We all know we can be better, stronger, leaner. But we often don’t know how to get there. The first step toward doing that—without frustration and disappointment—is to know where you are starting from. That begins with a proper assessment.
If a mid-50s woman walks in our door says is, “I need to lose 20 pounds” she may already have set herself up for failure. That’s because she is associating weight with health and fitness. If she doesn’t have enough muscle mass and her postures poor, no amount of weight loss will help her achieve her goal.
What’s more, if she “diets” heavily she will slow down her metabolism and compound the problem.
If your goal is to lose 20 pounds, you need to ask yourself, 20 pounds of what? Fat? Water? Muscle? Focusing on weight without proper body composition won’t get you into that size eight.
What’s the answer? Step one, is to figure out where you are. The best way to do that is to consult a professional trainer who will test to see if you body has:
Following the assessment, the trainer will determine if your goals are realistic, and then wil identify the steps to get you to your goal. If you know where you are starting from and where you are going, eventually you’ll make it.
For our mid-50s woman, that meant recalibrating her goal—taking the scale out of the equation—and creating a program to improve her muscular deficiencies so she could begin to make healthy strides forward. We let the fit of her clothes determine the success of the project. She eventually dropped two full sizes without “losing an ounce.”