People often ask how they can get ‘into’ fitness or if I can help make them a workout schedule. In my mind I’m thinking that for fitness to be useful, and get us where we need to go, it needs to be looked at as a long-term endeavor, NOT as something that’ll be used for a couple weeks, or whenever they ‘feel’ like it.
My thought is that health and fitness shouldn’t be a phase. It shouldn’t be a brief period of time in your life. It should be something that integrates itself into your life so that its sustainable until the day you die. It should be habit, it should be who you are.
Which is why my advice for someone getting into fitness or getting back into fitness is to start slow. Getting into a fit of motivation with militant change is less likely to be sustainable over the long term. On the other hand, smaller manageable action on a DAILY basis over a long period of time will lead to a much higher level of heath and fitness.
The fancy wording for this is “the aggregation of marginal gains.” In short, small gains add up and compound over time. If you’re convinced you can’t run — set out to run for just 5 MINUTES each day. It’s not a huge demand on your time or body. The second week, attempt to increase this to 10 minutes (or even 6 or 7 minutes), but remember it’s EVERY DAY. Follow this pattern over the following weeks until it becomes habit. Before you know it, you’ll be running distances you’ve never imagined.
I had a good friend that followed this pattern, but with push-ups. He started with only 3 push-ups a day EVERY DAY. Now, a few months later, he’s built up to over 50 per day, and hasn’t missed a day because now it’s something that’s ingrained into his daily routine.
This is the beauty about habits. I could write a whole separate blog post (and probably will) about the power of habit, but what tends to be the case is that when a performed action becomes habit it tends to require a whole lot LESS effort (and discipline) to continue performing the action. This means that after you focus on making one particular action a habit, it’s locked in and you can move on to another (and another and another)!
