When you view health and wellness as a journey towards being better, rather than an either/or proposition, you give yourself the chance to finally get somewhere with your fitness endeavors.
You Must Learn What Doesn’t Work
As my clients all know, I have recently begun training in the sport of Olympic Weightlifting in a serious way. This sport is, to me, the ultimate form of strength training as it requires both strong muscles as well as incredibly fine-tuned technique. The technique part is exceptionally challenging because it requires one to understand and master contradictory ideas. You must be strong, but not try to muscle the weights up overhead. You must be fast, but you cannot rush what you are doing. You must get the weight in the air, but not too high. You must create tension, but you must also be loose. Needless to say, this is all difficult and it takes time to develop these skills. In the meantime, there can be a lot of challenges—many missed lifts, many frustrating practices, many disappointing competitions.
Or at least, that’s one way of looking at it…
There is another way of thinking about the struggle that comes from working at something that is difficult to master. My coach said it once, and the sentiment stuck with me. Every practice or competition, he said, is by definition progress because at the very least, you are learning what doesn’t work.
Every Attempt Is A Victory, Win Or Lose
Here’s a secret about fitness: there are no secrets. No special weapons, no magic routines, no guaranteed shortcuts. Becoming sustainably fit and healthy requires finding the habits, routines, and lifestyle that will work for you over the long term. The fact of the matter is, finding what is right for you means testing, and testing means risking failure. Some people, for example, do well on low carb diets. Others feel sluggish, groggy, and find themselves ultimately binging uncontrollably at the end of a long day of low carbs. It isn’t a lack of discipline or commitment for those who fail at low carb, it’s the fact that low carb isn’t the right diet for them, and it’s never going to be. The key point though isn’t about the diet or its lack of efficacy, it’s about understanding that we must start by asking a question: could low-carb be right for me? Then, once we have asked it, we must experiment and see what happens.
The difficult part of this is the fact that experimenting involves the risk of failure, and this is what trips up many committed people seeking to improve their health. Whenever any of us try something that is difficult, it is naturally disappointing if it doesn’t work. No one wants to waste effort. No one wants to try hard and suffer defeat. When it happens it can be demoralizing, and too often, faced with that outcome, we walk away. But there is another way, which is to recognize the value of the learning experience, because learning is always a victory. Doing a low carb diet, to continue the example, and finding out that you felt terrible and didn’t lose a pound is a victory because, well, now you know. Thanks to the experience, you are ready to try something else, which has a greater chance of succeeding. Even better, with each successive try, you will get closer to the truth. This is why every attempt is a victory, the outcome is irrelevant.
Fitness Takes Time. Give It To Yourself
Why is it so hard to view failures as learning experiences, as steps along the road to victory? I think a big reason is because our society is in a rush. We all want fast results. In the health and fitness industry, this rush mentality is particularly pervasive. Results are usually promised in time-frames of weeks, never months or years. They are also usually framed as simple. Make this special change and your problems will be solved. The fact that this is rarely true need hardly be raised.
I think we would find more success, overall, if we could view our fitness endeavors not through the lens of radical transformations or the search for secret weapons, but rather as a project that involves long term learning and growth. In this scenario, moments that do not deliver the results we hope for are not seen as failures, but as important parts of the process—pieces of the overall victory. This would, I believe, encourage us to stick to the journey for the long term.