I am back! – 2014 Goals and Ambitions

As the title reads, I am back blogging! (Let’s see how long for…)
Yes I did think of giving it up a while ago but as part of my personal New Year Resolutions I decided that I want to try and post at least once a month on here – even if it is just giving an update on the progress in my fitness life!

Anyway just before I go on I’d like to wish you all a belated Happy New Year and hope that you all had a joyful festive season with the loved ones!

Now back to my New Year Resolutions, until recently I had decided to stop blogging and instead use Instagram to share my fitness journey. However I believe that I had let myself down somewhat as I had promised myself to start the blog and do it for at least 1 year. So hence why I am back here and below you will find a  snap of all my personal goals in 2014 – including the blog related resolution. These are all very much personal goals which actually sit outside what I want to do in the gym and my fitness life. If you fancy reading up on more about these here is the link: http://instagram.com/p/ipE5kWJoqC/

If you have visited my Instagram page you may have read that I am aspiring to one day step on stage and compete in either Fitness or Physique modelling . To this effect, over the years I have been seeking to improving myself to hopefully one day eventually be good enough to do so. It is a journey which I am hoping to share with you through my blog. The reasons to this particular aspiration are a complete separate topic and I will touch upon on this on a later post.

Returning back to the title in hand: 2014 Goals and Ambitions.

In 2013 I saw myself reaching probably my best condition yet to date however there is much still to be improved, obviously! Below you can see a picture comparing probably my best shape of 2012 against one of my best in 2013. I tried to find a couple of photos in which the pose was similar to allow for easier comparisons. I feel that there was an improvement but I think that 2014 I can bring an even better condition.

So, just like I have set myself three personal New Year Resolutions, I am also setting myself three fitness New Year Resolutions. Although these are not easily measurable resolutions I feel that they will help me and ensure that I keep on track. My 2014 fitness resolutions are:
1.     Improve my strength – I want to improve my lifts on specific movements these being: Bench Press, Overheard Press, Squats and Deadlifts. I want to make sure that my strength is improving throughout the year even when whilst dieting down. From past experience, I firmly believe that I have seen some of my best gains when adopting a more strength/ power training method which has allowed me to pack on more muscle mass. This is probably the only real measurable resolution as I will be tracking my lifts each time I go to the gym!
2.     Develop certain muscle groups: Shoulders (delts and traps), Calves, Triceps and Abs – I want to really focus on these muscle groups as I feel that they are slightly behind the rest.
3.     Focus on flexibility – so this might be a big hype of the past few years in the fitness world but it is something that I really want to concentrate on which is improving my flexibility through many different exercises including the likes of dynamic stretching, yoga and others. I’ve read a few articles suggesting that this will not only assist my lifts as well as keep my muscles and joints a lot healthier, so why not give it a go.

So here they are! Despite aspiring to step on stage at some point in my life, unfortunately I don’t think I am quite ready yet so I will spend this year focusing on improving further to hopefully do it next year!

This is my first post of 2014, the first of hopefully many. I’m going to work on my blog over the coming weeks to improve the interface and so on. I also realise that for those that don’t really know me I haven’t formally introduced myself and I will aim to do so over the next few posts. Coming up shortly will be some information on my diet as well as my current gym programme.

Here is a thought before I finish this entry, appropriate considering the nature of this post.

“Choosing a goal and sticking to it changes everything.” Scott Reed