I first got into health and fitness when I was in my early 20s. I bought Kayla Itsines’ Bikini Body Guide and, for the 10 weeks leading up to my summer holiday that year, I followed it religiously.
Following that I flip-flopped between many different health and fitness trends from weight training to Yoga to Joe Wicks style HITT sessions.
In that time I’ve come to the realisation that a lot of what is sold to you online is a load of rubbish.
These plans and fitness gurus can help, but in my case they probably did more harm than good.
These days I am a lot more balanced in my approach to fitness. It’s the reason I have been able to consistently go to the gym 3 times a week for around 5 years. (If you want to know more about how I manage my workouts around a full time job read my post on how to work out smarter here).
In this post I have revisited some of the many many mistakes I have made when it comes to my health and fitness routine. Read on below to make sure you don’t fall into the same traps as me, wherever you are in your fitness journey.
1. Using food tracking apps
Some fitness journeys start before you even get into the gym, with your diet. As all good fitness gurus will tell you: abs are made in the kitchen.
In the past, to achieve the perfect diet, I have obsessively used the food tracking app my fitness pal. For months on end I have tracked every single thing I ate.
If it was a single snack or shop bought ready meal – that was easy. I could scan it directly using the barcode. Home cooked meals were harder. I had to weigh out exact amounts of each ingredient and then weigh out the portion I ate to calculate the total amount of calories.
If I went out or if someone else cooked, I got anxious since I had to guess the calorie amount and I didn’t know if my guesses were widely out or not. If I went over my food target, it was a bad day. I would have to make sure I made it up the next day by going under.
Sometimes I also paid attention to the macros as well as the calories counts. This, for me, was an even more extreme version. I kept track of not just calories, but counts of carbohydrates, fats and proteins every day. It often felt like I was tying myself in knots trying to get every count in the target range.
Long story short, this was an insane way to live. I usually only managed it for a couple months at a time until I had a minor breakdown, deleted the app and spent the next month eating nothing but junk food to get over the stress.
I often get this all or nothing mindset which makes me take food tracking way too seriously, to the point of obsession.
My lesson learnt here was to stop tracking my food. Instead l like to think about diet in a more long term sense rather than what I specifically ate on any given day.
2. Not taking rest days / Trying to fit in too much
It’s obvious, but we only have so much time in the week. It is not possible to train for multiple things at once.
I used to make these crazy fitness plans where I was trying to increase my strength in the gym and train for a half marathon and play football twice a week. To fit everything in, I had to cut down my number of rest days. And on some days I even had to have two fitness activities scheduled.
I thought it was all in the mindset. If I wanted to achieve these things I just had to stick to the plan. However this quickly turned out to be more difficult than I expected.
Firstly, I was tired all the time. My body was constantly sore because there was no recovery between sessions. I found myself going running the day after doing brutal squats in the gym or playing football with aching abs from a core based circuit the day before.
Then I started to get injured.
I developed pain in my shins from all the running without recovery. The pain didn’t go away for months as I pushed on with my plan hoping it would get better on its own.
In addition to this, I found I didn’t have enough time to see my friends or do any other activities. I was supposed to be doing some kind of exercise EVERY DAY.
Eventually I just burnt out. I stopped getting enjoyment from my plan and I gave it up. It was only after I calmed down and rested that my leg pain finally went away.
3. Forgetting to stretch and missing muscle groups
For a long time, stretching was not part of my regular workout. Stretching, to me, felt like an optional extra. Something that was nice to do but not a necessity.
At the gym, I used to always be in a rush to get home and hardly ever fancied staying an extra 10 minutes to stretch. I didn’t really see the point because I was pretty flexible even without stretching.
In addition to this, I planned my gym sessions around key compound movements such as squats and deadlifts. I didn’t bother to train the smaller muscle groups like calves, biceps and forearms separately.
Again I didn’t really see the benefit because I didn’t want massive calves or biceps.
However when I got the leg pain mentioned above, I went to see a physio. I thought I needed insoles to change the way I was running.
Instead I was told my calves were weak and inflexible. It had caused me to develop a condition called anterior tibialis tendonitis: muscle strain down the front of the shin.
