The Key To Staying On The Proverbial Fitness Wagon: Don’t Get Off

One of the more common things I see with people who constantly “jump on” and “jump off” the proverbial wagon of a fitness regime, is this: they set expectations for themselves that are not sustainable long-term, eg. “I’m going to exercise 6 days a week.”

How does one stick with it and “stay on” the wagon then? Instead of choosing a lofty weekly goal, instead establish a minimum baseline to work from that is your foundation, and then build on top of this for certain goals. This baseline is a minimum requirement per week, and is something that is achievable week-to-week long-term and can withstand the “turbulence of life.” For everyone this baseline will be different, and might have a different goal attached to it. By this I mean, someone’s baseline might just allow them to stay healthy and be active, and not necessarily lose weight.

Why is this important?

The reason it’s so important has to with the psychology behind success and failure. Let’s use an example of someone who has committed to exercising 5 days a week. For some, this is do-able. For others, in particular those who previously didn’t exercise or people that can have abrupt time conflicts (eg. parents and/or business owners), there will be repeated weeks where they won’t reach their desired 5 days a week. Then, every time they don’t exercise 5 days in that given week the feeling of failure sets in. This repeated reinforcement of failure has a negative conditioning effect on their long-term success.

If instead we set a baseline of something more achievable, like 3 days a week or 3 hours a week. This is likely…

something that is achievable week-to-week long-term, and can withstand the “turbulence of life.”

This now changes the psychology to positive conditioning and reinforcement of what you’re doing where you are having more “wins” than “losses.” Then, you can build and plan to “add to” this baseline to work towards something, like a weight loss goal, by increasing the amount of exercise over a set amount of weeks.

Also, I prefer to work with hours rather than days, eg. exercise 3 hours in a given week, rather than exercising 3 days a week for an hour each time. There are a few reasons for this, but the biggest one for me with my clients is practicality and execution: there is time associated with exercise (driving to and from, showering after, etc.) that can be a barrier for some, so if time is the focus they are more likely to follow through with their commitment.

One more point: I refer to exercise in this post as a general description of something that gets you moving. It doesn’t always have to be resistance training (lifting weights). There is a time a place for different types of exercise for different goals, but I won’t get into that in this post.

Take home point:

I’m not saying you can’t exercise an hour a day, or more. What I’m saying is set a realistic and achievable baseline that you can then build on top of for certain goals. This way you get more “wins” than “losses” and you’re setting yourself up for success in the future. This will ensure that you don’t get the negative reinforcement of failure when you don’t continue to exercise the desired amount of times you wanted to, which can often lead many to jump off the “wagon” and take a hard stop with exercising all-together. Which then can lead to you starting again later, once again with too high of an expectation and the vicious cycle continues…

This same strategy can be applied to nutrition to help you lose weight, and keep it off – all the while still enjoying many of the foods you love. If you have questions about this, or anything in this post, shoot me a message.

Till next time,

-Mike