How Do I Prioritize My Fitness Goals? Tips From a 5-Star Trainer

Start with small, easily achievable goals and build momentum towards bigger goals. This is the way to get traction.

One of the great things about being an exercise newbie is that you can often achieve multiple goals at once.

If you have never strength trained, for example, and you are carrying more fat then you’d like you can often lose fat quite effectively while becoming stronger and more muscular.

An exercise newbies’ body responds so enthusiastically to exercise that it will often do so even in the face of their caloric restriction.

Losing Fat or Getting Stronger?

But for those, like myself, that have done some form of exercise and watched what we eat for most of our lives, fitness goals must often be prioritized.

Exercise veterans who find themselves, like me, fluffier after the holidays, have to choose whether to make losing fat or becoming stronger/more muscular a priority.

Above: Socorro Morales in a training session at Inner Strength Fitness in Manhattan

It’s not that an exercise veteran cannot become stronger while becoming leaner.

It’s that gains in strength, while on a fat loss diet, will be slower. Sometimes significantly slower, depending on the level of caloric deficit.

Balancing Goals

There are tricks of the trade to balance these seemingly incompatible goals.

1. Make sure you are consuming adequate levels of protein.
   
2. Make sure you are eating enough calories to support your strength training workouts.
3. Make sure your calorie levels are also set to create an acceptable level of fat loss (half a pound to two pounds per week depending on the exerciser’s starting weight).

You can play around with the intensity and volume of your strength training program so you can continue to make moderate progress despite the caloric deficit.

Adjust Your Calorie Intake

But in the final analysis, an exercise veteran has to acknowledge that facts are facts. Strength and muscle are most efficiently built while on a moderate caloric surplus.

If you want to build up the structure which is your body, it makes sense to have an adequate number of bricks on hand for the purpose!

An Inner Strength Fitness client

But if you want to give pride of place to becoming leaner for the time being, continue to work as hard as you can on building strength and maintaining your metabolically precious muscle.

Just accept that becoming leaner, i.e., eating less then what your body needs to maintain its weight, will make getting stronger and especially building muscle exponentially more difficult.