Training Readiness: A Fundamental Part of Fitness

Hands up if you’ve experienced the stopping and starting cycle. Where for 3 weeks straight you’ve been crushing your workouts, showing up consistently and feeling awesome, and then next thing you know, you take a 3 month hiatus because life gets in the way. There’s no shame in this, this is one of the most common struggles with fitness! One reason people experience the stopping and starting cycle is because their lifestyle habits don’t compliment their life: they haven’t found the magic of training readiness! You may be thinking, what the heck does this mean??? 

Let’s dive into how Training Readiness impacts your ability to create a sustainable fitness routine.

‘Training readiness’, is the process of repeatedly dialing into your habits and correlating them to how you feel. How you feel each day is a major indicator of how you want to show up for your workouts. A habit tracker is a simple way to measure this.

Keep reading to download a FREE All Day Fit habit tracker!

It can be easy to fall into a pattern of thinking your habits are more sustainable than they are. Have you ever found yourself stuck in a routine of late nights and early mornings preventing you from getting more than 6 hours of sleep? It’s not hard to let that go on for weeks… I have certainly experienced this many times! Habit tracking keeps you honest. Just like poor sleep, you can be unaware of the daily habits that are contributing to feeling tired, weak, and unmotivated. When you track your habits [and the evidence is right in front of you], you overcome any blindness to your behaviour and dig deeper into what’s really going on each day.

There are many habits you can look at, it’s totally up to you! At All Day Fit, our top habits to track are:

• Nutrition
• Sleep
• Hydration
• Stress
• Motivation to train
• Daily movement

More on this below!

Okay so now that you know the why, let’s chat about the how.

One great benefit of training readiness is that it’s personal. You get to pick what habits you want to work on – I highly suggest you start with something small. You want to focus your energy on your prioritized habits – maybe it’s as little as 3 habits! Honing in on the specific will help you crush your goals.  The goal is to get 1% better each day: where these small improvements add up to make a huge difference over time. 

At All Day Fit, before your training session, your coach asks you between 4-6 questions as a pre-training readiness which brings awareness to the following pillars: Motivation, Sleep, Nutrition, Stress, Movement.

All the lifestyle pillars in your life are interconnected.

For instance, your high stress levels may impact your poor nutrition day. Your high quality sleep may impact your high motivation to train that day. Looking at your motivation, sleep, nutrition, stress and movement gives you the 360 picture of how you are physically and mentally feeling. 

Motivation

We look at this pillar particularly because it’s a good indicator of how we’re showing up for ourselves each day. Low motivation could be caused by low quality sleep, not enough carbohydrates or low hydration levels. So when a client indicates that their motivation is low, we know to dive deeper on which habit is potentially causing this. Consistent low motivation is a sign that our client is struggling to develop strength training as a sustainable part of their life – we want to help fix this!

Sleep

Sleep has many benefits on your life – it’s not just about feeling energized in the morning! Sleep can improve mood, encourage a healthy heart, regulate blood sugar levels, increase patience and ability to problem solve, improve memory, and improve performance.

When it comes to your training, sleep is essential to get stronger, create more power, and increase your reaction time. If you’re looking to hit a personal best in the gym (or even just show up regularly!) you need proper sleep.

Nutrition

The nutrients we eat have a direct correlation to the functioning of our brain and body. Proper nutrition includes getting sufficient fats, protein and carbohydrates along with antioxidants, fibre and immune-boosting foods. These nutrients improve your mental and emotional health, stabilize your mood, support muscle recovery, provide you with energy and vitality, and so much more.

Certain foods help you build more muscle in the gym, provide you with the necessary energy to show up to your workouts, as well as protect your body from post-workout injury or pain. Proper nutrition keeps you feeling good before, during and after your workouts! 

Stress

Stress is often caused by events in your life that feel out of your control: work pressure, interpersonal relationships, finance, or even just long to-do lists. When we look at stress as a habit, we don’t look at eliminating it, we look at managing it. There are many habits you can adopt to reduce the cortisol levels in your brain (cortisol = stress chemicals). For instance, strength training has a direct correlation to reduced cortisol levels. So although optimizing your habits won’t necessarily prevent the pressure from work and anxiety of bills to pay, it will help you manage your stress levels so you can still function well in your everyday life.

It goes both ways (pssst… this is why we say these pillars are interconnected!). High levels of stress can have negative consequences on the other areas in your life. It can reduce sleep quality, increase muscle tension (affecting your ability to feel mobile), and destabilize your mood. High stress can also prevent you from showing up for your workouts when taking time for yourself feels completely off the table!

Movement

This pillar can relate to walking, mobility, strength training or other recreational activities. Each has their own benefits, however overall any movement is great for boosting serotonin levels, feelings of accomplishment, improving sleep and heart health, and so much more.

Walking has 20+ benefits on your physical and mental health. Read all about them here!

Print this All Day Fit habit-tracking document for FREE to incorporate training readiness into your fitness routine!

Life can happen and sometimes you won’t be having a perfect score on every habit and THAT IS OKAY.  Creating the routine of having habits means that no matter if you sway from your routine temporarily, you will always come back to the habitual pattern.

There is no wrong way to apply training readiness, but working with a certified strength coach can ensure you are being held accountable to it. Workout with one of our strength coaches in either Personal Training or Small Group Personal Training and elevate your fitness routine. See you there!