Life’s Already Hard

I get to help a lot of people sort out their minds about this whole fitness thing. They come to my gym for a free consultation and sometimes it may as well be a therapy session. It’s not that the gym itself is scary, it’s that life is already hard and they’re not sure if they can handle making it harder. So let’s take a minute to think about how to deal with a training program when it’s hard.

Starting When It’s Hard

“Start where you are, pick where you go” is my guiding light for new lifters.

You cannot pick where you start, and yes your life is already hard as it is. Next week will be really hard with the kid’s events and your work project and your wife still has the flu. This whole year has been tough and you’re not sure how well a new gym will fit into your life.

You can pick where you go. You can decide to try out a new schedule, a new set of priorities. You can decide to pick a new habit and roll with it for a month. You can decide to a pick a goal and pursue it. You can pick the easiest possible next step and then do the easiest possible next step over and over again.

What you pick may not be my program! But don’t fool yourself into thinking you cannot choose where you’re headed. So don’t wait for life to make it clear: choose for yourself.

Keeping Going When It’s Hard

As soon as you save up some money in an emergency fund, it’s crazy how the car suddenly needs a repair. Right after finishing a huge work project the biggest customer switches to a competitor. We smashed our personal best bench press yesterday, then our partner goes out of town and between all the extra cooking, cleaning, and handling the kids we just don’t know how to keep the program going.

Life will happen. The path you choose will always have an obstacle.

This isn’t the time to wing it, it’s the time to turn in those fitness credits you’ve been accumulating. When you started, you chose a direction instead of resigning yourself to fate. Now you must choose again.

Seek Help

We can solve a lot of problems with some outside perspective. I personally struggle with this a lot, defaulting to tasking myself with buckling down and figuring it out myself. But family and friends don’t want to see you suffering. You pay your coach to take some of the load off – they should be helping as much as possible. You already have lots of resources available, work with those around you to remember what’s already possible.

Invest In Your Basics

Your sleep, your essential foods, and some form of activity will never be a weakness.

Your weightlifting may turn into walking, push-ups, pull-ups, and a pair of dumbbells on the front porch for a while but more importantly it counts.

Microwaving some frozen vegetables is hardly gourmet but it absolutely adds nutrients to your diet and is just as easy as any other part of dinner.

Going to bed on time is free, and feeling recovered helps you work harder on the problems you’re facing.

Keep Monitoring What You’re Monitoring

Tracking your calories, or maybe just your grams of protein? Keep doing it and be honest about it without shame. If it’s lower than usual still write it down. One day you can look back at that information and you know that’s what it looks like when times are tough. Now add the simplest way you could improve those numbers even in the tough time. Make that your next habit to focus on.

Maybe you were in the gym every Mon-Tues-Thurs-Sat. Buy a calendar and write an X on the days you got some amount of exercise. You might be able to fit in more days than you originally thought, maybe even more if you’re doing less work per session than usual.

Journal

We learn a lot more from losing a game than winning. And we can learn a lot about ourselves when we’re going through a tough time. Journal what’s in your head now. It will bring some direction now and some lessons later. A few minutes in a note on your phone is plenty, you don’t need a complicated system or a special notebook.

Getting Ready for the Next One

Sometimes you can see a tough week/month/season coming over the horizon. Time to steel yourself up. Everything regarding “keeping going” applies here too but you have a head start on all of them. Make use of that time. You also have these on your side:

1. Take stock of everything that’s been a new habit in the last 90 days. Find a way to make them even simpler. Tracking all my food may turn into picking one easy breakfast you can eat everyday. Sleeping 8.5 hours a night may turn into turning the lights off by a certain time. Put your training into Maintenance Mode.
2. Consider it an upcoming season. Write down how you’re going to handle it, and set a reminder on a date you think you can embrace another change of seasons.
3. Prepare yourself to fall short. If we could be perfect then it isn’t really a hard time is it? Give yourself grace and refuse to attach shame to your goals. Treat it as new information instead, and it will make you better as time goes on.