2023 Goals:
The main focus of my fitness goals this year is to building healthy lifestyle the habits that will make losing the weight to reach my goal weight of 76.5kgs easy but will also make it possible to keep the weight off for years to come! Once the habits are formed I can then set more specific goals next year to reach my BMX goals when I start racing again.
My health/ fitness goals for the year are:ls
- Lose 30kgs
- No fizzy drinks
- Go to the gym 4x a week
- Cycle for 1 hour per day
- Keep up with intermittent fasting
My BMX goals are:
- Manual 100m by the end of the year
- Learn to jump
My personal Goal for the year is:
- Cut out use of Facebook and you tube
My Finance goals are:
- Save £300 a month to build up my emergency fund by the end of the year.
- No takeout for a year
- Sell all unused bikes
So my main goal for the year is to lose 30kgs to get my weight down to around 76.5 kgs by the end of the year. I am pretty confident that by achieving my smaller goals I will be able to reach my weight goal by this time next year as I only need to lose 0.58 kgs a week for 52 weeks to lose 30kgs. To get to this goal I have set my fitness goals:
No fizzy drinks
This is to cut out all empty calories and to try and get over my addiction to Coca Cola. This is an effective weight loss tool as I have lost 2kgs at the end of the year simply stopping drinking all fizzie drinks! This will also dramatically reduce my sugar consumption too not to mention cut out all the other crap that I was ingesting when drinking up to 3l of coca cola a day!!!
Go to the gym 4x a week
I have chosen to keep this goal just about going to the gym 4x a week as it is more about building the habit of going to the gym rather than what I am actually doing when I am there. Once the habit is formed I can get more specific later on. This goal is mainly to start building a base fitness level and also to rehab my various Injuries so that next year when I start BMX specific training again I will have a good foundation to build on. I set this goal as the hardest thing for me is actually getting to the gym, once I am there I am pretty good at getting the workout done so by setting this goal I will make sure that I complete 2 x Lower Body and 2 x Upper Body workouts a week.
My preferred days to go to the gym are Mon, Tue, Thur, Fri but I then have Wed, Sat and Sun to make up any missed days each week so it should be pretty easy to make this goal each week.
I have just bought a 2023 diary from Amazon with one day per page to use as my fitness diary to make it easier to plan workouts and record my progress this year.
Cycle at least 1 hour a day
This is another habit forming goal which is pretty vague on purpose to encompass ALL the cycling that I do so the 1 hour could be riding to work or the gym and back, riding the smart trainer or practising manuals or going to a pump track or the BMX track it doesn’t matter its just about getting in the habit of getting on a bike and riding for at least an hour a day! I expect to do more than an hour most days and I am thinking that I will work in the office in the mornings most days so that this goal should be pretty easy to achieve each week.
I am tidying and re-arranging my flat today to get the smart trainer setup permanently in front of the TV to make it faster and easier to use so that I have one less excuse for not using it!
Continue to intermittent fast
This goal should be pretty easy to stick too as I have built up the habit of not eating until midday most days in 2022. I have noticed that by intermittent fasting I am more focused and productive in the morning compared to the afternoon when I an in my eating window and I have noticed that I eat much less food when I am fasting too as it it very hard to eat a lot of food in the 8 hour eating window. Also my stomach feels much less bloated when I am intermittent fasting and I seem to get leaner faster too.
The only thing that I am not sure about is how much harder fasting will be when I am working out in the gym in the morning and then having to stay in a fasted state for another 5 hours, I guess I will find out in the next couple of weeks as I start to go to the gym more regularly.
Manual 100m
I have decided to set a distance of 100m for this goal so that I can break the goal down into 10m increments and build up to 100m. I have been setting learn to manual as a goal for the past 3-4 years but I have never really set any measurable distance goals so I thought that setting a goal would make the goal more achievable. I worked out that most BMX jumps are less than 30m so I set a goal of 100m so that I will be able to comfortably manual any jump on any track by the end of the year. As I am injured and can’t race this year I may as well dedicate some time to improving my manuals to make me faster and smoother when I return to racing in 2024.
Learn to jump
I have been less specific with this goal as it is harder to quantify than flat manuals as jumping distance is jump dependent more than technique dependent. To achieve this goal I will need to be able to jump all of the jumps on Bath track apart from the triple on the 3rd straight. This will be a hard goal for me to achieve as at the moment I can’t jump any of the jumps as I have totally lost my nerve when it comes to jumping! I think that with a lot of practice on the pump track and track with a year of practice this goal is achievable. I want to learn to jump again as there are jumps on each track that the only fast way to get over them is to jump so I may as well dedicate some time to getting better at jumping this year to make me faster in 2024.
Cut out Facebook and YouTube
I have noticed that I have been wasting a lot of time on my phone on Facebook and YouTube (4-5 hours a day) which is a total waste of time and has been causing me to not get up and workout in the mornings. I have also noticed that at weekends I will wake up early and go back to bed on my phone until the afternoon which is not healthy and also wastes a lot of time.
I plan to try and only use my phone during work hours to reduce the amount of time wasted on Facebook and YouTube and also to break my dependency on my phone. To do this my phone will stay on silent on my desk from 16:00 until 7:30 the next day every day.
By putting phone restrictions in place I will have an extra 4-5 hours a day to workout, study and work on my side hustles.
This should also make it easier to get back into the habit of waking up getting out of bed and getting my day started straight away. This will in turn make it easier to get up and go to the gym first thing so that it is ticked off of my list early in the day to make my day less stressful and also start they day with a win so that I feel more productive throughout the day.
By not wasting time it will free up plenty of time to cook food, clean the house and more importantly, start my side hustle of using my vinyl cutter to sell number stickers online to earn some extra cash as well as build my own business to hopefully work towards being debt free and financially independent as soon as I can.
Financial Goals
My financial goals are designed to work towards being debt free and financially independent as soon as I can! I set the goal of saving £300 a month as my goal as it is basically the minimum amount that I currently spend on Deliveroo and Uber eats a month so it should be achievable by just cutting out Takeouts and shopping on the apps.
By saving £300 a month for a year I will have saved £3600 which will pay off my overdraft and be a good emergency fund for the future so that I don’t have to rely on credit cards so much.
I also plan to sell all unused or unwanted bikes this year so that I can put the money towards paying off my debts and working towards being debt free faster. I currently have over £2000 tied up in bikes and parts that I do not use so selling them will make a fair bit of money and clear a lot of debt really quickly!
I will sort through the bikes and clean them and take photos and get them up for sale today so that I can start paying my debt off as quickly as I can.
As a minimum I have the following bike to sell:
1 x Specialised Road Bike
1 x Sunday 24″ Park Bike
1 x Inspyre 20″ race Bike
1 x Octane One Jump Bike
1 x Dialled 4X frame
1 x Octane One Jump Bike Frame
On a low estimate that should make back between £1500 and £2000 as well as freeing a lot of space in the house/garage.