How to Stick to Your New Year's Fitness Goals After 40

Nikkiey: Real quick, the only ask I could ever have of you guys is to help spread the word so we can help more women lose body fat, build muscle, reach their goals, and feel insanely confident. And the only way we can do that is if you rate, review, and share this podcast. So the single thing I ask is that you leave a review. It will take you 10 seconds, and it will mean the absolute world to me and may change the world of someone else.

It's not going to happen in two weeks. It's not going to happen in three weeks. It's not going to happen by you following one training block in a program and then disappearing for three months. It requires you to be consistent over weeks and over months, and it requires you to be consistent with the right type of nutrition that you need to be eating to make those muscle fibers get thicker and stronger, and it requires you to rest and recover. If you rush this entire process by overtraining or by not eating enough, you not only risk injury by overtraining, but your body is not going to help you to recover the way you should, and it's actually going to slow your progress.

What's going on, you guys? Most resolutions fail because people wait for January to feel ready. That's not you. Not this year. So in this episode, we put together a mashup of straight-up actionable advice to crush your new year goals starting right now. No fluff, no empty promises, just strategies to reflect, plan, and actually stick to what you said you'd do. You don't need January 1 to start leveling up. Let's make this year your best year yet. Let's go.

We're going to talk about a crucial concept here: the time that it takes to see results, and why zooming out and playing the long game is so essential for sustainable success along your fitness journey. I have a couple of questions, because I think we've all been here and we've all experienced this. How many of you have felt frustrated because you weren't seeing immediate results from a fitness program you were following? Maybe you're a WarriorBabe and you're like, hey, I've been in this for two months and I'm not seeing the results that I want to see. Keep listening.

Maybe you've been eating right. Maybe you've been working out consistently, but the scale just won't budge, or the muscle definition that you're hoping to see is taking so freaking long. This is a frustration that you have experienced, I've experienced, a lot of us have experienced at some point. And it's easy to get so caught up in the desire for the quick fix and the instant gratification. What I say is, you want to pop your body into a microwave and, out in 30 seconds, you're expecting to have a toned body, to have dropped 5% body fat and to see more muscle definition.

And I think it's not just the instant gratification that a lot of people want. It's also the abundance of before and after photos that everybody sees, and the quick transformation stories and people's successes all over social media. People don't show the hard work and the behind the scenes. And I'm kind of guilty of this. When you go to my Instagram, you see what I look like now and me sharing advice and tips and strategies. But there's no way I could show you, other than going through all of my pictures and old videos, the eight or nine years that I've put in, unless you've been following me for that long.

A lot of people who are new come to my Instagram and they're like, oh, this person just has a good body. But no, it took me eight, nine years to get where I am today, with consistent effort and hard work over that time. I didn't have this body eight years ago.

Building muscle is a slow process because it requires consistent strength training, consistent resistance training, resistance on the muscles. It requires you to have adequate protein intake on a daily basis. And it requires you to give your body proper recovery, which is hard for a lot of people. Those three things are hard for a lot of people, because I typically hear the objection of, I'm too busy and I don't have enough time to go work out. Or, I'm too busy during the day and I don't have time to meal prep or eat enough protein. Or, I don't know what foods have protein in them, or I don't know how much protein I should be eating.

And in terms of proper recovery, people just love to go ham six days a week. You can't build muscle going ham six to seven days a week, because muscle fibers need time to repair and grow stronger. When you lift weights, you create these tiny muscle fiber tears. When you're working out, you're breaking down the muscle. You're not building it up. You build it up after the workout, with the recovery and the nutrition that you eat. So every single time that you work out, you're creating these tiny tears in your muscle fibers. Your body repairs those tears, making those muscle fibers thicker and stronger in the process of recovery. The repair isn't instant, though. It requires consistent training over weeks and months, combined with adequate nutrition and rest.

I think this is what a lot of people think. I know I did at the beginning of my journey, so I feel like I can say this. I went into the gym for like two weeks and I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to get muscle and I'm going to be toned. And then I wouldn't go anymore. I wouldn't be consistent. Building those muscle fibers back thicker and stronger is a huge process to undertake, and the process isn't instant. It's not going to happen in two weeks.

It's not going to happen in three weeks. It's not going to happen by you following one training block in a program and then disappearing for three months. It requires you to be consistent over weeks and over months. And it requires you to be consistent with the right type of nutrition that you need to be eating to make those muscle fibers get thicker and stronger. And it requires you to rest and recover. However, if you rush this entire process by overtraining or by not eating enough, you not only risk injury by overtraining, but your body is not going to help you to recover the way you should.

And it's actually going to slow your progress. So if you're training seven days a week, if you're doing tons and tons of cardio, yet your goal is to be more toned and build muscle, and you're also only eating a thousand calories a day, you risk burnout. You risk hurting yourself. And you actually slow down your progress, because you need the right type of food to recover and to build the muscle fibers back thicker and stronger. You need consistent training, the right type of training, and not doing too much.

