What You Want vs What You Need

What you want vs what you need – the never ending battle! 

I hurt my back last week. Nothing major, just a slight disc injury – the kind of thing that keeps you out of action for a week or so, but leaves no lasting damage. It was quite painful for a few days and meant that my exercise for the week was essentially non-existent, save for the little bit of rehab work I needed to do to shave a few days off my recovery time.

Today was my first chance to exercise in a week. I wanted to go back to the hard, Olympic lifting and supersets I’ve been doing recently, but I needed to get myself moving safely and effectively again.

A classic case of what you want vs what you need.

I hadn’t been able to stretch properly during my week of injury, so I was feeling stiff and knew that the dynamic nature of the Olympic lifting wasn’t a good idea and that it could cause me another injury. Instead, I did a gentle, short-duration bodyweight circuit at home.

I barely raised a sweat, but it was the right thing to do. I’ll train hard tomorrow.

My home workout was a really simple circuit…

• Pull Ups
• Push Ups
• Jump Squats

Start with a set of 10 with each exercise, dropping to 9, 8, 7 and so on until you reach 1. Rest between each superset.

If you need some way of doing pull ups at home, I recommend this bit of kit – it’s called the Iron Gym Extreme and it’s what I use.

All you need is a solid door frame and you can do your pull ups without expensive gym equipment or a specific pull up bar! It doesn’t even screw into anything so is portable.

Back to ‘what you want vs what you need’…

The ‘what you want vs what you need’ debate goes beyond training. In fact, I’d argue it’s a bigger deal when it comes to nutrition.

You may want this…

But you need this…

Your health, fitness and physique is essentially down to your choices. The option you choose when it comes to your wants and needs.

There are so many unhealthy choices when it comes to food that we do really have to exercise some pretty tight nutritional discipline or maybe create an environment where healthy choices are easier to make.

Batch-cooking, stocking up the fridge, raw foods, healthy snacks, pre-packed meals are all ways to help ensure you make healthy food choices on a regular basis.

So, which are you going to pick – wants or needs?

The more often you make the right choice, the better you’ll be.

By the way, healthy eating needn’t be time consuming. Check out this article where I show you a super simple strategy to help you make the right choice.

Finally, as ever I’m giving away a FREE eBook ‘101 Health and Fitness Tips’ to everyone who subscribes to my VIP email list. By joining the list you’ll have access to exclusive content, discounts, offers and products from both me and selected partners. Click here to download!