Train With Consistency

The biggest driver of success in anything you want to accomplish is consistency, showing up and doing the thing again and again. This can relate to investing, advancing in your career, growing spiritually, being a better friend, or improving your fitness. Seems simple. It’s not always easy, though.

At the time of this writing, we are in the month of February, enough time for the shininess of New Year’s resolutions to have worn off or to have been forgotten. January’s a busy month, school’s back in session, it’s time to reset and clean up after the holidays, take stock of your financial situation, and think about getting your papers together for the tax man. The weather is crummy, sickness abounds, fitness goals get put on the back burner.

If you have a minute, though, and are able to come up for air long enough to read this blog, take another minute or two and glance at last month’s calendar. If you aren’t any closer to the fitness goals you set last month, or have been looking to achieve for years, it may be that you haven’t been able to maintain the consistency needed to chip away at those goals. This isn’t to make you feel bad, but to give you hope for why those things haven’t happened.

If for the past three years, your goal has been to do a set of 10 high quality push-ups from the ground, and right now you can barely squeak out one, your calendar may give you the reason why. The amount of time spent intentionally focused on the goal is often correlated with the achievement of that goal. Maybe you spent $60 on a monthly gym membership and have gone once a week for the past five weeks. It feels like you are invested. You spent hard-earned money on that membership, you took the 2-2.5 hours required to get to and from the gym, and you got your sweat on in the class and on the treadmill. This is a great first step.

However, it is not enough to get you closer to that goal of 10 high quality push-ups from the ground. But do not despair! Achieving this goal does not require an extra 7.5 hours per week dedicated toward being at the gym. This is one way of doing it, but there are others.

Leverage those small pockets of time throughout the day to put toward your goal. When you have a 10 minute window while the kids are asleep, while you are on the phone (put on hold or waiting for your long-winded counterpart to finish their story), or watching a show, use that time to knock out a few sets of push-ups. Set a timer (or watch the time on your phone call) for 10 minutes. At the top of every minute do 5-8 elevated (secure counter/table/bench) push-ups. Rest until the top of the next minute, then go again. By the end of those 10 minutes, you will have knocked out 50-80 push-ups and be one small step closer to your goal. Increase the difficulty as the weeks go on, keep doing this most days of the week, and you’ll be much closer to your goal than if you waited for the one time per week you could get to the gym to do your workout.

Make a plan. Stick to the plan. Train intentionally.

In the next posts, I’ll cover more ways to make consistency easier.

If you need help creating a plan or sticking with the plan, feel free to contact me at intentiontraininglex@gmail.com.

*Another benefit to training more frequently throughout the week, rather than just once a week, is to avoid the cycle of workout, get very sore, recover, feel okay for two days, repeat. This is called the repeated bout effect, explained here.