Hi, I’m Kris Stokes from Custom Fitness personal training studio, and today I wanted to help you know how to stay consistent with your activity when you’re staying at home. A lot of times, whenever we’re at home, things feel very cluttered, very chaotic, very distracted, and so getting our workouts in doesn’t always happen. That comes from 20 years of being a professional in this field and sending many people to their homes to do their workouts and hearing back from them that they didn’t get it done. That’s actually part of where our small group personal training came from, was that we just had clients that weren’t able to get it done at home for whatever reason, and so they needed somewhere to go to get that done, so we created the small group training program a couple of years ago in order to let them come in for those workouts outside of their private sessions and be able to get that done.

In this day and age, where things have been shifted more to the home realm, whether that’s schooling or work or just life in general, maybe this is new to you. Maybe you’ve just come into being a mom and staying at home is a new thing. Maybe you just changed jobs, and now you have a new schedule. Maybe being at home’s just where you’re happiest, and that’s fine. The problem becomes that within the walls of our home, we tend to be less directed, less scheduled, less focused than we are outside of them. That’s proof whenever people are at home trying to get ready for a Zoom meeting, and it’s their only one that week, and that may be the only day that they’re getting clothes on or putting makeup on or whatever, and the rest of the day just hanging out in lounge clothes, yoga clothes, pajamas, whatever it may be.

I find that there are several pieces of this puzzle of being able to maintain our activity because, believe it or not, I’ve had a very high inquiry for people wondering about how to change their nutrition because they haven’t been as active lately. Well, we can still be active even if we are at home. We just have to be a little more purposeful about it. So the first step is to plan, to really sit down and plan out your week and figure out, how am I going to fit this in? And commit to fitting it in.

The second thing is actually put it on your schedule, so after you’ve got a plan in your mind of what’s going to happen, actually write it into your schedule. I’m a big paper planner type of person, and if I can get it on my paper planner, then I know exactly where it goes and it will more than likely get done. I say more than likely because I tend to overbook things sometimes. For me, in that situation, where I do over-schedule a lot of times, I will actually put in one or two extra workouts, either in the same day that I know is going to be really busy or throughout the week just to make sure if I miss one I get an extra one in, so that’s always an option too.

After you plan it and after you schedule it, the next thing is to track it to make sure that you have some way to follow up on making sure that you’re getting it done. Now, that can be as simple as a spreadsheet or a piece of notebook paper that you’re checking off saying, “Yes, I got it done.” It could be as much as having a close friend or a family member help keep you accountable, hopefully in a not nagging way, but in a concerned way. And it could go so far as having a professional on your side, like a professional trainer, a nutritionist, anything like that to be able to help hold you accountable to what action steps you should be taking for that week.

We’ve got that side down. We know that we need to plan it. We know we need to schedule it, to track it. Makes sense, hopefully. What else do we need to do in order to be consistent? Well, in order to be consistent, we’ve really got to think through this new environment. If you’re used to going to the gym or out by yourself to do your workouts, maybe out in the park, but now you’ve got kids or you’re at home or whatever it may be, we have to think about that new environment. That new environment has other people. It may have animals. It may have phones ringing. It may have laundry going. How do we do this?

Well, we start by making it easy. Not the workout, the setup of the workout. We want to create a space that maybe you can’t keep your stuff out all the time, or maybe you can, but if you can’t, have it available, and have that space so that you know where it’s going to go, whenever you do get to work out. If you have a space that you can leave stuff out in, great. Leave it out. Have your workout area all set up. That way, it’s ready for you when you’re ready, and you’re not trying to struggle to get extra things put together if you have less time that day.

We want to make it easy on the setup, not just in the environment of where we’re setting it up, but we also want to think about the equipment that we’re using. If you’ve been going to the gym a lot and that’s your comfort zone, you may not realize what all you can do with your body with light dumbbells, with bands. There’s a whole myriad of options that you can use that’s light equipment that’ll help you with functional training to help promote the rest of your day to being better.

One of my favorite things is whenever I bring in a new trainer to our team, which doesn’t happen that often, but when I get to, seeing their faces the first time that I get to walk them around the studio and show them what we have, but also what we don’t have. It usually blows their minds because they’re not quite sure what we’re going to do with all this lack of machinery that we have. But it’s a very short time before they start getting very creative and figuring out what all we can do with what we do have. And the reason that we do that, honestly, is because the machines were never built to help promote your functional fitness. They were meant to build strength, and they were meant to build muscle, but not to build your functional fitness, and so we do a lot more functional training here with our bands and our dumbbells and our body weight and all sorts of good things that really help your body to become healthier, become stronger, become more fit from the inside out.

