#362: How to Plan Your Year to Include ALL E

Hello there, my friends. Welcome to today’s episode, welcome to December if you’re listening to this, right when it comes out, here we are last month of the year. So I’m going to take this month to kind of yes, we want to finish 2023 by head. So enjoy for like, what year are we finishing, we are finishing 2023 strong. Of course, and lots of things we’ve been talking about here recently, my view on this month is not that it’s a wash and not that it should be ignored. But that it should be, in my opinion approached like, we are going to just try to maintain, I don’t try to make any fat loss goals, obviously not right now. But anytime you’re like, what I’m not pregnant, this is not the time that I’m trying to lose weight or lose body fat or any of that stuff. It’s fine. If you are we’ve talked a little bit about that in these holiday specific episodes. However, I just think, you know, taking this time to finish out what we’re doing staying consistent with what we’re doing all the things we’ve talked about maybe doing three or four workouts a week, this you know, last month of the year, that’s what we’re doing in the chasing greatness group, which is our monthly workout group, we’re just doing three workouts a week with an optional fourth, but then trying to really hold ourselves to that like by hook or crook you are getting those workouts in is the idea. And I hold myself to that as well pregnant and not pregnant and all that. So I’m doing that with you as well. And right up until hopefully, maybe even at the time this comes out the baby will be here, but I don’t know. So we’ll see. But that is my plan, you know, to do the same thing.

So I would, you know, advise you exactly as I advise myself. And now I kind of want to segue into using this month to prepare ourselves for a really great 2024 You might be listening to these episodes in January because I know December can be a whirlwind. And it’s like, oh my gosh, I do that where then I have a listen to my usual podcasts, I’m like other things are falling by the wayside. Because just schedules are different and all of that. So wherever you’re listening to this, it’s not too late, even if you’re catching this, you know, in March of 2024, these things can still apply. I love the new year, and we’ll talk about that as it approaches even more. And throughout these episodes. But there’s you know, every day is truly it’s corny, but everyday is really like a new beginning. And it’s new chance of you know just winning the day talk about that a lot that I did not coin but somebody named Andy Frisella who’s an entrepreneur, to just win the day that you’re in. So these can apply. You know, whenever you listen to them, I just want to say that now today, we’re specifically we’re going to talk about how to plan your year, again, setting ourselves up for success, including different exercise modalities, and kind of just an overarching view of especially this is gonna, if you are newer, let me back it up. If you’re newer to working out to trying to eat in a more macro balanced way, I talk a lot about this 8020 idea, and tracking your macros within that or just making sure your macros are balanced within that. That might be enough, right now we’re like, Okay, that’s all I can, you know, kind of wrap my head around, I’m just kind of getting into strength training, or maybe I haven’t sold yet on the strength training and you’re doing a mix of a lot of stuff, which is fine, it mixes great, as long as you’re doing strength training. But, um, today, I’m going to take it a little step further, because a lot of you have been with me for a long time and you now are taking even some of like my you know, programs like a lot of you are in the chasing greatness group, who then are doing a couple days at the gym and incorporating different exercises and different goals and things like that. And we’re all even if you’re in any kind of group program, or you go to a group class, you’re in one of my group programs, you know, there’s ways to personalize it. And we talked about that a lot in my programs, but so when you’re looking at your coming year, you should not be just cutting and pursuing fat loss all the time. Nor should you just be working out the same way all the time. So this is what I naturally do. You’ll notice and I’ll talk about give examples.

