Tidbit Tuesday - Strategies for Starting Your Fitness Journey
Hello,
Welcome to another Tidbit Tuesday where we aim to teach you something new about health, nutrition, lifestyle, training, and so much more, every week!
Today we are talking about the top 3 strategies for starting your fitness journey.
Making changes to our lifestyle can be challenging. It certainly isn’t easy, but it can be simple.
If you focus on making a few small changes to your lifestyle then, over time, you will begin to see profound results!
Afterall, as the famous Thomas Jefferson quote goes;
If you want something you have never had, you must be willing to do something you have never done.
My first strategy is going to seem a little unorthodox but hear me out.
Remove all your expectations and develop a deep “why”.
The reason that most people fail at “getting into shape” and living healthier is because they have some unrealistic expectation of what that journey should look like and how it should proceed.
But that is almost never the case, is it?
We start off strong, diving all into our new lifestyle, only to be derailed by life. And if we can’t be all in then why be in at all, right?
This will just result in our health slipping a little further away, with another re-assessment a little while later, kicking yourself, wishing you had just stuck with it.
If you remove your expectations from the journey and simply learn to enjoy the process then you will reach that goal eventually. I promise.
The way to ensure you stick with the process is to have a deep seeded reason as to why we want to improve our quality of life. If you discover that, at your core, health is important to you for more than just looking good, you will have a much easier time creating a lifestyle that matches your beliefs.
To find this reason to keep us moving forward we can practice something called “the 5 why’s”.
It works like this, ask yourself a “why” question, like, why do I want to get healthier?
You might answer. Because I want to look and feel better.
Again, ask yourself “why”. Why is looking and feeling good important to me?
You answer. Because if I look and feel good, I will be more confident!
Once again, ask “why”. Why is having more confidence important to me?
Answer as best you can. If I am more confident than I will be more likely to go after the things in life that I want.
You would again ask yourself “why”, until you have completed 5 cycles, or as many times as you would like!
Once you have a truly deep seeded reason, far beyond the shallow, vain reasons that initially get most of us interested in becoming healthier, looking good naked, will you finally have a fighting chance at pushing through when your willpower doesn’t feel like enough.
My second strategy is going to seem obvious, yet all too under utilized.
Practice consistency. Always something, never nothing.
This is to help you get the “all-or-nothing” mentality out of your head. It never ends up in you having “all”.
Instead, adopt a mentality more akin to a dial than a switch. You have effort levels from 1 to 10, rather than just on or off.
Follow these steps:
Step 1 – Consider areas of your life where you would like to change or improve.
Step 2 – Ask yourself, “what is the absolute MOST I could do?” That is your 10.
Step 3 – Ask yourself, “what is the absolute LEAST I could do?” That is your 1.
Step 4 – Use your 1 and 10 to fill in the other numbers on the dial.
Step 5 – Refer to your dial when life gets busy, you feel overwhelmed, or you think it is time to increase your effort!
This way you are always doing something. Even if that is simply going for a walk or completing some household chores for the day.
You don’t have to hit a personal best in the gym every day, nor do you have to be perfectly on point with your diet. You are human, I doubt you are competing in the next Olympics, and your schedule is probably already pretty full. So, cut yourself some slack and give yourself some credit for doing just a little bit every day!
And finally, my third strategy may sound simple in theory, but when it comes to applying it you must have some discipline.
Plan for life to get in the way.
You are going to run into some hurdles. That is just life!
The best thing that you can do for yourself is to plan for life to happen, and for SOMETHING to get in the way of your journey.
Because, by planning for it, then it doesn’t have to totally derail you and all your progress. It can be just a small bump in the road that barely slows you down.
We all have common hurdles in our lives that tend to slow us down every time we seem to start picking up some moment. Things like family, work can begin to demand more of us, perhaps friends or your significant other require more attention lately.
Whatever it is, it does not have to stop your progress all together.
The best way to prepare yourself for any hurdle, surprise or not, is to determine your “sphere of control”.
By establishing your sphere of control, you will be in a much better place to triage these hurdles as they come and not allow them to control you!
This works by creating 3 categories: Total control. Some control. No control.
Start by jotting down a few things that have derailed you in the past. Maybe a family event or holiday is coming in the next few weeks .. Valentine’s Day perhaps?
And place that “hurdle” into one of the categories above. With something like a birthday, family event, or outing with your significant other you will certainly have SOME control.
Perhaps you must go to the event, you might even enjoy some good food and a drink or two. But by no means do you have to devour half the cake, eat an entire bag of chips with guac and then wash that down with a case of Twisted Teas.
As you create your list, recognize that there are hardly any times when we have NO CONTROL.
Maybe if we’re stranded in the desert and can’t find food or water. But luckily, we live in a pretty accessible world!
Once you have your list, start with the “total control” items and start to knock these out of the park. Show yourself that when you plan ahead you can let these little events be just that .. a blip on the radar that hardly even slows us down.
When you can do that, your goal will be at your fingertips.
Reach out a TAKE IT!
Your Friend in Health & Fitness,
Coach Sean
