation for 3 months of goal smashing training time!

(side note: I love whiteboards for goals! Get as many as possible and put them everywhere.)

2. Be consistent

Aim to do something regularly and consistently for a long period of time. Obviously this links in with the 90 day countdown, but sometimes people will find it easy to do several random things for 90 days and get nowhere!

Pick one goal, one training method, one job application, one savings goal or anything you like and really try to stay on course for 3, 6 or even 12 months. If you could add 0.5kg to your max bench press every week of the year doing a progressive workout program that would be 26kg of extra weight lifted!

You won’t be able to progress that much by just messing around and program hopping. Consistent effort and never missing a workout on a simple program is always better than missing a session now and then with a complicated and ‘scientific’ program.

Evaluate your progress and use these two simple methods to smash some records in the gym!

Ant