But I actually do this when I come up with long term programs like chasing greatness group is the best example of this because that is the monthly workout program where you know, I’m planning out 12 months so at the beginning of the year, I’ve already done it of course for 24 but I will sit down and and a lot of you we crowdsource it this year I took your opinions in a survey and you know, found out what you wanted to prioritize to we all kind of weighed in on this. But there’s things that I’m always going to make sure I incorporate I don’t always say it. So this is like again, whether you’re in one of mine or not. Because if you’re in one of mine, I’m kind of doing it for you. But if you’re doing your own thing, which a lot of you are and are either going to the gym working out at home or you’re developing your own workouts doing your own thing. This is going to be hopefully helpful to you. That’s the goal of it. and walk you through the process, I kind of do to make sure I’m hitting the main points because you do not I just want to say one more time, I want to spend the entire 12 months of the year, doing hit style workouts doing really intense, like fat loss, either style workouts or just cutting, making sure you’re, you know, taking in less than you’re getting the whole year long, you don’t want to live there. And it’s kind of like always just chasing something too. But there’s a lot of things you’re gonna leave by the wayside then. So even then, when you get to your fat loss goal, or you know, most people, it’s very ironic. So I want to let you know that too. Because you might, you might not be selling you on this, you might be like no Brittany, but I need to lose 50 pounds. So like I do need to do fat loss here. You can, I mean, just say that. I just had a client that I worked with last year who was in the chasing greatest group. And we did coaching calls along with it. So we check in, I’d look at her food logs, we touch base, via email via our coaching calls. And over the course of like eight months, she did meet her goal of losing 30 pounds. So and then still had some of the year to play with clearly. But even within that, so she was still losing fat, she wasn’t plateauing or anything, we included all kinds of things because she was doing the chasing greatness workout. So she was getting her balance, she was getting her flexibility, she was getting her mobility, she was getting all these other things too. So just let her know that the two can coincide, you can be losing fat without doing only one style of eating or one style of working out. A lot of times our bodies respond a lot better when we are not just mixing things up for the sake of mixing things up giving them a break. Focusing on other things. Even sometimes when we back off the workout, you know, intensity, if we go down, I should say frequency, we go down from six workouts a week to four but we prioritize sleep, you would be surprised it maybe you just drop fat because now your hormones are back in balance, you know, so there’s so many factors at play. It’s a really, I tried to give a really holistic view to health and fitness in general, because we can’t just isolate it like, what’s the best type of workout for failures, what’s the best type of nutrition like it all factors in and our bodies need breaks, even if you just came to me now and said, Brittany, I want to lose weight, we’ll just stick with that 30 pounds in the next eight months. Because that is what that lady did, which was not necessarily the exact goal. But to actually we came in a little before our deadline, actually. But you know, and said like, so what I just cut for eight months, no, like, I would be showing you how with macros. If we were getting into the nitty gritty of that, how we need to be in a cut, then we need to reverse diet back up, then we need to maintain that we need to do it again, because your body can’t stay there. You know, it’s not going to optimize fat loss to just Cut cut cut for a year, that just becomes eating low calorie. Alright, so if you are trying to do this at home, and plan out your year, so that was the point of this.

First thing I want you to consider is taking into account what you enjoy that might be seasonal, or what you like to do over the course of a year. Again, if you’re newer and you might be like I don’t really enjoy anything about working out that’s fine. All right, bear with it. But if you know certain things about yourself, even mood wise, okay, like, for me, I like to run I do not usually run in the winter sometimes. Last year, I did start in January because I knew that I wanted to do a race in August. So I had that goal in mind and thought I had a baby in July and thought okay, I’m gonna like work my core, get my strength back start walking. We’re going to start running in January and started you know, with just a mile guys, that’s where you start. And then by you know, August I knew I had the race so I did run through the winter because I knew if I started in June or July I could not possibly run 50 miles at the end of August. So I did run through the winter last year however, like this, you know, also I’ll get into like taking into account your season of life. Obviously if I’m having me in December I’m not gonna start running in January anyways. But think things to think about do like things he’s not a lot of you I know listening do do some different races and things in the summer, five K’s half marathons, marathons, etc. Spartan Races, a lot of you do so take that into account with your you know, entire year plan because if you’re doing a Spartan Race in June say then maybe yeah, March April May. You want to specifically be including a lot of grip strength and upper body like pull ups to get up and over those walls, working monkey bars in there, that kind of stuff. But January February, maybe you’re just like man, I really need to get stronger like my legs need to get stronger for those hill climbs and stuff. So January, February. I I’m going to need to bulk in calories. So eat a little more than I think my body needs. And I need to focus on building strength. So I’m going to use high heavy weights, low reps, like six to eight reps, instead of doing these 10 to 12 reps, you know, kind of workouts,
