It’s Sunday night and you decide Monday is the day, this time you’re going to get on it and stay on it. From there it shakes out one of two ways:
- Monday you do the workout you think you ought to be doing, and you feel great about it. But then on Tuesday you’re sore, and on Wednesday sitting down feels like a technical maneuver that would have the best people at NASA biting their nails.
- Monday you skip the workout, because you didn’t get up early enough or because you don’t remember the exact plan or because your good gym shorts are nowhere to be found and obviously you can’t work out in the old ones, so you’ll just have to wait until Tuesday and then you’ll do both Monday and Tuesday’s workouts at once. Except, then Tuesday comes and holy shit you have to do TWO workouts today!
By the following Monday the whole thing is over, and now you’re carrying fresh evidence that you can’t stick with anything. So, how do you break this cycle?
With exercise, as with a lot of ambitious things we pursue, it’s easy to fixate on where you think you should be instead of accepting where you are now. This can lead to overly ambitious exercise plans that are too long, too complicated, too challenging, or some of each. The restart dose that actually works might feel almost insultingly easy, which is the point.
Easy is NOT the goal forever. Progressive overload is real, and hard work is required to see big changes. But you can only build on training that’s actually happening. A session you can’t recover from after three days isn’t training, it’s an event, and a session that you never do is, well, nothing. Bodies change because of repeated bouts of exertion, which means that effective training has to be repeatable.
So the test is whether you could do it again tomorrow, not if you feel like you “did enough.” When you’re starting out, it’s OK to finish your workout feeling like you could do the whole thing over again. This might look like doing two sets instead of five, stopping three or four reps before the point where you’d fail, or walking for fifteen minutes instead of forty. If you’re coming back to lifting, pick a weight that feels like you’re just warming up. For week one, that’s the right weight.
This is all helpful for getting into or returning to exercise, but there’s another layer to it.
Say it’s ten at night, you’re wrecked, you were planning to do a workout today, but that is absolutely not happening now. Do ten push-ups on the kitchen floor, or twenty squats in front of the TV, and then go to bed (the movement and the reps don’t matter so long as it looks at least vaguely like exercise and it takes less than one minute). Those ten push-ups did nothing for your chest. Your glutes will not grow from 20 air squats. Nothing measurable happened anywhere in your body, but do them anyway.
What you did in that moment was prove to yourself that taking care of yourself doesn’t require ideal conditions. That’s a program you build upon. The physical results come once the pattern is there, but the pattern is the hard part, and at ten at night on a bad day, ten push-ups are the thing you can do to keep the pattern going.
This is why I push people to start smaller than they want to, not because they are fragile but because they want their results so badly that they’ll mentally exhaust themselves in the first ten days chasing them. A small start protects the habit from your enthusiasm.
Try holding a dose you can hit every scheduled day for two weeks without dread and without negotiating with yourself in the car. Then, add one more set, a few more reps, or five more minutes. If you start missing days, you didn’t fail but the dose was too big. Cut it back and run the two weeks again.
So this week, pick the version of your restart that’s a little embarrassing, then do it again the next day. Six weeks from now you’ll be doing more work, and more to the point, you’ll still be doing it.
If you’ve restarted and stalled out more than once, that’s where I can help: blackcreekcoaching.com.