You should think of your fitness routine the same way you would think of a career. You start small, and over time, you build. Along the way you gain experience, learn new skills, and tread into new territory. The accumulation and compounding of all of these things over time is what brings you to the top.
Fitness is not a short term prospect. After all, your goal is to be in good shape your whole life, not just this summer. And since you have a lifetime, your attitude towards fitness should be the long-view. It’s like a career, where your efforts today help you advance tomorrow.
An important aspect of this is to see the smaller steps for what they are – building blocks. At work, finishing a report or a project on time today won’t necessarily get you a promotion right on the spot. However, finishing all your projects and reports on time every time, over the long term, just might. Whatever you do in your workout today probably won’t drastically change how you look and feel this weekend. But putting in good workouts every week, week after week, will change how you look and feel at the end of the year.
Similarly, if a career goal is to go from project member to project leader, you’ll probably want to get some experience. Launching into the top role without it is likely to be at the very least a lot of stress and at the worst an unmitigated disaster. The same goes for exercise. If you are starting from a pretty humble place, like most people do, launching into boot-camp might be over-reaching. If you get in a good 4 weeks but then have to sit out for 6 because of an injury, it’s a bit like getting fired. You may have been project manager for a time, but that ending probably made the whole thing more harmful than helpful.
I could go on but you get the picture. Think of exercise as a project. It is a set of skills and abilities that build on one another. If done systematically, it’s a ladder that you can continually climb to higher and higher results. If you can, try looking for a good personal trainer who can help to mentor you through the process. If not, try a little home research on your own to get a sense of the project.
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Bengt Nyman, Corporate Ladder To The Moon. License
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