„I Reached My Goals“ – What’s The Next Step?

 

You’ve done it!

That picture that you had when you closed your eyes is showing in the mirror. You gained as much muscle mass as you wanted, your body fat is at your optimal level…all of your longterm goals have been accomplished!

What to do now?

What to do when you just wanna maintain that state and that is your new goal?

To be totally honest with you, when you DO reach that goal of yours you will probably set another goal to reach which is true in most of the cases but let’s say that you just want to stop there and maintain that shape.

Now if you are still chasing that goal stop for a moment, close your eyes and imagine that you got there.

Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?

It’s fun to imagine, we can’t say it isn’t but as long as you have realistic long-term goals and you’re willing to put all the time and effort to reach them, getting to this „closed eyes“ picture of yourself is pretty possible.

So what to do when you once get there?

Well FIRST and most obvious and important thing…

You can’t stop your training, you can’t stop your eating habits.

There can’t be any scenario in your head where you just stop everything and sit back and enjoy the look in the mirror.

The bad news is that if you stop working out, you will gradually lose more and more muscle. And if you just adjust your training to burn additional calories to stay in that shape and you don’t adjust your calorie intake, you will gradually start to gain fat too.

Basically, what we’re trying to say is if you want to maintain the look that you have you will NEED to maintain the workout and the diet routine but you will need to adjust it to your needs (which is maintaining your current state).

What adjustments are we talking about?

We will give you these options:

1. Your diet
2. Your weight training
3. Your cardio

 

1. DIET

This adjustment is pretty simple and basically what you need to do is to set your calorie intake to a level where you won’t take extra calories because you are not interested in weight/muscle gains and no more calorie deficits because you are not interested in getting leaner.

What you can do is set your calorie intake on maintenance and eat that amount from that point on.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that you need to be 100% strict about your calories but you will still need to keep track of your body weight, body measurements etc…and simply react if you see any changes in the way proper to that change.

The only thing that you REALLY need to take care of is your daily protein intake as it plays a crucial role in muscle maintenance.

Design your diet plan around whatever you feel most comfortable with yourself and in which you enjoy the most.

 

2. WEIGHT TRAINING

What about those weights???

Well, obviously, the major change that you will need to do is to stop pushing yourself for progression and gainz. Not forever, but for the most of the time as your new goal is to maintain your current level of muscle and strength.

You should consider lowering your training volume and frequency if needed.

This comes due to that you need different training volume/frequency when your goal is to gain muscle and your training volume/frequency when your goal is to maintain your muscle.

If by that time you fell in love with weights and gym and have plenty of time to fit in your training, you could still train 4-5 times per week, if your volume/frequency is adjusted right of course.

But the optimal routine would be that you train 3 times per week for your maintenance.

If you can only afford 2 training sessions in one week you should consider looking our training programs on our  mobile app WorkoutMemo.

 

3. Cardio

Maybe this is the part that you hate doing the most but in order to lose fat/preventing fat gain, you need to include some cardio training to maintain your level of fitness.

If you did some cardio in past to help you lose some of your body fat and you wonder how much cardio should you do when you just wanna maintain that the answer is pretty simple.

If your maintenance is on 2000 calories per day, and you eat food worth around 2200-2400 calories, that is 200-400 calories that you need to burn on cardio. But if you consume exactly 2000 calories per day then you don’t need cardio at all. Simple as that.

If you wanna do your cardio or not is completely up to you and how much calories you eat per day.

Listen:

If you wonder what is your next goal now when you’ve reached this one you won’t find that answer here but there is a little something we can do in order to put you on the right path.

We won’t brainstorm your potentially new goals in order for you to choose one of them but as long as your fitness goal is reached maybe you wanna take another look in the mirror and ask yourself if there is anything that you would like to fix, or make bigger, or maybe even pack some additional endurance etc…

Or you can just enjoy your life now that you have the body you’ve dreamed of. Sit back and admire yourself in the mirror as your hard ass work and sacrifice has paid off!

 

Team GYMBERS.