I’ve spoken here before about the value of planning your workouts prior to actually doing them each day; it’s something that has proven to be an invaluable tool for me.
One of the bigger roadblocks to staying on, or even starting on, the road to fitness is an inability to understand what you’re working towards. Most of us see a photo of someone, think hey, I’d like to look like her/him, and then join a gym; nowhere in that process do we actually think to ourselves what is necessary to get us to our ideal.
I don’t know Jennifer Lawrence, Kelly Rowland, Kerry Washington, or Olivia Wilde personally, but I can assure you their regiments are steeped in purpose—most of them have likely worked with a personal trainer or fitness coach of some sort during the course of their careers—and that means they had a vision of how they wanted their bodies to look and then someone showed them how to get it there. Period.
No one exercise is going to give you those tone, tank top worthy, arms and no spin class will give you the beautifully sculpted dancers legs you see on “Dancing With The Stars”; every physique you see has a means by which you get there—find that path and you’ll find success.
For example: I love the lean, athletic, totally sculpted look, with what I like to call peek-a-boo abs in the mid-section (you can see them, but they’re not necessarily bulging out at you). It looks similar to this:
This woman is my ideal vision of fitness because she epitomizes my end goal…at least for the moment; that said, I tailor my workouts around both strength and cardio, with subtle infusions of yoga and Pilates to help with core strength and flexibility. It’s a regiment that I am constantly tweaking, but one that I know is working because I see the results.
I’ll admit that doing things this way can be time consuming (that’s why so many people turn to personal trainers to help them through the process), but when you’re crafting the ideal version of you, the work is worth it in my opinion.
