You should think of your fitness the way you think of a career. You start small and, over time, build. Along the way you gain experience, learn new skills, and tread into new territory. The accumulation and compounding of all of this over time brings you to the top.
Fitness Is Not A Short Term Prospect
You might have some specific goals in mind, like a wedding, a beach vacation, or the summer but being in good shape is really a life-long endeavor. You’d like to be at your healthiest all the time, not just for a few weeks a year, don’t you think? And since you have a lifetime, your attitude towards fitness should be the long view.
Fitness Is Like A Career
An important aspect of this is to see the smaller steps for what they are, building blocks. At work, finishing a report or project on time today won’t necessarily get you a promotion on the spot. However, finishing all your projects and reports on time everytime, over the long term, just might. The same goes for exercise. Whatever you do in your workout today probably won’t drastically change you how you look and feel this weekend. But putting in good workouts every week, week after week, will absolutely change how you look and feel at the end of the year.
Good Things Come With Experience
If a career goal is to go from project member to project leader, you’ll want some experience. Launching into the top role without it is not likely to serve anyone well. The same goes with exercise. If you are starting from a pretty humble place, like most of us do, going straight into boot camp is probably over-reaching. Four weeks of hard workouts don’t amount to much if you have to sit out the following six because of an injury. That’s like being project leader for a month and then getting fired – great while it lasted, but now what?
The metaphor could continue, but you get the picture. Think of fitness in the big picture. It is a set of skills and abilities that build on one another. Done systematically, it’s a ladder that you can continually cliber to higher and higher results. Enjoy the journey.
This post originally appeared on www.dothemovement.com