Why You Fail at Fitness

Plan your exercise program is great, is not it? Nothing like sitting down with your calendar and write all the workouts you will do this week. Just thinking about it makes you feel good, does not it? But life has a way of getting in the way of those fitness goals. Maybe you have to work late or if you catch a cold. Perhaps your child has soccer practice or you have unexpected guests. Whatever “it” is, it will happen, and for many of us, “it sends our exercise plans right out the window. You may recognize some of these other reasons that you skip exercise:

* Catching a cold, flu or other nasty bug
* Muscle strain, pain or other injuries
* Long hours, busy schedules and social obligations
* Life transitions such as getting married, finding a new job, graduates or retired
* Having a baby
* Feeling tired, lack energy and do not get enough sleep
* Burnout or overtraining
* Boredom
* The lack of results and confusion on how to achieve goals
* Travel

What is important to understand is this: you will not always be perfect in the year and, more importantly, you do not have to be. What you want is to do your best and give you credit for what you achieve, even if it is far from your original goal. To overcome these failures of fitness, you have to stop the blame game and start taking action.

Join the Club

Your first step in the transformation is about a failure to stop kicking and realize yourself you are not alone in this field. We skip all workouts, eat more than we should go and get from time to time. In fact, many of my clients successfully training individuals come to me in the midst of their own fitness failures, guilt and frustration.

* Mary was one of those clients, a woman of 67 years who had been active with cardio and weight training for years. Then she got a new job challenging and realized she had gained nearly 35 pounds after giving up his routine. She called me after two years of struggle with her weight, wondering how she was so far off track.

* Gretta was another client who came to see me after having a baby. Despite her efforts, she has been a difficult time losing weight baby and a more difficult time trying to figure out how to take care of itself and the new baby. When she came to me, he had for months she had performed.

So what happened? These customers have completely different situations, but it ended in the same place for the same reason: they did not plan on how they continue to engage with these huge changes in their lives. Mary does not take into account the hours she would work and thought she had to stick to his routine. When that routine does not correspond, it dropped, rather than altered. Gretta has also failed to plan on how it had the year with a new baby in the house. Once we understand why their failures happened, we were able to use that failure to create better routines to adapt to their new situation.

You can do the same thing for you and your first step? Risking failure.