Why Your Past Fitness Efforts Have Failed

Why Your Past Fitness Efforts Have Failed

(and how to avoid repeating the pattern)

A few years ago, you decided to drop the baby weight. You embarked on a diet, signed up for a half marathon, and you became the epitome of a focused athlete. You crossed that finish line, experienced euphoria like never before – and then a few days later came crashing back to reality, with post-race depression. After those months of deprivation, the French fries and the truffles seemed not only well-deserved but were welcome comfort. Now, 20+ pounds heavier, you feel like a failure and wonder if you are even capable of sustaining the fitness gained through a pre-race or a boot camp program. You feel overwhelmed, hopeless, and out of control. Here’s the good news: you can definitely accomplish your goals and maintain your fitness level. You just need to be aware of your past pitfalls and have a plan for avoiding them.

Pitfall #1: Too much brawn, too little brain

No, I’m not talking about my college boyfriends. I’m talking about the way that whether spurred by January 1st, or a health scare, or a looming trip to the beach – we tend to make these drastic lifestyle changes without thinking about how they will affect our body, mind, family, schedule. We live in a society where “microwave thinking” is the norm. We don’t want to wait for something to gradually reach its natural state of readiness, instead we want instant action, instant results. The problem with this is that in terms of a fitness plan, this is not only unsustainable, but it can be unhealthy. When we go from occasionally taking a stroll with the dog, to taking kick-boxing, bootcamp, and hot yoga classes with two strength-training sessions and three treadmill runs in between – and do this for a few weeks – we are not only taxing our muscles, but we are making sacrifices in our relationships. We are increasing our stress levels as suddenly our family, the laundry piles and the boss feel neglected.

Solution: Think, then ease in slowly. You didn’t get to where you are overnight, and getting out of it will take a comprehensive, sustained effort. If you are going to stick to your workouts, you need to come up with a plan that eases your muscles and joints into new movements. Yes, it’s good to feel a bit sore the day after a workout. But you shouldn’t feel extreme discomfort, and certainly not ongoing pain. If the lean, mean, fighting machine instructor is screaming at you to go harder – ignore her. Listen to your body and trust it. In the same vein, if you are a beginning runner, for goodness’ sake run slowly. Run so slowly that you could maintain that pace all day. Do this for a few weeks and then, only then, start picking it up during a few interval workouts. The other things is, you don’t want to follow a hard workout with another hard workout. One of the greatest values of having a coach is that yes, she will push you to reach new limits, but she will also remind you of the importance of rest. All too often, we become so infatuated with our new focused lifestyle and dropping jeans size that we forget to be smart about it. You need to give your body regular rest, so your muscles can repair themselves, your laundry can be done and your spouse and kids can get some much-needed attention.

Pitfall #2: No Plan B

You crossed that finish line, earning the admiration of your family and friends, you are so proud of all you accomplished. And then a few days later the realization sets in that you no longer have that daily structure that came with planning your activities around your dates with Nike, and now that you’re no longer eating to train, your eating is quickly becoming a train wreck. Or, perhaps what happened is that you fell into Pitfall #1 (see above) and one day popped out of bed – and your knee popped at the same time. Forget your cardio workout, as you hobble around, devastated that your heroic fitness plans have come to a screeching halt. So now you go the other extreme and watch helplessly as your abs, which were finally starting to emerge from Flabbyland once again disappear.

Solution: think of goals as a moving goalpost. While training for a race certainly qualifies as a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-constrained) goal, it’s not the end of the road. It needs to be one of a series of goals. In fact, it’s best to think of your goal as more of a life goal, e.g. “I will live to be really old, and when I die my great-grandchildren will boast to their friends about their great-grandma who rocked the spinning class at age 97.” The races, beach vacations, high school reunions, and so on should be more like targets. And once you reach one target, you head for the next. When life happens and you become injured, or a child is sick, or your job goes through an unexpectedly overwhelming period – and you’re forced to reduce gym time, temporarily – it’s important to reexamine the targets and readjust. In my coaching, I preach about the importance of having goals, and that most people can avoid depression, dis-ease, and so on, with a good set of goals. It is especially important to have clearly articulated goals, and to be working on them daily, even when life throws us a curve ball. If we become injured, we come up with a less ambitious goal and keep going. It may no longer be, run a half marathon in 1:35, but we are no longer the person who set that goal. We have a new set of circumstances and we go from there. The point is to keep moving forward.

Pitfall #3: Ignoring (or not knowing) the importance of the compound effect

Financially, the compound effect can be thought of this way: if you spend $4 on a fancy coffee drink every day for 20 years, you’ll have spent $51,833.79. YIKES. If you think of it in terms of health, if you consume an extra 125 calories (2 chicken nuggets off your kid’s plate) per day, in 31 months you will have gained 33.5 pounds. Of course, this also means that if during that time, you reduced your consumption by 125 calories per day, you will have lost about 33 pounds. Therefore, what ends up happening is that we underestimate our ratio of consumption to expenditure. Simply put, we are eating more than we’re burning, and we don’t realize it because we ignore the little things. But those chicken nuggets swiped off our kid’s plate sure add up!