The solution? To train my calves specifically at the gym and work on my flexibility.
Since doing this the pain has completely gone away and I feel very foolish for neglecting this area for so long.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed other niggles in my wrists and in my back. I’ve started training my forearms to increase my wrist strength and stretching my back to improve my posture.
I didn’t realise before, but it is actually so important to stretch and take care of all parts of the body.
4. Drinking too much alcohol
At university I was a big drinker. I loved going out with my friends and dancing the night away. I started each night with a boozy pre-drinks and then headed merrily off into town to continue the drinking.
This behaviour lingered after I graduated and I found myself often going out at the weekend and then wasting my full sunday in bed with a terrible hangover.
It was incredibly annoying to me that I only had 2 free days a week and I was wasting one of them completely by being so hungover.
Drinking on a school night was obviously better since I could be hungover at work instead of on the weekend. While there are ways to make this easier (see my post on how to survive a brutal hangover at work), eventually even this became too painful for me as well.
It wasn’t just that I was wasting my time. My drinking meant I was making bad choices when it came to health and fitness. I was missing workouts, missing meal prep and eating lots of junk food.
So I started cutting down the drinking a little bit. And as soon as I did I realised how much better I feel when I’m not hungover!
I got into a positive feedback loop where the less I drank, the more annoyed I would get at myself when I did get hungover. Which then made me decide to drink less.
I still drink alcohol these days, but I rarely drink enough to get hungover. (Last year I counted only 7 hangovers!) I feel much happier and much healthier. Plus it’s now much easier to stick to my health and fitness plans.
5. Consistency (not perfection)
As mentioned already, I have a bit of an all or nothing mindset. This means when I decide I want to go after a particular goal such as losing weight, increasing my 5km time or getting stronger at the gym, I have a tendency to get obsessive with sticking to my plan.
There was a period of time a few years ago where I kept a bullet journal. In my journal I created a custom page designed to track my fitness progress. I drew a number of boxes to represent each day and coloured them according to how that day went. The box was blue if I stuck to my diet and red if I did not.
I found it extremely painful to have to colour in any boxes red. I would do everything possible to stay in the blue even if it meant saying no to social events and other plans.
If I ever did colour in a box red, I felt like a failure.
Eventually though this level of perfectionism becomes too much. I found myself time and time again unable to stick to my plan. So I quit. Because if I can’t do it perfectly then what is the point?
This is a mindset I’ve been trying really hard to change recently.
There are always going to be things that come up in life that get in the way. You can get sick, you can have a family emergency, you can have 3 birthday parties fall into the same week!
The point is not to be perfect all the time, it’s to be consistent over time.
If something comes up and you miss a workout, it is OK. In fact it is to be expected because that’s life! But instead of getting down about it and quitting, you make sure that as soon as you can, you get back onto the right path.
Being consistent over time will always yield better results than short term perfectionism and quitting.
6. Not following a plan or recording my workouts
The gym can be a busy place. It often feels like a battle to get the machine or equipment that you want at the right time.
I tend to do badly in stressful situations and for years, I would decide what workout I would do based on what equipment was available. Rather than following a specific plan and try to improve each week on those specific exercises.
I made progress at the start in this way, but I quickly plateaued. I found it frustrating that I was going consistently to the gym but not really seeing any changes in my strength or my physique.
My boyfriend constantly told me I should be sticking to a plan and tracking my workouts but I found it too tricky given my haphazard workout schedule.
It was only when I moved gyms to a slightly quieter gym that I actually tried sticking to a plan and writing down exactly what I did.
For the first time, I began to see progress. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes I felt too tired to go up in weight or reps. But I always knew exactly where I was compared to the previous week. And more often than not, when I would usually give up on an exercise, if I knew I needed 2 more reps to beat last week I would try my best to do it.
If you are planning on going to the gym, it really is worth getting a proper plan in place and committing to follow it each week. While sometimes you have to swap things around depending on what machines are available, it is not as stressful as I had previously imagined and it really helped me fall back in love with the gym.
Despite my mistakes, I am very grateful I got started on this journey when I did and that I have learnt so much along the way.
If you are starting your own health and fitness journey this year, good luck! You may make mistakes but you won’t be sorry you started!
