Maintenance: The Greatest Incentive of All

Most people work out to achieve a goal. The goal can be quantitative, like losing a certain amount of pounds or being able to lift a certain weight, or the goal and be less defined, like having more energy or just feeling more confident in yourself.  But what happens when you reach this goal? Where do you go from there?

 It may seem like when you reach this point, you are done in your fitness journey, but that’s not so. 

You have just reached the maintenance stage, my friends.  The greatest stage of all.

 In the fitness world, there are three stages of progression:

The Initial Conditioning Stage (where you start to build your baseline of fitness)

The Improvement Conditioning Stage (where you build on you baseline- progressing towards heavier weights, longer runs, more weight lost, whatever your goal is)

 And then finally, The Maintenance Stage.

The maintenance stage does not mean you are done on your fitness journey.  You are never done living a healthy lifestyle- hopefully, most of you know that.  Once a goal is reached you can’t just go back to the indent in the couch eating ice cream with a wooden spoon. 

To truly be in the maintenance stage, there are certain qualifiers.  During maintenance, you are no longer actively changing your behaviors, but you continue to actively utilize methods to monitor and control such behavior.  In other words,  you are not counting calories to reach your goal, but you may still count calories to make sure you are getting enough fuel for the day.  Or you may not go to the gym 4 times a week in order to lose weight, but you still go to keep yourself healthy, active and fend off disease.

The maintenance stage has two aspects: the mental side and the physical side.

If you are mentally in the maintenance stage, it means you have been successful in making sustainable lifestyle modifications. You eat right, you exercise consistently, and you are happy and satisfied with where you are in your fitness journey, you don’t have to white knuckle it anymore.

The physical side to it, is that you are physically exactly where you want to be.  You don’t feel the need to be able to lift more weight, lose more weight, or lower your blood pressure.  You are exercising the recommended amount, eating a healthy diet, and happy and satisfied with how you look, feel and perform.

You aren’t done once you reach maintenance, but you sure can breathe a big sigh of relief.

It takes more energy to increase your aerobic (cardiovascular) and muscular fitness than it does to maintain it as long as the intensity is sustained.

Maintenance of physical fitness is achievable, even when training volume (frequency), but not intensity, is cut in half. 

That’s right: you only have to work out half as much.

Therefore, instead of busting your butt in the gym, you can focus on more fun activities, like tennis, or hiking, or you can simply cut back on the umber of days you exericise per week. 

It is important to also maintain interest and enthusiasm in fitness, as you will need to keep active the rest of your life.

Some ways to do this are

• adding variety to your workouts (partner activities, trying new things, etc.)
• still set goals (train to do 5 pull-ups, sign up for a marathon, etc)
• focus more on the intangible benefits (increased energy, better sleep, better mood, etc.)

 Once you are in the maintenance stage, ideally you should be there the rest of your life.  Sometimes however, people let a little weight come back on, or don’t keep up with their routine as much as they should, and lose some strength. Or maybe they just decide they would like to push themselves further.  If this happens you need to go back to the improvement conditioning stage, set some goals, and up both the intensity and frequency of your workouts to get you on the right track.

Maintenance is the ultimate goal when it comes to fitness.  You’ve hit your goals and you’ve made lifelong modifications to your lifestyle to keep you healthy.  Most and best of all, you can relax your workouts, and really enjoy them.  Its a lot of work to get to this stage, but once you are there, its your time to be rewarded for all that hard work.