One of the good things to come out of the recent crisis has been having a little more time to refocus on my personal fitness routine. Though I am blessed to have a well-outfitted home gym, I understand that many people need to make do with little or no fitness equipment. While this may seem like an insurmountable obstacle, blocking you from making progress, this is actually not true.

Achieving your fitness goals depends on several keys, and as long as you adhere to some simple advice, you will most certainly make great progress.

Define your goals. Common sense tells us that when taking a trip, we need to know where we are going. When developing a fitness plan, think about what you want to achieve before you actually start. Be specific. Just saying you want to get into shape is not enough. Do you want to lose weight, lower your blood sugar levels, develop stamina, get stronger — what exactly are you interested in achieving? Once you have thought about it and decided what your goals are, write them down. It helps to have something you can look back on and, occasionally, revise.

Educate yourself. You need to know where you are going and how you plan on getting there to use the trip analogy again. Thus, you will need to educate yourself on how the human body adapts to stress. And, yes, exercise is a stress.

Your body adapts specifically to the stresses you impose upon it. In other words, you get what you train for. If you want to get stronger, lift things that are challenging. If you want to develop endurance, perform an exercise that gets you fatigued over a relatively long period of time. There is certainly more to this, but the bottom line is you need to challenge yourself by doing the things that you want to improve. If exercise is new to you altogether, you will want to ask a fitness professional what exercises are right for you and to help get you started.

Progressive Overload. The concept of progressive overload has been around for thousands of years. Legend has it that in the 6th Century B.C., Milo of Crotona, a city in what is now Southern Italy, came up with a simple yet ingenious method for achieving strength and physical development. Milo would pick up a calf and carry it on his shoulders across a field. As the calf grew in size, the demands of the already heavy load increased. Milo was able to adapt and grow stronger.

This brings us back to stress. Just how hard should you push yourself? Progressive overload simply means doing something that your body is not used to and that challenges you. In order to get better, your body needs to perceive a threshold of stress. Then, as you rest and recover, your body’s natural response is to adapt by becoming stronger, adding muscle, or making some other physiological improvement that is in direct response to the specific stress/exercise you subjected your body to. You need to push yourself to a point where it is exposed to slightly more weight, more repetitions, shorter rest breaks, more exercises, etc., over time. If you don’t push yourself, your body has no reason to adapt or become stronger. That being said, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Don’t kill yourself. Take baby steps and make little adjustments over time so your body actually has a chance to adapt.

Thousands of years after Milo is said to have crossed a field with a bull on his shoulders, little has changed in the health and fitness industry. Sure, every other second, a chemically enhanced fitness “expert” is touting their latest method for achieving a lean, rock-hard body. Just send them three payments of $39.95, and they will happily send you a bottle of whatever supposedly gave them the look of a comic book superhero.

The truth, while not glamorous, is simple. Define your goals, understand what stress is necessary to elicit the change you want, then gradually push yourself to become better. Over time, you will most certainly achieve whatever goals you set your mind to, not with expensive equipment, but with simple training principles and a desire to Live Well.

For more information on developing a fitness program or if you are interested in online training, feel free to message me on my Facebook page, Bellomo Online Training.