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13 years ago
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Why You Fail at Fitness
Planning your exercise schedule is great, isn’t it? There’s nothing like sitting down with your calendar and writing down all the workouts you’ll do this week. Just thinking about it makes you feel good, doesn’t it? But life has a way of getting in the way of those fitness goals. Maybe you have to work late or you catch a cold. Maybe your child has soccer practice or you have unexpected guests. Whatever ‘it’ is, it will happen and, for many of us, that ‘it’ sends our exercise plans right out the window. You may recognize some of these other reasons you skip exercise:
* Catching a cold, flu or other nasty bug
* Pulled muscles, soreness or other injuries
* Long work hours, busy schedules and social obligations
* Life transitions like getting married, getting a new job, graduating or retiring
* Having a baby
* Feeling tired, low energy and not getting enough sleep
* Burnout or overtraining
* Boredom
* Lack of results and confusion over how to reach goals
* Travel
* Pulled muscles, soreness or other injuries
* Long work hours, busy schedules and social obligations
* Life transitions like getting married, getting a new job, graduating or retiring
* Having a baby
* Feeling tired, low energy and not getting enough sleep
* Burnout or overtraining
* Boredom
* Lack of results and confusion over how to reach goals
* Travel
What’s important to realize is this: you won’t always be perfect at exercise and, even more important, you don’t have to be. What you do want is to make your best effort and give yourself credit for what you achieve, even if it falls short of your original goal. To get yourself past those fitness failures, you have to stop the blame game and start taking some action.
Join the Club
Your first step in turning a failure around is to stop kicking yourself and realize you’re not alone in this. We all skip workouts, eat more than we should and get off track from time to time. In fact, many of my successful personal training clients come to me in the middle of their own fitness failures, feeling guilty and frustrated.
*Mary was one of those clients, a 67-year-old woman who’d been active with cardio and strength training for years. Then she got a new demanding job and realized she’d gained almost 35 pounds after abandoning her routine. She called me after two years of struggling with her weight, wondering how she’d gotten so far off track.
*Gretta was another client who came to me after having a baby. Despite her best efforts, she was having a hard time losing her baby weight and an even harder time trying to figure out how to take care of both herself and this new baby. By the time she came to me, it had been months since she’d exercised.
So, what happened? These clients had completely different situations, but ended up at the same place for the same reason: they didn’t plan on how they’d continue exercising with these huge changes in their lives. Mary didn’t take into account the hours she’d be working and figured she’d just stick to her usual routine. When that routine didn’t fit, she abandoned it rather than change it. Gretta also failed to plan on how she’d exercise with a new baby in the house. Once we figured out why their failures happened, we were able to use that failure to create better routines to fit their new circumstances.
You can do the same thing for yourself and your first step? Risking failure.
