Training Partner

If you're looking to follow a work out programme or just eat better, I think one of the best things you can do is find a person or group of people who have similar goals to you as a way of keeping you on track. You may read about it all the time, and I know different things work for different people, but for me I think it's a brilliant idea that I'd recommend.

I was talking to a close cousin of mine over the weekend and we've devised a plan that hopefully we'll stick to that should keep each other on track with our goals. Last year, when we challenged each other over two months, I managed to lose my target of two stone and he completed his target too. We've got a chemistry that blends both support and healthy competition and it definitely works. If you can find someone or a group of people like this, trust me, you'll enjoy it the new found motivation.

So the plan we've come up with differs from our plan last year, in which we both wanted to be a certain weight at the end of two months. This time round, we're going to set monthly targets to stick to. The interesting thing is, they're not always going to be weight targets. One month I may say, 'I want to be x kg's', the following month I may say 'I want to get my 5km time down to x minutes' and the month after, 'I want to be able to bench x kg's'.

I think mixing these goals up on a monthly basis keeps the motivation and competition going and adds a freshness to your goals. You might get bored with constantly looking at weight as a target, so using other markers can mix things up for you.

We only started yesterday and we've both set weight targets for the end of the month. I'll let you know how I get on. We said we'd do it for six months initially, but there's no reason why you couldn't do it for life. You don't need to constantly need to lose weight, for instance if you reach an ideal weight, you could use the same weight target the following month to see if you can maintain that level. It is, however, useful to challenge yourself physically.

If you can find someone or a group of people who'll do this with you, it could really be worthwhile. If you're doing it already, good stuff and why didn't you tell me before!?