Avoid these bad habits and hit your fitness goals.

The root cause of our success and failures within health and fitness can always be backtracked to our habits.

Habits are the small daily steps we take toward a destination. Good habits take us there, bad habits draw us away.

Here are five bad habits that are taking you away from your goals.

Why Are Bad Habits Bad?

First, let’s figure out what makes bad habits bad.

If you think about it, no bad habit is inherently bad, good and bad are simply labels we put on things.

Take smoking for example, that’s a habit everyone says is bad. It can give you cancer, shortness of breath, and affects the people you smoke around (second-hand smoke). But it's not a bad habit if your goals are to do those things. 

In the extreme case of smoking that sounds a little silly, but let’s apply the same thought process to weight loss. 

Take constant snacking on calorific foods like nuts. If you want to lose weight, that’s a bad habit since it may put you in a caloric surplus, but if your goal is to gain weight, snacking is a good thing.  

Therefore bad habits are only bad when they don’t align with our goals.

How To Identify Bad Habits

If bad habits are only bad when they don’t align with our goals, you can identify them through cause and effect. 

Take one thing you do every day then zoom out and look at the macro, where does that habit lead?

Let’s take walking to work. Walking to work burns calories, improves your cardiovascular health, and reduces your carbon footprint. Since those are the results we desire, we call walking to work a good habit.

Going through this thought process whenever you’re about to commit a bad habit will help you steer away from it. 

The 5 Bad Habits

Now, let’s get into the 5 bad habits that are killing your gains.

1. Skipping Workouts 

If you skip one workout, you’ll skip several. Workouts give our body the stimulus it needs for change. Whether that’s losing fat, gaining muscle, or both. But working out infrequently isn’t enough. In anything you do, working out included, you require consistency. A workout skipped today opens the door for a workout skipped tomorrow. Don’t let that happen.

2. Not Resting Enough 

Almost the opposite of skipping workouts is working out too much. If you try to train above your body's capabilities, you’re going to burn out, risk injury, and end up spending more time away from exercise, maybe even more than if you skipped workouts. Overcoming skipping workouts requires discipline, and so does taking time to rest.

3. Comparing Yourself To Others

Comparing yourself to others is easier now more than ever thanks to social media. Before social media, you could only compare yourself with your neighbours, a small pool of people. Now though, you can compare yourself to the people with the best physiques on the planet. That can have two effects: it can motivate you or cause you to give up. Either way, you should recognise that everyone’s story is different, so comparison is pointless.

4. Lack Of Sleep

Sleep is outshone by nutrition and exercise, but it’s just as important. A lack of sleep decreases mood, performance, and recovery whilst increasing the chance of injury. Simply sleeping for an hour longer can remedy all of those, making for a more successful day. Prioritise sleep and watch your health and fitness elevate. 

5. Poor Nutrition 

Show me your diet and I’ll predict your future, within health and fitness anyway. Nutrition is the key variable that determines whether you’ll lose, maintain, or gain weight. Your performance, recovery, digestive health, and so much more, all depend on what you put in your mouth too. If there’s only one thing you can gain control of, it should be nutrition. See Cutting Concepts for more.

Takeaway 

• Your health and fitness goals are determined by your habits. 

• Identify bad habits, then eliminate or take control of them.

• Pay special attention to the five listed in this article.

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