I’m gonna drop it down to six to eight, and I’m going to really work on building strength for January, February. So then March, April, May, I can start kind of trying to cut a little bit and lose any, you know, body fat that I might have gained from the ball while I start working on speed work, and maybe my grip strength stuff, my upper body, stuff like that. Still, the more like skill based things like monkey bars, where you want to feel lighter and leaner. That’s just an example. So think about if there is anything you like seasonally, that you would need to incorporate there a lot of you to like, you might have a hobby that you would want to work around, I used to train a couple of people who might be listening to this podcast, there’s several ladies who specifically wanted to get stronger to shoot bow. So we focused on Okay, one’s bowl hunting season. So during the season, you’re probably going to be doing a lot more just mobility and stretching and range of motion to the muscles that you’re working there. But those couple months before, we were doing lots of heavy rows, heavy back work, like all those pull muscles that you need to pull back about. Same thing with, Okay, I think you get it, you need an example of every physical activity that we have going on, we’re just gonna say golf. That’s another big one where like it, maybe you don’t get a lot of steps in during the winter and whatnot. And you need to plan that in your workout. Like you need to plan a specific cardio day, whether it’s indoors or outdoors. Because you just don’t do it as much in the winter. You’re like more sedentary but then in the summer, you might not need to do any hit or any cardio because you get so many steps because you golf two times a week, can you walk it? Okay? So all things to consider when you’re looking at your year as a whole, if there is anything seasonal, just kind of jot that down, like maybe grab a piece of scrap paper and just write out the 12 months write out when the seasonal things are. So for me, that would look like I would just over June, July, August, I do a little box and put like to run because I know that I’m going to probably include one or two runs a week in my plan there. Because I know that when this summer sun hits, I’m like, get me outside. Maybe that’s too much. Maybe it’s made June, July, because I started to do it more in the spring. But, and I do like to stretch more in the winter. So stretching is something that should be in there all the time. But I know that I’m more down with those kinds of workouts when I’m cold and wake up a little more like stiff and cold and want to get moving. I like to do that kind of stuff in the morning. So things to know about yourself.

Alright, so that was step one was think about what you might need to consider seasonally.

Step two, is make sure these certain staples are just always in there. This is no matter who I’m programming for. This is going to be in there no matter what. Like even if we have a balanced focus or flexibility focus. These other elements are the bones of the structure of the workout plan style. So number one is strength training is the foundation. So it needs to be in there at least three times a week. So if you’re listening to this, you’re like I only workout three times a week. Well, you know what your workouts are that day then. And then within that within that strength workout, I’m going to talk about the next step is incorporating like diff, what that strength needs to look like to make sure it’s balanced and well rounded. But strength training needs to be at least three times a week. Now there’s fluctuation here and there’s room for personalization. If you love your peloton, you can do three strength a week and two peloton rides a week and that solely comes out to five workouts a week, you still get two rest days, that’s very doable. Or if you’re like I only have three days that I can work in workouts, then maybe you do 20 minutes of strength and you do a 20 minute ride after and now you know your workouts have to be about 40 or 45 minutes. Lots of different ways to play with this. If you know you love to lift like and your goal is to get stronger to grow in strength to maybe compete in something next year or whatever that’s more strength based okay powerlifting you know some of you listening might be interested in that that is going to be a huge factor because you’re obviously not going to be doing much cardio if you’re going to do a powerlifting meet, you’re going to be very heavily focusing on lifting I know that’s not our most of our listeners, but there might be somebody now so strength always has to be in there at least three times a week that’s a staple. Another staple is mobility needs to be either included in your workouts or addition in there at least once a week. So I usually do a mix of this with her chasing greatness workouts. I’m usually doing mobility work right and I don’t always say it like if it’s an upper body day I might put cat About halos on there where you take the kettlebell and it passes around your head. And with a little rotation, we go side to side on that, that’s really good for upper body mobility, I might just stick that on an upper body mode on an upper body day and not say, Hey, this is a mobility move, I do talk a lot of the workout. So I might say that, but a lot of times, I do have a separate mobility workout where we’re foam rolling and stretching, or it’s more Pilates style. A lot of us have been liking that. So I plan to include that for sure in the coming year. And even get more into that. But strength training and mobility need to be in the bones of a workout. Alright, so from there, you’re considering everything right, seasonally, you know, you’ve got to train train couple times, this is fun, it’s fun, I want you to make sure that you’re including all the different things you should be focusing on. So I’m just going to name a couple of these, and just jot them down like in your notes. And then when you’re planning your workouts, I’ll give you examples of what this will look like. So I want you to think about movement on all planes, a lot of times we’re doing things only front to back, like a forward stepping lunge or back stepping lunge, you’ve got to work all planes in the body, it’s really important for preventing injury. So making sure there’s lateral movement in there and making sure there’s rotational movement in there. You know, this is huge, because it’s really functional. You know, that’s a big buzzword is functional fitness, right, you are not usually just walking straight forward and back through your life, you’re bending down picking something up, you’re twisting, you’re stepping to the side to grip something like and these are the times usually endure ourselves if our bodies are not used to moving that way. So things like side lunges, things like those rotating hills, I just talked about making sure you’re working all planes of movement.
