Why Your Workout Plans Have Failed in the Past
Creating a Habit of Lifetime Fitness
**For a limited time, subscribe to my Coach.me plan, “Create a Fitness Habit for Life in 24 Days” for only 99¢!
An excerpt from Create a Fitness Habit for Life in 24 Days.
“Getting fit does not happen overnight, but creating a lifetime habit of fitness does. As Tony Robbins says, a decision to change happens in a moment. I will add, it may be informed by a lifetime, but it happens at the moment you decide you can no longer live with the way “it” is. Follow this guide and make that moment NOW! This is a 24 day plan to making a permanent change. It starts with specifying your goal and your plan for achieving that goal (defined in a measurable way, so even your dog could recognize that you are achieving it), recognize and define your motivation for achieving your goal, identify roadblocks to achieving your goal habit, and putting the infrastructure (time, tools, people, resources) in place to support your goal. This is where the real work will come. You will need to sit down, reflect, and write. Commit! It may not be easy, but once this work is honestly achieved, you are more than halfway to your goal and you haven’t even begun to sweat (other than the cold sweats that come from being honest with ourselves sometimes.) I can’t stress enough that completing your “plan” with integrity is essential to your success. Once it is done, all that follows is implementation. There are no maybes. You have written it in your calendar. It is like brushing your teeth, bathing, or going to work. It becomes a ‘must’ not a ‘should’.”
“Why would anyone pay for this information when they could just get it online?” A friend suggested. A fair question assuming the only barriers to behavior change are knowing what to do and doing it. I’m sure, like me, you have started on a new path full of desire to do differently, only to fall back to the former state of affairs when faced with the various challenges life throws our way. Whether illness, car trouble, or a rainy day, slight changes to our everyday can throw us out of our newly developing habit.
What are the reasons we find it so difficult to break a cycle and approach our lives in a new way? First of all, we tend to spend our lives trying to make our lives easy, but easy does not necessarily mean efficient. Easy is what we know. Easy is often what we grew up with. Our brains have to go from autopilot to consciously and methodically processing each step of a new pattern. Therefore, it isn’t easy to break old patterns and incorporate a new routine in the midst of our busy lives.
Making the Habit Stick
So the question remains, what factors must be present to make change happen, and more importantly, make change stick. I think most of us would agree that motivation is of ultimate importance, but is it sufficient to really effect change? I would suggest that motivation will cause us to take additional initiative beyond our normal effort, and though we can load ourselves up with facts and ideas about whatever change we desire, without a framework to support our change we just have information. Many highly motivated individuals have put forth a considerable degree of effort only to fail from a lack of infrastructure.
As part of the Coach.me platform, I have developed a plan to support you in your desire to create a lifetime habit of fitness. My plan will walk you through the steps to make lasting change. From determining your goals, identifying barriers, and developing a workout plan, to following through day by day until your fitness habit is formed, I will provide you with the tools for successful implementation. While my plan is specifically about creating a workout plan, the basic structure I present can be applied to any situation requiring change.
I really appreciate the opportunity to provide a written plan as a vehicle to reach clients. It allows me to share my knowledge with a wider audience. In addition, subscribing to the plan works well together with a 1-1 coaching chat or telephone consultation, as mentioned in my previous post, and all offered on Coach.me.
Whether you subscribe to my workout plan or not, I invite to check the link out for an overview. I’d love your feedback. I will write future posts on other topics contained within the plan as well as address and feedback readers provide.