What Are Your Limiting Factors?

Getting outstanding results in any boxing or fitness program means learning how to overcome any limiting factors in your life.

Finding and removing the obstacles in your way makes your journey much quicker, more enjoyable and effective.

Your top priority should be to identify anything that is holding you back so you can ruthlessly eliminate it.

Doing that requires a good dose of inward looking. In most cases it's personal and what may be a limiting factor for you may not be for someone else.

Everyone has different genetics and lives different lives with different environmental influences meaning I could spend the next ten years coming up with a list of factors that might be affecting your ability to follow a program or eat right to achieve the boxing and fitness goals you set for yourself.

So... I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to address five limiting factors that many blame on their lack of progress:

1. Your genetic makeup
2. Your physical activity patterns
3. Your physiology
4. Your mindset
5. Your nutrition

Let's see if we can't figure out which of these may be your limiting factors.

To be honest - probably not.

At the most upper levels of competition, this might be something that could be affecting you, but for most of us - it's not even worth wasting time worrying about. It's rare for people to ever reach the limit of their genetic potential.

If you're blaming genetics on lack of progress or inability to excel in the sport - you may want to get real with yourself. Everyone can improve their health, strength, speed and boxing ability by implementing good training and advice.

In the many years I've been involved in boxing and fitness, I've never encountered someone who didn't improve significantly if they put in the effort.

Perhaps you're not working out and training at all or maybe you are and experiencing a lack of results.

It's easy to see how not working out at all will limit your abilities. If you aren't doing things that are making you stronger, faster, or working on boxing skills, then you're simply not going to improve. Obviously getting leaner, stronger, and fitter means living an active lifestyle and committing to a regimented, challenging, training program.

Not embracing an active life likely means you are doing your very best to slowly kill yourself with metabolic decline, fat gain, muscle loss, and all the myriad of diseases that go along with that.

However, some people do live active lives and exercise does become a limiting factor. This happens if the training program you are following sucks.

Some training is simply more effective. You're lucky though, as you've discovered a boxing site and boxing workouts are on the upper end of effective, especially for fat loss, muscle gain, and developing overall agility, coordination and boxing skills. Diligently following a boxing training plan will eliminate any limiting exercise factors if your goal is to become a boxer or develop a boxer's physique.

Physiology refers to how things are working in your body. Sometimes people will follow an awesome program, eat right and still not see the results expected. At that point, it's worth looking a little deeper to see if there is something physically wrong that is preventing you from seeing the expected weight loss, muscle gain, or athletic improvement. This could be anything: a hormone imbalance, gastrointestinal dysfunction, or sex hormone imbalance. There are a lot of things going on in your body at any one time and something might be messed up - highly unlikely - but possible.

Your attitude towards your training and the habits you develop are huge factors in achieving your goals. It's one thing to know what to do and quite another to actually perform those things consistently with the intensity required to improve.

Cultivating and maintaining a positive mental attitude is essential. Visualizing achievement of your goal is critical and research shows that those who do have more improved and drastic body composition and athletic changes.

By far, the most influential limiting factor is nutrition.

Whether you are here to learn how to box, use boxing to develop an awesome body, or simply learn a few fitness tricks to shed some unwanted pounds - nothing here will come close to the effect that food will have on your progress.

Eating crap is what holds 95% of people back from achieving their goals. Good nutrition is the foundation for everything else. All weight loss, muscle gain, and athletic improvement starts with nutrition - the training and workouts simply speed up the process.

The right foods in the right quantities will make you healthier. It will build muscle making you stronger, faster, and able to outlast your opponents. It will help you recover more quickly from your training allowing you to train longer and harder and improve at a significantly faster rate than your opponents. It will make you more confident, improve your mood, and give you a positive outlook on life.

You don't have to be a victim to limiting factors. Find them in your life and rip them out by the roots. With each limiting factor or impediment that you eliminate you accelerate the velocity at which you move towards greatness - whatever your definition of greatness consists of.

Are any of these factors limiting your potential? What's holding you back?