You also want to make sure you’re including symmetry work like single sided or unilateral exercises. Examples of this would be like a unilateral row where you’re rowing just with one dumbbell on one side, or you’re doing the everyone’s favorite step ups, which are no one’s favorite. Were one foot is on a bench stepper chair, and you’re pushing up through the heel. And working one leg at a time. single sided work is very important to make sure that you are well balanced that you don’t have one dominant side just taken over. If all you do is squat, and you’re just focusing on this is exactly what I mean about switching things up with a purpose throughout the year. Think about this, if you love a good goblet squat, which I do too. I use goblet squats all the time. But all you do is goblet squat hip thrusts like double leg, double leg, double leg work RDLs double leg then you just increasing getting stronger, stronger, stronger, and you’re just going up in that weight. That’s again, fine. If you were looking for just maximal strength for a short term thing, like that’s fine. If you were building strength, let’s say back to my example of the person who’s doing a Spartan Race in June, if January or February, they were focused on building strength, we would just do a lot of double leg stuff go heavy, that kind of thing. Because you can’t go as heavy when you’re doing single sided. Now, it’s still beneficial even in that work single sided, because obviously, if you catch both sides up to each other, you’re gonna end up stronger in the long run. But say you just love your goblet squats. That’s all you’re doing, you’re almost double, you know, two sides at a time working together, you are going to just max out on weight eventually, like eventually you’re gonna lift as much as you can, or you need to keep buying more weights. And then when you go to do anything single sided, you might realize you have a huge deficiency on one side and your other side is just been kicking in helping because if you’re squatting like one leg can really carry a lot of it and cover it you don’t even notice it. And those kind of little deficits become more noticeable when all of a sudden you have one side responsible for it. So keeping that in mind single sided on both upper and lower body is important. You do also want to make sure that you are working your balance and flexibility. I know I talked about mobility, but balance is super important. It’s one of the key indicators and a lot of studies for early onset dementia is if you are able to stand on one leg, I believe it’s for a minute. So like in our chasing greenness workouts, when we are doing mobility or stretching I always include some kind of balanced challenge. So that’s in there every single month to make sure that we are you know, every single month means also every single week. So every single week, we are working our Beyonds but you know might have like a balance specific month or flexibility specific month. Another thing you might want to focus on is increasing strength. This is something I heard from a lot of you last year was like Okay, I am getting you know I’m enjoying seeing my lift, go lifts going up or doing more compound moves like if you do have access to the gym and you want to start deadlifting or anything like that. But you could obviously do that at home too, if you have the equipment. But that might be the time where you are just focusing on increasing strength as much as you can. So you’re gonna follow a plan that supports that, that would have you eating, basically to break down the nutrition fees with it to really simplify it. And again, we talked about this more within our groups. So inside of the Jason greenish group, I’d say, each month, like, hey, it’s a fat loss month. So nutritionally, I want you to take yourself down to a little bit of a cut, let me know if you need to, you know, need help with what that looks like, whatever. But when we’re in a strength month, I say, Hey, we’re in a strength month, so you need to be eating enough, and maybe in a surplus, so eating more than you’re burning, just for this month to get as strong as possible, then next month, we will take it back to a cut. And if you did gain, like 1% body fat this month, it’ll fly off next month when we’re doing fat loss and did it. So your nutrition needs to support the style of working out that you’re doing. Like last year, when I was training for the race, I had to slowly up my carbs, you know, when my mileage was going up. So these are nuanced things that we talked about, again, more within the program, or just one on one. That’s something we can always talk about in coaching calls, even if you’re not in one of my programs, and you just want to set up a plan, I did that with several ladies last year, where we just sat down, they were like, I have this, this and this