Solution: Again, in our society of extremes, we tend to embrace the latest celebrity diet or newfangled workout. But it’s the little things that add up. If we are going to make healthful lifestyle changes, it is much easier and more sustainable to whittle away at our bad habits, than to go at them with a pickax. When you eat out, ask the server to hold the bread basket. Replace the weekly gallon of milk at your house with skim milk. Buy baked potato chips instead of regular chips. Eat dinner on a salad plate instead of a regular plate – and have only one serving. Drink herbal tea instead of hot chocolate after sledding with the kids. If you normally have three slices of pizza, have two – from now on. If you normally have two glasses of wine with dinner, limit yourself to one – allowing yourself two on Saturdays. The same goes with exercise. Somebody in one of my classes recently pointed out that a guest trainer on the Dr. Phil show said, “it’s not so much what you do during the one hour you spend at the gym, what matters is what you do the other 23 hours of the day.” Every little step counts. Actually get out of the minivan and walk around it, to close the door. While waiting for the bus, do some walking lunges. Park further away from the shop entrance. When folding laundry, squat down to pick up each clothing article. Take your kids ice skating instead of bowling or to the mall.

Pitfall #4: Unclear Motivation

So, you’re a few weeks into the New You and after the initial infatuation and seemingly effortless weight loss, you hit a plateau. You’re bored. Or your body, now used to less input (food) and more output (calories burned), in its brilliance has become more efficient. Which sucks for you, as you struggle to shed those last five – or fifty – pounds. You think, why the heck am I doing this? And in that defining moment, when facing the choice between another workout, or a cocktail with the hubby, the reason that made you stock up on Under Armour garb and throw out all the Halloween candy is now a distant memory. And the cocktails win out. For the next few years.

Solution: Before you buy that gym membership, or spend a fortune at Athleta.com, think about WHY you are doing this. And write it down. Cut out magazine pictures or print pictures you find online, of what inspires you. We are all motivated by different things. The popular thinking is that it is the intrinsic (internal) motivation that keeps us going, but the truth is that a lot of people are actually more motivated by extrinsic factors. Most of us are motivated by both. So those of us who are more intrinsically motivated, may do this because we want to live a long, healthy life; we want to see our grandchildren get married; we want to feel the fulfillment of achieving hard-earned goals; we want to be a positive role model for the children in our lives. If we are extrinsically motivated, we want to win that age group medal; be admired for fitting into our high school jeans; be the envy of our friends and better yet, our enemies; be praised by our loved ones.

When we achieve our goals and make the “right” choice during those defining moments, it’s not because we are more motivated than others. Nor is it because we are stronger of character. It is because we are clear about our goals and most of all, of the reasons we were pursuing them. And we remind ourselves constantly of why we are doing something, or saying no to something. There is no such thing as an unmotivated person. Everyone is motivated. Some people are motivated to work their butt off to run a 7 minute mile, while someone else may be motivated to work toward a spotless house, a six-figure income, a graduate degree, catching the biggest fish or improving their marriage. My husband has no problem getting up at 5:00am for a golf tee-time, but it would take some heavy machinery to pry him out of bed at that time to get him on the treadmill. It’s not that he’s lazy, it’s that he’s more motivated to play golf than to hit the dreadmill. When we are in that defining moment, is when we need to remember the WHY.

Pitfall #5: It’s not fun

I look at kids’ sports today and for the most part think, boy are we grown-ups screwing up a great thing! From a very young age, kids’ sports are structured, organized, analyzed, regulated, legislated, and so on. Stick some grown ups and a budget into anything and there goes all the fun. Even grade school PE has become a place where instead of kids running around, honing their fine and large motor skills and figuring out how to navigate egos, half the time they’re engaging in “conceptual learning” and “autonomy supported instruction” and taking tests on subjects such as body composition, skeletal fitness, muscular development… Chances are, you’re guilty of doing the same thing in your own life. Your workouts have become yet another chore on your endless lift, instead of something you look forward to.

Solution: Be a kid again! When I train and compete in triathlons, I don’t think of it as a serious endeavor. Sure, I take my training seriously in that I schedule it into every week, making my workouts as much a priority as a doctor’s appointment would take. But as much as possible, I try to keep it all in perspective. I think back to when I was a kid and my sister, cousins and I would bike across country roads (in Sweden), swim in the freezing lakes, bike home, and run around playing hide-and-seek until our moms would call us inside. Talk about a great triathlon training program! And so fun! I still try to tune into that inner playful, carefree child. Even yoga, for the majority of us who neither believe in elephant gods, nor care to stand on our heads in a populated room, nor fathom bending into a lopsided pose with an animal name without risking a fig of giggles - can be an intimidating concept. Basically, as soon as there’s a section of Target dedicated to an activity, it becomes less fun and more work, as far as I’m concerned.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan of hard work and I think it’s something that needs to be practiced a lot more than it is. But even when I’m doing a 6 hour bike ride or a 162 lap swim or a 22 mile run, I make sure that it’s fun, that I’m smilepacing™. And the easiest way to do that is to do it with friends (support group), to laugh at the absurdity of what I’m doing, and to feel deep gratitude for having the strength and the will to do this, since after all, it is optional.