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Create a Transformation in Your Life

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I ran across an interesting book at Costco the other day while shopping. It’s called Transformation, and it’s a follow up work by Bill Phillips to his life changing book, Body for Life, which was published 11 years ago.

If you have been a reader of this blog for any length of time, you know that his first book changed my life. In twelve weeks following the Body for Life program, I lost over 25 pounds and cut my body fat percentage by over 30%. And the muscle that I gained, helped me keep the weight off for years.

body-for-life

Bill’s new book is more holistic than his first, covering not just diet and exercise, but also mindset and well being. His weight training and exercise program is a kinder and gentler version of the original but still achieves amazing results. It’s written from the viewpoint of someone in their forties, that wants to live an incredibly healthy and happy life.

It’s the inspiration from this book and my experiences with weight training and exercise that I want to use to create a focused goal planner for fitness that can help us lose weight and create a focused and sustainable exercise program. The planner will be flexible so you can use it with most of the popular fitness programs on the market such as Body for Life.

box-modify

To do it , we’ll modify our planner in a couple of different ways that will allow us to track our progress with multiple check-off boxes and keep a weekly tally on our weight.

We’ll aim for a twelve week initial program and focus on a standardized start and end time. We’ll also look at bringing in a coach or mentor to help keep us accountable along the way. Stay tuned as we get started.

Focused Project Planner

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The key to completing any project or reaching any goal is to work on it in a focused and organized manner. The better the planning, the better the completed project. With that in mind, I would like to introduce the first draft of our Focused Project Planner using our F.A.S.T. system to help you reach your goals quickly.

The planner is a free download and comes in two formats. One is completely customizable in Microsoft publisher and the other is a print only PDF version that you can print on any machine that has Adobe acrobat reader on it.

Here are the major components…

Focused-project-planner

The planner is based around a twelve week time frame, but can easily be expanded with multiple sheets. There is a place for project title, work location and timeframe along with our focused work time, accountability partners, and project milestones.

The sheet is easy to set up and has two boxes per day for easy check-offs. To give you an idea how the system works, I’ll post three example setups in the next few days which will include…

  • Our Name and some personal information
  • The focused time period we plan to work (example: 48 minutes)
  • The scheduled time for the focused time period (example: 6 to 8 am)
  • The location we plan to work on our project
  • The time period to reach our goal (example: Twelve weeks)
  • Milestones along the way to keep us on track (example: weekly review)
  • Completion date and intended results (example: lose 12 pounds by Oct 15)
  • Checklist that will mark mark daily/weekly completion
  • A list of people that will hold us accountable and contact information
  • Tools and supplies needed for success

Why not download the template today and give it a try. Stay tuned over the next few days as we put the FAST system planner through three different planning challenges.

Fast Planner Download

Putting Together Our FAST Planner

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In my last post, I talked about creating a document to track our progress on a long term goal using the FAST method which includes…

1. Focused work means working on one thing at a time. You turn off all distractions such as e-mail, web browsers, and close your door if possible, and focus on one key task.

2. Accountable means setting a short term and long term goal for your project and letting someone else hold you accountable for completing the task.

3. Scheduled means setting a time and place for your focused activities and also setting a completion schedule with milestones along the way.

4. Time is the amount of focused time you will spend on each interval of the project and also the amount of days or weeks to complete the project.

Looking at our objectives above, we’ll need to include the following items.

  • Our Name and some personal information
  • The focused time period we plan to work (example: 48 minutes)
  • The scheduled time for the focused time period (example: 6 to 8 am)
  • The location we plan to work on our project
  • The time period to reach our goal (example: Twelve weeks)
  • Milestones along the way to keep us on track (example: weekly review)
  • Completion date and intended results (example: lose 12 pounds by Oct 15)
  • Checklist that will mark mark daily/weekly completion
  • A list of people that will hold us accountable and contact information
  • Tools and supplies needed for success

The goal will be to include these items on a one-sheet planner in an organized fashion for quick reference and a place to check off completed items. It will need to be laid out in such a way that completed items can be checked off easily and our progress seen at a glance.

Over the weekend I’ll design a basic prototype and we’ll give it a try. Stay tuned.