come in, I still have these goals. But what should my plan look like and we can set you up like a 12 week plan or something that’s like, Alright, these weeks, you’re gonna be eating this, then increase to this, you know, to get optimal results, everything’s got to really work together. So I’m just gonna give you an example of this. This was actually from I did not even release yet, I will this middle of this month, I’m going to give the 2024 options. So chasing greatest group will still be there, our monthly workout group will announce our fat loss challenges for beginners those kinds of things. So I have not shared with the chasing greenness group yet what 2020 Forest Plan will look like. But this was the outline from the year from just 2023. January and February, we did a fat loss focus. So it’s usually nice to start the year after the holidays, trimming back down going into a calorie deficit, doing a more fat loss focused style workout. So 10 to 12 reps, hits included that kind of stuff. Now, again, I just want to reiterate that even within that fat loss focus in the way I program, my workouts, I still include single side work, I still include balance, I still include mobility, all of that is still in there, just, you know, might not be overtly saying it there. So then in March, we focused on balancing back out the macros just kind of going to a maintenance phase, and having specifically a lower body focus. So we still were strength training at least three times a week, but we were focusing on building really strong legs and glutes. In April, same thing, essentially, we did we maintained calorie wise, and we focused on upper body strength, then made a June we went back to fat loss for that kind of spring slimmed down idea. So we went through a macro cut again, a little more fast paced style workouts, that kind of thing. July, we had a core focus. So even though we work in core all the time, in those previous months, those first five months of the year. In July, we did a lot of core specific challenges in core strengthening. And then August, we did an athletic Power Focus. So our workouts looked like that what you would need for power and performance. September, October was the last fat loss round of the year. So taking advantage of kind of getting into a routine, making sure we’re back on track after summer wears a lot of astray. And then to end out the year, November was I thought really fun. It was aerobic capacity endurance. So similar, a little bit similar to the athletic power month it was like more high rep. So low weights high rep to make sure you had good aerobic capacity, like your heart could handle the workouts as well. We were huffing and puffing a lot and those ones. And then lastly, this last month of the year is about maintenance. So it’s also not too late. If you want to happen with us for December, you’re totally welcome to there’s even a two week free trial. And you can test out what that looks like within there. So in this month of maintenance, yes, we’re working on just keeping our macros the same. Pretty much trying to get out of the holidays without gaining weight is the goal. Keeping our workouts going to help us keep our sanity, or mental health or physical health within these three, and then the optional fourth workouts. I still have mobility I still have single sided work. I still have balance work. I still have all that. So I hope that makes sense. I hope this gives you a holistic view of the year and kind of gives you a springboard to start with, like I said, I would love to help you. I am my coaching call calendar is going to be closed for December just because the baby is coming. And you know, maybe I’ll change it, maybe we’ll open it up. If there’s a lot of interests, you can always email me Brittany and healthy Catholic moms.com. Otherwise, I plan to open my coaching calendar back up for January. And we can get on there as well maybe can jot some things down and get some things going and then we can solidify it in January if you need that. Or maybe, like I said, if you just want it laid out for you, chasing you’re gonna screw might be a fantastic option. We will you can come in right now. But all of the paid in full options for 2024 will be which is a better value. We’ll come up in just a few weeks here. All right. So I hope this was helpful. Next episode. You might hear my two year old is throwing things right above us. So I hear my husband, correcting him. might have heard all that as well. Welcome. This is a family style show here. But next episode, we’re going to talk about decluttering for Advent. So a little bit of a pivot from our health and fitness. And then we’ll get back to planning 2024. All right, so I will talk to you then I hope you have a great rest of your day. And I’ll see you soon

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