Impossible is Nothing

I can't believe its 2014 already! I guess it's time to reflect on last years achievements and assess what changes you want to make in the New Year. Don't be discouraged if you didn't achieve all your goals, use this year as an opportunity to prioritise the goals you didn't achieve last year. 

However, be realistic when goal setting. Sometimes we aim to accomplish 101 things by the end of the year, without assessing whether this is even feasible. I mean there's no point completing the year having completed all your goals half heartedly. 

As the year was coming to an end, I got a bit upset that I didn't get to complete everything I set out to do. Nevertheless, I realised that there was a reason for the delay and it just wasn't the right time.

However, I have so many things to be thankful for that I don't even know where to begin. I'm not going to list all of them, because you probably don't want to hear them lol, but what I will say is, blogging has shown me that nothing is impossible.

Blogging was one of my resolutions last year and within a year I've had over 30,000 views. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I was very nervous and scared about blogging. I put it off for the longest time. I was scared that no one would read it or that it would be rubbish. To some people it may be just that, but my hits tell me I'm doing something right. I have had nothing but positive feedback and I would just like to say a big thank you to everyone that has followed me and supported me on my journey.

Your support means a lot to me and is the motivation I need to keep doing what I'm doing. I know I've said this before, but when I first started my journey it was all about me. I wasn't doing it to benefit anyone else and it was all about my personal gain. I was just a girl who liked posting gym pictures on Instagram, but I soon came to realise that I was beginning to inspire those around me without even noticing it, and for those reasons, I won't stop doing what I'm doing.

My advice for this year would be set yourself realistic goals that way you’re more likely to stick to it. If your goal is to finally get active and lose weight, instead of it being a resolution, why not have it as a change in lifestyle with the intention of it lasting a lifetime. As I've said before, fitness isn't a destination but rather a journey. It’s much harder to maintain your results once you've reached your goal.

I would suggest creating a 2014 vision board and placing images and words of all the things you want to accomplish this year. Have this board in a place you will see everyday. This should keep you on track and act as a constant reminder of your objectives for that year. Sometimes having your goals on paper, is what you need to take the steps to make it a reality. 

Let's make 2014 a productive year and focus on making those dreams a reality.

G

Can you lose body fat without losing your curves?

This is something I’ve struggled with since the beginning of my fitness journey and I know a lot of females can relate, so I thought to share my experience and explain how the process works.

So can you lose body fat without losing your curves? My answer is yes and no.

The thing is you cannot determine where you lose fat from. If you do cardio, you can’t only burn the fat off your waist area and keep it on your bum and thighs. Trust me I wish you could but it just doesn’t work like that.

Please bare in mind that your body does burn fat all over, it’s just that sometimes it can burn fat more in specific areas. For example, my fat burns quickly around my chest area (hence my lack of boobs lol) and although I still have a bum and thighs, I have still lost body fat in those areas.

Everyone has stubborn fat cells in specific areas. For me, I’d say my stubborn areas are my bum, thighs and waist, which isn't a bad thing except the waist area- but this, is not within my control. The only way I focused on those stubborn fat cells in my waist was to keep up the cardio until it finally responded and disappeared (it still hasn’t gone yet but its slowly getting there), although I did suffer the risk of losing my curves. So what do I do?

Well I know how my body works and I know it’s a lot easier for me to put on weight than it is for me to lose weight. So I took the risk (and still am taking the risk) in order to give my body the best possible chance of stripping down my body fat. I haven’t lost too much mass in the process as my cardio mainly consists of high intensity workouts (refer to previous blogpost) which has in some way retained my muscle.

But inevitably I was bound to lose fat from my bum, thighs and hips so I also weight trained those specific areas on days where I wasn’t doing cardio. I’ve now incorporated more leg days in my fitness regime focusing more on exercises which target my glutes, thighs and hips (squats, lunges, leg raises, glute bridges etc) in order to compensate for the fat burned in those areas.

I still haven’t replaced all the missing fat from those areas YET but just know I won’t stop until I do. Personally, I'm yet to see the gains of my work because I know this process will probably take a year to master effectively and my body doesn’t respond to muscle training as fast as I would like it to. But everyone’s body is different so it might not even take you that long.

There are two ways to do this, you can either lose the fat first then weight train or do both at the same time. I’ve chosen to do both at the same time because when combined with a good balanced diet, adding muscle mass will increase your metabolism and help burn off any excess body fat, so it’s a win win situation.

The only thing is that muscle takes a lot longer to build than fat takes to burn so this process requires the most amount of patience. My advice to anyone embarking on this part of their journey is to be patient and accept that slow progress is better than no progress.

Remember Rome wasn’t built in a day…and neither are your muscles.

G

#MonthOfMadness

So my birthday present to myself was a trip to New York.

The annoying thing about holidays for me is that I always feel guilty for enjoying my holiday and not working out. So obviously I had to make use of my surroundings and workout whenever and wherever I could lol.

I'm gonna be honest, my diet was a shambles, I threw clean eating out the window and became the old Gina - the 11 stone 11 year old indulging in any and everything I wanted. The worst thing was it felt so good to do it and I didn't care about the repercussions!  You're probably thinking WTF but this was all planned.

Before I left, I had started to lose motivation and the drive to keep going hard-why? Because I didn't have a visual goal. I didn't have a beach holiday coming up or anything short term to work towards so going hard was getting boring, I wanted something to look forward to and I wanted a new challenge. Also, because it was my birthday month I was surrounded by alcohol, restaurants and endless cake.

So I said to myself, you know what, go on holiday, 'YOLO' and get it out of your system. I'm the kind of person where I need to feel before I hear so I knew I needed to see myself put on the weight to get that motivation to go hard again. It may sound silly but that's just how I work, I'm not scared of putting on weight because I know my body and I know how to put weight on just as much as I know how to lose it.

But I've come back, put on weight and have fallen in love with the gym all over again.

Funnily enough some of my other fitness friends are going through the same transition, so we've joined together to start a #MonthOfMadness. We all have individual goals, some are trying to bulk, shred, tone up.... you name it and for the next month we will be going hard like when we first began. If your on Instagram lookout for the #MonthOfMadness hashtag to see all the crazy stuff we will be up to.

I'm excited about the next 28 days and can't wait to share my results. If your up for the challenge, join in and hashtag #MonthOfMadness in your instagram pictures and lets go hard together.

G

Sunday Funday

The weather wasn’t too bad on Sunday, so after church I decided to have a little workout in the park with my cousins. It was a short session which consisted of bodyweight exercises.

Bodyweight exercises are so convenient. You don’t need equipment, you can workout literally anywhere and all you need is your body! 

What I like about these types of exercises, is that they require more flexibility and balance in order to perform reps, in comparison to weight training. Because you have to use your bodyweight to adjust the difficulty of exercises, you learn how to make use of your entire body in any given movements.  

It's all about becoming one with your body because you’re literally working with what you've got and your body HAS to tone itself because it’s naturally being conditioned to the same weight all the time. Not only that but, you can workout towards your own strengths and weaknesses, as through doing certain exercises you'll be able to learn what muscles are stronger/weaker.

There is an ongoing discussion about Bodyweight Training vs Weight Training but that’s a different blog post. Personally, I like them both and think when combined together you get good results, but that’s just my opinion. J

But yh ...since the weathers getting better now, I plan to do a lot more training in the park on weekends…so anyone interested let me know and lets do this!

G