A lot of people can't believe it when I say that you need to do less, not more. Especially if you are in the age range of 45, 50, 55, 60, 65 or older, it's about doing less, not more. You can't do what you were doing at 20 or 30 years old anymore. We're talking about a different approach, a strategic approach that actually works for you in these years of your life, rather than what worked for you 20 years ago. And you can still get the same type of results that you had 20 years ago.

But anyway, if you're eating a thousand calories and you're not resting, this whole process can't happen, so it just slows it down. If you're overtraining and not eating enough, and you're doing that consistently over time rather than doing it the right way, and you think that you're speeding up your progress, you're not. You're slowing it down. Just think of it as doubling the time it's actually going to take you to get results. So if you expect to see results in a year doing it this way, expect it to take two years, or even longer.

Depending on the body, or the human, and whatever factors go into you getting results, if you're doing this, it's going to take you longer, period, point blank, end of story. It takes time.

So I want to talk about what trusting the process really looks like and dive into that. You've probably heard that phrase over and over again, especially in the fitness world. Trust the process. Your coach says, trust the process. You've been telling yourself, trust the process. What does that actually mean? Patience and trusting the process are the real keys to unlocking the true potential within yourself. And it really has nothing to do with macros. It has nothing to do with workouts. This is more the mindset aspect of this podcast. If you can accept that that's the key to unlocking your potential along your journey, that's all I hope you take away from this podcast: truly understanding the patience that is required of you to trust the process.

Okay. So first, let's break down what trusting the process really means. Personally, I think this phrase gets thrown around a lot without people fully understanding the true depth of it. It's very surface level when people say it. It's like, you've got to trust the process. But trusting the process means believing in the journey that you're on wholeheartedly, even when you don't see the immediate results that you want to.

It's about sticking to your plan, whether it's your workout routine, your nutrition, your overall approach, the language that you're using with yourself, the narrative that you're telling yourself, the beliefs that you're breaking. It's sticking to that plan, because you understand that real progress takes time. When you trust the process, you're essentially committing to a long-term vision for yourself. And this is where I think it breaks for a lot of people, because they get into it wanting to see immediate results, like next week or the week after.

And when that doesn't happen for them, they get frustrated or discouraged, they think this isn't working, and so they try to change everything up. You have to commit yourself to a long-term vision. You basically have to tell yourself at the start that this is going to take 12 months. This is going to take 18 months. This is going to take two years. This is going to take five years, wherever you're at. If you have 100 pounds to lose, it's going to take time. You didn't just put those 100 pounds on. If you have the last 10 pounds to lose, mind you, the last 10 pounds is sometimes the hardest to lose.

So you have to give yourself that time. You have to be realistic with yourself and really commit to the long-term vision. It doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen in a week. You have to be willing to put in the work consistently, even when it feels like nothing is happening. And I know that can be tough. I know that we live in a world that values quick results.

You can get same-day delivery on just about everything in this world. You can binge-watch an entire series in one weekend. You get Amazon Prime the next day. And you're constantly exposed on social media to before and after photos of transformations that seem to happen in a matter of weeks. But listen to me loud and clear. Fitness, health, true transformations, they don't work like that. There are some people promoting transformations online that happen in three months or six months, but there's also probably a handful of people being promoted on social media who took a year or two years.

That is seriously what we pride ourselves on at WarriorBabe. We celebrate the women who have had results no matter where they are along their journey, but especially the ones who have been with us for two years and have had a true, full-on life transformation. All in all, what it really means is believing in the journey you're on. You have to believe in the journey you're on. And I think that's really hard for people to understand when they're just at the start of their journey. The belief in self is hard to come by.

That's why I think working with a coach, or finding a program that you love and that you're going to commit yourself to, helps: you buy belief. The coaches believe in you before you believe in yourself. So that helps you trust the process a little bit more. But it's not only believing in yourself and believing in the journey you're on. It's also sticking to your plan regardless of whether you're seeing results or not, because you understand that progress takes time, that you have to commit yourself to that long-term vision, and that your body takes time to adapt.

It takes time to change and it takes time to grow stronger. And that's where patience comes into play.

Quick break. If you're finding this episode helpful so far, it would mean a lot if you could hit pause for just a second, leave a quick rating or a review, or share it with someone who could benefit from it. Your support helps more women discover these tools to build muscle, lose fat and feel confident. Thank you so much for being a part of this journey with me.

Thoughts become things. This means that the thoughts you think on a daily basis shape your actions and eventually your results. If your thoughts are negative, if they are self-limiting or filled with doubt, they're going to manifest in behaviors that undermine you and your fitness goals, whether that's skipping a workout, overeating, making poor food choices, or excuse after excuse. I'm too busy. I don't have enough time.

To break it down to the science, when you repeatedly think certain thoughts, they create neural pathways in your brain, making those thoughts habitual. Over time, your thoughts become automatic and your brain operates in a kind of default mode. So if you constantly tell yourself that you can't achieve your fitness goals, you are programming your mind to find ways to make that belief true. But the good news is that just as you developed those limiting thoughts, you can also reprogram your mind to think differently.

