All the greats agree: Consistency is key! Think back to a time when you’ve achieved something that you were really proud of. Maybe you did great in an exam, maybe playing sport and doing extremely well, maybe it’s been your career. You’ll be able to look back at that and see that a large part of success came from being consistent.

Let’s take weight loss. The first step to success in any area is looking at what are the biggest factors that will determine results? Once we understand those, we need to focus on creating a strategy around them. In this case, it’s nutrition and exercise. What are the keys focus points?

1. Calories in. The important focus point is to stay consistent with calories. For a lot of people this means having similar meals, at similar times and just keeping to a certain strategy. Basically, making it very hard to mess up. That’s a key point!
2. The important focus point is to stay consistent with your training program. This means certain sessions on certain days to burn calories or focus on different body parts.

The key is not to get too overwhelmed with the end result. If you need to lose a lot of weight, or you’re a trainer reading this, the focus shouldn’t be on the end result – that’s a given. The focus needs to be on what you’re in control of. Meaning what can you control right now that will make a difference to that end result. What are you about to eat or not eat, will you train today? They are the controllable and will ultimately determine today’s success. If you get those right and you’ve worked out the numbers correctly like how many sessions are required each week, what are your daily or weekly calorie requirements, the rest will fall into place.

Let’s take a big number. Say you need to lose 50kg and the aim is in 12 months – very possible, but it’s going to take hard work and dedication. And for a lot of people it’s just too overwhelming to even start. So, let’s break it down and make smaller goals or daily targets to hit.

50kg over 52 weeks = 0.96kg per week.
Which is actually only 137g per day. While there will inevitably be ups and downs, good days and bad, and while you won’t be weighing every day, we know the target each day.
If we understand our calorie target and our training targets, we just need to stay consistent to reach the goal.

Your end goal isn’t the most important thing, it’s your daily habits because they determine your success!

How do we stay on track? Measure and adapt where needed. In this case we need to measure calories, so my fitness pal as an example. Scales because that’s the one marker we’re really after to measure the weight loss. You could use others as well and if the weight isn’t dropping as quickly as required, reduce the calories or increase the energy out, meaning the sessions. Increase intensity, the duration of the session or change the type of training stimulus to increase energy expenditure.