How to Fail at Fitness -And Sabotage Yourself All the Way Down

Most people who decide to “get healthy” will be back to their old habits in about a month. They start off with good intentions, but can’t seem to break their old lifestyle habits. Why is this? Getting started with a new fitness plan should be easy, right? While it may not be technically difficult to get yourself going, it can be easy to sabotage yourself with your own enthusiasm. Trying to do too much too soon, whether physically or mentally, is the easiest way to kill your motivation.

Your body can only take so much at any one time. If you haven’t been physically active for a while, you should take it slow with your new exercises. While the exercises may seem easy at first, they apply unexpected stress to your body. Overdoing it won’t help you progress faster, but it will make you very sore and you won’t be very enthusiastic about going back to the gym. Let your body get used to exercising! If you ease into it, you’ll be more likely to stick with your program.

“Too much too soon” also applies to your mental game. A common set of goals usually reads something like this: “I’m going to exercise every day, eat six small healthy meals a day and get eight hours of sleep every night.” Wow! Great idea, but too much too soon! While you should definitely have these goals in mind, they are long-term goals. If you don’t exercise, eat poorly and get five hours of sleep a night, you’ll be trying to change three major habits all at once. Try accomplishing them one at a time instead. When I have a new client, I tell him or her to just worry about getting in the gym and to forget about meal planning for about a month. Trust me, exercising three or four days per week is going to be a big enough adjustment! After the exercise habit has developed, then we can start working on the meal planning.

If you have set some lofty goals for yourself, that’s great! You should be congratulated for just making the effort, but nobody climbed Everest by running straight for the top. Climb your personal Everest in stages and you’ll have a much better shot at reaching the top.

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How Much Exercise Do I ACTUALLY Need for Optimal Health Anyway?

Many people don’t exercise because they lead busy lives and don’t want their exercise programs to monopolize their schedules. While it is true that professional athletes and body builders spend a great deal of time in the gym, the actual amount of exercise needed for good to optimal health is quite small.

If you want to have a healthy body and increased levels of energy, don’t look to the muscle magazines for exercise advice. Every activity and every sport has different training regimens. Some of the differences are small and some are quite large. Putting it simply, if you don’t want to be a body builder, football player, or downhill skier then don’t train like one.

For a basic health and fitness starter program, I recommend 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise three days per week and about 45 minutes of resistance exercise two days per week. If you haven’t exercised much lately, take it slow! Over-enthusiasm is one of the biggest killers of exercise plans. If you overdo it, you’ll be miserable and much less likely to continue. How do you know if you’re doing too much? Listen to your body! If you go for a run and you start gasping for breath, slow down and walk until you feel better. As you progress, you’ll find that you need fewer breaks and the breaks that you do take will be much shorter. Start small with the weights! No lifting with the ego! The goal is NOT to be curled up in a big ball of pain the next morning. Experiment until you find a weight that you can perform eight to twelve repetitions with. If you can’t lift the weight eight times, go lighter. Once you can do twelve repetitions it’s time to bump the weight up a little.

If you don’t feel you’re getting results quickly enough, don’t worry. While the human body has an amazing ability to adapt to its environment and the stresses of that environment, the adaptation doesn’t come overnight. Give it a couple of months. With a sensible exercise program, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how little your daily schedule is impacted and by how much your body changes for the better!