And that's what I love so much about the WarriorBabe program and what we've built over the last six years, and have continued to optimize, improve and redefine. It's not just, hey, here's your workout program and here's the nutrition protocol you have to follow. It's, let me understand where this human is, the babe, we call our clients babes, at the other end of the Zoom call. The coach shows up to the Zoom call and onboarding and meets the client where they are at.

And every single client is drastically different. Each client is going to have different thoughts, different narratives, different limiting beliefs. Maybe they're self-limiting. Maybe they're filled with doubt. Maybe they're positive and hopeful and energetic, and they're super excited about their journey moving forward, they signed up and they can't wait. Or, like I said, they're self-limiting or filled with doubt, and they think they can't do this.

Then it is the coach's job to hear this and see how this human is operating in terms of thoughts. And this is where the professional comes into play: no, these thoughts are not going to be conducive to a successful journey moving forward, so I need to help this human. The coach needs to help this human reprogram her mind to think differently. That's where we're breaking old habitual thoughts, habitual patterns and habitual actions.

But it starts up here first: the thoughts, then the emotions, then the actions. First, we're breaking those thoughts. We have to rebuild them. We have to reprogram them. And we have to create better behavior changes, which come from the emotions, which then go into the actions that are going to get you to where you want to be. They're going to help you be successful. That's why it's so much more than just, here's your workout program, here's an app with all your workouts, sets and reps.

Here are your macro numbers that you have to follow and apply. If you have self-limiting beliefs around nutrition, do you think you're going to go follow those macros? No. If you have self-doubt or negative narratives going on in your brain about how you feel in your body, those thoughts and feelings, do you think that you're going to go to the gym to do your workout? No.

And you may be excited. Maybe you're the person I talked about who's super excited and hopeful and has all the faith in the world at the beginning of their journey. But guaranteed, two months in, once it starts to level out and those emotions dip, you're going to feel these thoughts. And that's where you're going to have a coach who can hear you saying those words and help reprogram that type of mindset, because otherwise you're not going to be able to be as successful as you want moving forward.

I think that affirmations are one of the most important tools. You can also do visualization. Visualization is definitely a little harder for people to do, but it's a very powerful tool when it comes to reprogramming your mind. How I do this is I write out who I want to be. I'm currently not that person. But I actually have a whole page defining who I want to be, of how I'm operating differently from now. I'm still in the healing journey of figuring things out, but I know future me has figured it out, and this is how she operates.

So for you, it's like, okay, I'm stuck in a painful feeling in my body. I'm not happy with it. So who do you want to be? What does that person look like? What is she doing? How is she showing up? How is she acting differently? And you want to visualize her. Imagine yourself lifting heavier weights, eating your macros, eating healthy foods, feeling confident and strong.

You can take a few minutes. You don't have to write it down. You can just think about that person, though that might be a little harder to do because, again, you're in your current state. You can either sit and meditate on that person, or, like you did with the affirmations, you can write out the visualization, either in the notepad on your phone or on paper, and read it every day. Taking a few minutes to visualize yourself reaching those goals primes your brain to start looking for opportunities to make those visualizations a reality.

So all in all, you guys, I think this is a really good one. These are some concepts that are hard to understand. So if you need to listen to this podcast again, I would highly recommend it. Or if you need to listen to Joe Dispenza, I would highly recommend that too. The takeaway is that your thoughts and feelings have a direct impact on your actions.

And if you shift your mindset, you can unlock your full potential when it comes to the goals you're striving for and who you want to become. Everything starts in your mind. Whether it's a strength training workout you have to go do, or I need to track my macros at the end of the day, or I need to make sure my macros are aligned for the day, or achieving the goals that you set out to achieve, everything starts in your mind. Everything else, the workouts and the macros, those are the tools and resources to get you there.

But if you don't believe you can do it, you're not going to do it. If you believe you can, you will go do it. And it starts there. You have the power to change the way you think and feel about your journey. It is all in your control. If you reprogram your mind to believe in your strength and your abilities, to visualize your success, and to take consistent action that is aligned with those thoughts, the body you want and the results you want are so freaking possible. But it all starts here.

All right, guys, do what you've got to do to get more aligned with yourself, to rewire your thoughts. Do those affirmations. I'm telling you, do it. And then write down a future you. If you don't know how to do it, go Google how to do it. Or if you're a WarriorBabe, go talk to your coach about how to do it. All right, go do it. I love you guys. I'll see you next time. Peace out.

Hey, really quick before you go, I have one small favor to ask. If this episode brought you value or sparked something in you, take just a moment to hit that review button. Your rating and review make all the difference, helping more women discover the tools they need to transform their fitness and their confidence. It takes less than a minute, but it can change the path of someone else's journey. Thank you so much for leaving that review. I appreciate you so much. Thank you.