Think about those things wherever you’re getting set up, and if you need help with equipment or with a space setup or anything, we actually do that as well. You can always call us and we can set that up for you or help you to set that up.

Okay, so we’ve made it easy. We thought about our environment. We’ve thought about what equipment we’re going to use. We’re going to simplify all that. We’re not going to pull out 15 pieces of equipment. We’re going to choose maybe one or two to use and go from there. We’re going to make it purposeful. If you’re going to take the time out of your day, with kids running around, pets jumping off of things and phones ringing, to take time to work out, then we want to make sure that what you’re doing is worth it. We want to make sure that we cut down on those distractions so you’ve got your space that you’re doing it in. Maybe turn off your cell phone. Really make sure that you have a plan of what you’re doing rather than just going in there to get in a few reps or get in a few minutes on the elliptical or whatever that may be for you.

Make sure that what you’re doing is purposeful. That doesn’t mean that it has to take an hour. Most of our workouts are actually in 30 minutes or less. It’s very easy to get a very efficient workout with very little equipment in a small space, being purposeful, and getting efficient results. Just kind of think that through.

The third step is to make sure that you get the right help. Right now, there is not a lacking of exercise apps out there. You can get any app with any instructor that you want. You can do any type of workout. It’s all fantastic. However, those are workouts. Those are follow-along workouts for the most part. And so if that’s what you’re looking for, if you don’t feel like you need any specialized coaching, if you’re not needing a one-on-one connection, if you don’t have any specific issues with your body, say lunges or squats that cause issues or a shoulder issue or a back issue, balance trouble, flexibility trouble, you name it. If you don’t have some specialized issue, then maybe one of those apps is perfect for you. That’s great. If that’s what gets you going, go for it.

But if you feel like you need more of a one-on-one connection or you need more of a customized approach to your program, make sure that what you’re doing is really purposeful, that it’s really going to deliver the results that you’re wanting. Because a lot of the workouts that we just follow along with typically will provide results for about 5% of the population. So if you don’t feel like you’re in that 5% for that workout, we either need to switch the app or we need to get some help. Getting coaching is not that hard. A lot of coaches are switching online. I can tell you that personally, Custom Fitness has been doing online coaching for the past eight years. We’ve done it nationwide, helped people all over the place to learn to eat better, to exercise better, to be consistent with what they’re doing, so this is not a new platform for us. It’s just maybe something new that you didn’t know that we did.

Getting the right help is essential to being able to stay consistent with your activity because it helps that accountability piece that we talked about. It helps with making sure that your workouts are purposeful. It helps with making sure that your setup is not too complicated and it helps you to schedule things out because then you have a session that you’re scheduling.

I also wanted to let you know about a really special opportunity. We don’t typically do a whole lot of salesy stuff, a whole lot of discounts and things like that because what we are is we’re personal trainers. We are health coaches. We are nutrition coaches. We’re not your typical gym. But what I want to do, since so many people right now have been kind of gym abandoned, they don’t have a home right now to go to, and I want to be able to get you the help that you need without creating a longterm commitment or anything like that. So what we’re going to do is right now we’re offering the next 30 days for $30, so you get $30, 30 days. It’s unlimited small group personal training.

That means 10 people or less being focused on in each group, with workouts focused on building strength, building muscle, burning fat, building endurance, helping your body to shape and tone and trim. And you’ve got unlimited access to that. You’ll also get nutrition coaching through our team, as well as accountability check-ins. So if that’s something that interests you, feel free to contact us, 806-322-3188, and we’d love to get you started on that.

And what we’re going to do to make that special offer even better is after that first month is over, if you decide to continue with us, we’re only going to bill it weekly. So there’s no longterm commitment, there’s not even a month commitment, because I don’t know when your gym’s going to open back up and I want you to be able to go back to where you’re comfortable. So if that’s the case for you, then you can start back there whenever it works for you. After that first month, we’ll just do weekly billing and let you enjoy the services while we can offer them to you. If we can be a better help to you, feel free to give us a call. Again, 806-322-3188. And either way, work on making sure that you’re being consistent with your exercise at home right now because we all need a little bit more of that. Have a great day.