Why You Keep Starting Fitness Programmes And Giving up
Spoiler: Willpower doesn’t come into it. How you’re starting each time does.
Photo by Planet Volumes on Unsplash
Enough is enough. This time you're getting fit and VICTORY WILL BE YOURS!
DONE:
Renew gym: ✅
Buy new trainers and kit: ✅
Download all the various apps and tell everyone about your new exercising-five times-a-week schedule ✅
TO DO:
Eat like an athlete.
Train like a medal-winning athlete.
Halve the booze (if not more, dammit).
Sleep like a hibernating bear.
Finally become one of those people with their shit together.
For the first week, you're flying. You’re a god.
Week two: peer pressure won out at the pub - but it was only the one glass, so not so bad.
Week three, you've missed a couple of sessions. Work's been busy. You're tired. Something hurts.
Week six: on the sofa in slouchies with a family bag of Walker’s Sensations.
The problem with the big restart
One of the most common mistakes: trying to change too much, too quickly.
There's an understandable temptation to compensate for months or years of inactivity by launching an ambitious new regime.
Bu if you start at a million miles an hour you leave yourself with nowhere to go. Unless you can achieve ongoing perfection the only way is down, which is a killer for motivation.
Life is gonna life. Work deadlines happen. Children get ill. Sleep suffers. Holidays appear. Ageing parents need help. And some days you simply won't feel like exercising.
If your plan only works when everything else is going perfectly, it's not a good plan.
Stop treating every missed session as a catastrophe
There's another trap: all-or-nothing thinking.
You planned four workouts but only managed two, so the week feels like a failure.
You ate well until Thursday, then had a takeaway, so you might as well abandon the diet until Monday.
This is where a small setback becomes a much bigger one.
But two workouts are still two workouts. A takeaway doesn't erase a week's worth of nutritious meals.
Progress doesn't require an uninterrupted sequence of perfect days.
It requires returning to the things that matter after the inevitable interruptions.
Photo by Paolo Resteghini on Unsplash
You don't need to feel motivated
Motivation is useful for sure – but it’s not at all dependable.
Some days you'll want to train. Other days the joggers and the half open bottle of Sancerre will look infinitely more appealing.
That's why routines and systems are so valuable.
If you've already decided when and where you'll exercise, you've removed a decision from your day.
And if your programme is manageable enough that you can complete it (or even part of it) even when enthusiasm is low, you're much more likely to keep going.
The trick is to make consistency easier rather than repeatedly demanding more willpower.
One tip for you to try: Build a minimum version of your plan
What's the smallest realistic version you could maintain even when life gets busy? This is what fitness bods call MVI: Minimum Viable Input. The smallest sustainable change that will still move you forward, no matter how slowly.
Perhaps it's two 30-minute strength sessions.
Perhaps it's one gym visit and two brisk walks.
Choose something that you’d almost feel embarrassed to sharer with your friends, then put those commitments in your diary and treat them as your baseline for the next month.
Your only goal now is to DO. THOSE. THINGS. After all, if you can’t manage that how will you manage the bigger picture? So get tunnel visioned and complete this first step.
You can always do more when you have the time and energy. But don't make the extras a condition of success.
Getting fitter in midlife is rarely about finding the perfect six-week transformation programme. Nor is it about waiting until your life is flexible enough to cope with the fitness fantasy you have in your head. It's about building a way of exercising that fits around the life you actually have.
