What do you think of when you think of fitness? Many emotions might come to mind. You might let out a groan, remembering all those runs that ended poorly, or how you’ve been feeling guilty about cheating on your diet lately. You might feel inspired, hoping to potentially better yourself and your approach from now into the future, with a list of goals set to be completed by the end of the year.
You might also feel extremely tired as if no matter how hard you try to get fit, you always seem to fall off the wagon and fall back into your inactive ways. If you work a sedentary job, this can be even more harmful than you might realise. It’s important to know how to finally stick to a new fitness lifestyle, and how to try to make your next time the final time that you become ‘a fitness person.’ But this can sound like a very difficult thing to aim for.
It is if you don’t know how to proceed. We hope to help you with that. Consider:
Start Slowly
Most of us know how tempting it is to start a new hobby or discipline with the full weight of your ambition. Not only do you think you’re going to make a strong effort, you know you are. However, remain too over-ambitious and you might find you are unable to start as well as you had hoped. Perhaps you need to adapt to the new lifestyle or learn things to help you even begin. For example, you cannot weightlift safely unless you know about proper form, technique, and just what your weight limits are. Even learning to operate a treadmill for the first time can be a confusing process for anyone not well versed in this. Starting off slowly can often make all the difference here.
For example, let’s say you want to start hitting the gym and move forward to a targeted goal. Perhaps you decide to attend for four mornings of the week. Sounds good. But if you have largely led a sedentary life for the last four years, working out on a treadmill for two hours a week might be a worrying issue, and your body will not be used to it. This way, you will only feel exhausted, and most likely burned out within three weeks off effort. In reality, perhaps two low-impact gym sessions this week, three the next, and four in the following week could help you slowly adapt to that schedule and get ahead as you have planned.
Starting slowly can be applied to anything. To reuse our weightlifting example, it is much better to nail the form before you lift heavier weights. It’s also better to progress in your lifted weight more slowly if it means keeping intact form, rather than anything else. Starting slowly can help you settle into this new lifestyle. After all, you do not get fit in just one gym session. It can take years. This also means you should:
Focus On The Lifestyle, Not The Results
The fit and healthy lifestyle you want to lead will have many benefits should you keep following it to its natural conclusion. However, over time you might find that your lack of seeming progress is discouraging you. Perhaps after two weeks, you haven’t gotten the abs you seek, or perhaps you realise you’ve been eating wrong this entire time.
This is why it’s so essential to focus on the lifestyle, on perfecting each day, rather than trying to hurry along with results. This way you can actually focus on learning the art of fitness, and indulging your natural curiosity when hoping to learn more about your body. On top of that, ensure you’re not only focusing on the smaller results that are to be gained. After all, which is better? Gaining abs to impress people on the beach or in the summer? Or living a healthy life in which you feel more active, more alert, happier in yourself and feeling more confident as a result of your physical stress-relief through exercise?
We would assume you chose the latter option. Focus on the lifestyle, not the results, and let the results reveal themselves to you. You may be surprised just how incredible they can be, and just how much they can motivate further progress. This way, you can also avoid the tendency to feel as though you’ve failed should your narrow margin of success not be completed in some time. Perhaps your target weight lift will not be achieved unless you have your rotator cuff injury seen to. That’s fine. At least you now know the pressing need for this inspection before it started to harm or injure you during physical activity.
‘Good’
It’s important to turn your pessimism upside down when it comes to health and fitness. This is because no matter how lethargic you feel before the gym session, the overwhelming majority of the time (outside of inadvisable health issues,) you will feel grateful for having attended the gym. This is because a fitness lifestyle is a profoundly optimistic one. It always suggests that there is room to improve, that you can feel more confident, that you can enjoy using your body and learning how it moves well.
For this reason, you need to adapt to this optimistic ideal before even stepping foot in a gym. You need to believe that you can make progress, no matter how many inches you have on your waist or how many times you’ve failed before. A good way of subverting negative issues that might hold you back in the fitness landscape is to simply think ‘good,’ and then find an alternate route.
Get splashed by a car driving into a puddle on the way to the gym? Good. You can work that annoyance out on the treadmill and use it as a tool.
Didn’t manage to lift the target weight record you had hoped for? Good. You can spend next week identifying the need for better form, and thus subvert future injury as a result.
Haven’t been having much luck with supplements? Good. Now you can try something new such as the best appetite stimulants or a new protein brand.
With these tips, we hope you can finally stick to that fitness lifestyle you’ve wanted to keep.
