The Power Of The First Adjustment
When it comes to achieving your health and fitness goals, there is an all-important question. How can you make progress?
When I was at med school I used to train at a well known commercial gym. I always remember there was a guy there who used to do the most awful training plans. Poor exercise selection, his technique wasn’t great, he never seemed to change his routine
Yet, he was in great shape!
So what gives? Well he did two really important things. He showed up, and secondly, he executed his workouts with effort. He got stuck in!
Now I wish I could have coached him and tweaked his workouts to optimise them, but that’s besides the point.
The lesson is this, right now, you have all the information you need to make progress.
The reason we often don’t make progress is because of a lack of deliberate action. And not just action but the manner in which we execute this action.
We spend a lot of time thinking about the perfect plan and forget to execute.
We spend all our time planning, organising, getting things set up and then that’s it.
Guilty of any of these? I know I am!
- Saving recipes to a pinterest board and then not cooking any of them
- Researching a new protein powder when you’ve forgotten to take your last one
- Spending ages deciding between two pairs of fancy trainers when you can’t remember the last time you completed 10,000 steps in a day
But remember this, action doesn’t necessarily mean “do a really hard workout”.
Action could be anyone of the following:
- Getting up from your desk and doing three stretches BUT doing them properly
- Holding your core exercises for 10 seconds more and really tensing
- Buying some vegetables and making some soup
- Texting the gym to ask for some help from your coach and applying the solutions.
Don’t get caught in the planning phase. It’s been said it’s just an elegant way of procrastinating.
Act, and act with purpose.
