Congratulations! You’ve followed the plan you laid out and achieved the goal you were training for. There may have been ups and downs along the way - maybe you were injured and had to downshift the exercise for a bit, or burned out and had to fight yourself to get back on the wagon - but, no matter what, you didn’t quit and you reached the finish line. Feels great, doesn’t it? It should! You did a great job. What if you didn’t fully get to the goal you set? Well, how close did you get? Whatever the answer is its certainly a lot closer than you were when you began, which is something too. But what now? Whatever this goal brought you can’t be the only thing you want in life, right? Let’s talk about what’s next. Short answer is you’re going to set a new and greater goal and craft your plan to achieve it. But now you’re beyond the basics of a simple beginner plan. There are a few steps you need to follow first to make your next one as successful as possible. But before you do anything else celebrate! You just did something incredible. It doesn’t matter whether you feel that your goal was big or small you still did it. Unfortunately, that’s a feeling many people will never get to feel. Pat yourself on the back, tell a friend and get a high five, go out to dinner, eat some cake, whatever it may be do something special to mark the occasion! Obviously, don’t go overboard but have a good time. If you go big on finishing this first training plan it will be even harder to celebrate in a meaningful way when you tackle your next one. Plus, since you’ve been taking better care of yourself for the best few months whatever you eat, drink, or otherwise gorge on will hit a lot harder and you’ll feel pretty bad the next day. After your celebration you want to be saying “I can’t wait for my next big win!” rather than “I’m never doing that again.” Alright, back to the serious stuff. First, while it’s all still fresh in your mind, you need to look back at the program you just completed and debrief yourself. You now have some experience with training plans and can start to improve on your original plan or craft an entirely new one that’s more advanced. Second, you need to take a break! Yes, you heard me. While it feels great to have accomplished your goal and you want to ride that high into your next project, you do need to give yourself time to rest, reset, and recharge. That high won’t last forever and you don’t want to go hard charging into your next training plan and burnout when the buzz wears off. Finally, it’s time to set your sights on you next goal. You need to raise the bar. When you’re ready to get started on your next goal-oriented journey all you need to do is go back to step one. Define your new goal. Write it down on a piece of paper and hang it next to the last one. That way you can see where you want to go next to how far you’ve come already. Again, the main goal is to complete the training plan, remain healthy, and have fun. You must remember that if you start out going too hard you can injure yourself and fail. If you take the rest period, as you should, you will in fact need some time to build back up again. You can’t just start cold where your previous training plan ended; you won’t quite be at that level anymore. The good news is that you won’t have far to go and will be back up to speed in a few weeks. As you intensify your training or extend the time period of your training plan, such as from 3 months to 9 months, you are going to start running into issues that novice athletes or shorter training cycles won’t encounter.
