Perseverance

No matter what your starting point is on your journey to health and fitness, no matter how experienced or inexperienced you are you’re going to face obstacles, challenges, and roadblocks. These take various forms and can really hinder your progress. Your job might be taking up an absurd amount of your time. You might have family obligations that mean you’re constantly on the go. You might not be able to afford to join a gym. You might have crippling self-confidence issues that are shackling you to poor habits.

You’re not alone. Everybody and I mean everybody face challenges. I can train 5 days a week some weeks and people who don’t know me always assume that I was just magically able to do that. It’s of course false it took me years to get my scheduling right, experimentation with different types of training, manipulating my working day and my social life to finally get a balance. It doesn’t just happen.

Some weeks I may only train one day a week, it’s all done according to my goals. I’ve managed through years or fine tuning to find the spots in my day-to-day life where it’s possibly for me to squeeze in an hour in the gym. Or I’ve gone online and found and then gone to the martial arts club that does lunchtime classes during work.

My point here is not to get hung up on how much you miss. Remember the goal here is long term no short term. You’re in a marathon not a sprint. If you can only commit to one training day a week that’s fine. I’ll caveat that statement with a note that you would need to really focus on your diet in that case and work toward making more time.

Giving up is the easiest thing, continuing despite the adversity builds character, it builds resilience, and it feels good to accomplish something when it’s difficult. If it was easy there’d be no joy or satisfaction in completing whatever challenge you’re facing. If it was easy, we’d all look like whatever the media brand today’s perfect physique.

Again, this is the mental side of the game you need to make sure your head is in the right state. Without adversity or difficulty, you can’t succeed. When you hit your challenges and your roadblocks face them with a renewed vigour. Don’t just stay quiet and accept your faith. So, you had to work late and missed the gym all week, no problem it’s just 1 week in 52. So, you went out for a meal, and you really overate. OK next time you’re going to pre-screen the menu and know exactly what you’re going to order before you go and try and actively balance your calorific intake for that day.

It’s all a learning curve you’re not going to know how to do everything correctly simply because you’re ‘on a healthy buzz’. No, it doesn’t work like that in any walk of life; you’ve to learn the trade. If you started a new job from scratch, you wouldn’t expect to walk in on day one and know the ins and outs and roundabouts of everything. There’s no reason to expect the same with health and fitness. What you do need to do is to give it the time and dedication it needs so that you can and do progress. It’s one thing to say that you’re, ‘being healthy’ it’s another thing to try and make the changes necessary. Please don’t be the person who just talks about it; instead, be the person who talks less and does more.

Don’t misinterpret me about you having trips, slips, and falls on the way as you still need to make a conscious effort to make the right choices and plan out your meals but in the same breath nobody’s perfect, you will of course slip, trip and fall. What’s more important is that you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and remember what you’ve learned. Don’t beat yourself up and don’t knock yourself down.

12 months down the line, you’re fitter, faster, and smarter and you’ll be doing things very differently. Take it day by day and use each failure as a steppingstone. If you’re not failing, you’re not learning so embrace the failures and use them to fuel your success.

You need to fail and fail again and again and again before you succeed. You might have tried two hundred different ways to get to the health and fitness goals you’ve set, and they might all off been disasters. Here’s a little lesson in failure for the next time you think you’re just not cut out for the health and fitness lifestyle.

• Michael Jordan was once cut from his basketball team.

• Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for lacking imagination and having no original ideas.

• Steve Jobs was fired from the company he had created himself.

• The Beatles were once told that they didn’t have a future in music.

• Oprah Winfrey was demoted from being a new anchor because she supposedly wasn’t fit for television.

• Albert Einstein’s teachers said he’d never amount to anything.

These people are now revered in their respective fields, but people aren’t always aware of the pain they went through and the failures they endured to get to the top. You might have failed repeatedly with health and fitness but that shouldn’t stop you from keeping on trying.

If I can make people attain their health and fitness goals by either directly imparting some of the knowledge, skills, and aptitudes I’ve gained or serve as a catalyst to encourage them to go out and try something new or take another approach then I will be extremely satisfied.

Remember that if you quit now, you’ll be back where you started and when you started you wished you could be where you are now.   

Accept that there’s no one-stop-shop for getting fit and healthy and that the process itself will take time and require consistency.  You acknowledge that dieting is a crucial aspect of reaching your goals and that you cannot neglect your diet nor can you out-exercise a bad diet.

You’re not just going to go cold-turkey on your diet you’re going to gradually look to change your diet, experimenting and sampling bit by bit in line with your goals and in a way that progresses you forward. You’ll make mistakes and you’ll learn from every one of them.

You have a general idea of what a good goal looks like and how challenging yourself to do something like a race can be an extremely powerful motivator and incentive for you to get out there and start training.

You’re not going to give up. You’re going to embrace the pain; you know that each failure is just a steppingstone. Today you know more than you did yesterday and tomorrow you will know more again than you do today. In one single years’ time what you will know will have changed your life for the better.

You won’t be able to point to a single action, a single moment, or a single event instead you’ll be fully aware of the little changes, little steps, the many failures, and the many mini victories that have gotten you to that point.

Suddenly before you know it, you’re going to be that person that people go to for advice on diet and training. You’ll have an encyclopedic knowledge of the do and don’t and you’ll have practical examples from your own life that you can present to people and say look believe me when I say this because I was just like you and now, I am where I am because I did this.

Remember, chin up, chest out and handle it.

Yours,

Stephen