Consistency Is the Solution to Most of Your Fitness Problems
I train every day. I really don’t get sick. I’m not worried if I have to skip a workout. Over time, I make progress. I have good days at the (home) gym, but I almost never have bad days. My secret, while effective, is extremely boring. It’s just a sequence.
When you are consistent, you don’t get pain.
Let’s start with what everyone wants most in life: so that they don’t get sick. Since I exercise, you might think I have all the secrets for dealing with soreness. ( Yes , but that’s not the point.) In truth, I rarely feel pain.
This is because soreness is not an indication of how strong you are or how “good” your last workout was . It’s just something that sometimes pops up when you’re doing a workout you’re not used to. Your workout may have been harder than usual, but you can also get sick if it’s just different.
I’ve only felt really sick a few times in the past year. I once did a very light squat for 20 sets, whereas a regular workout was more like a heavy weight for me in sets of five. Another time I started a program with chin-ups when I hadn’t done chin-ups for ages. And then there was the day when I did the deadlift-like maximum deadlift after not doing the deadlift for a while and my lower back was toast for a week.
But in general? I lift weights and feel good the next day. This is the advantage that consistency gives you.
Motivation is never a problem
Every time an athlete asks questions and answers on Instagram, it seems like they always get asked at least one question about how they keep motivated to get their butt out to the gym every day. And almost every athlete is confused by this question. Motivation? Why do you need it?
Think about it: Do you need to be motivated to brush your teeth every morning? Go to work? “Motivation” can describe how you feel when you start a new hobby or new fitness activity, but that is not something that most people who exercise regularly relate to their daily life. You come in and squat because squats are what’s on the program today. I’ve already written about what it looks like .
No single workout matters much
We all had good workouts, bad workouts, missed workouts. But if you’ve been training consistently for, say, five years, none of those days will really matter.
I remember skipping a workout once, following a serious, consistent program after a couple of months. Maybe I was sick, or maybe I was busy at work. It does not matter. I just suddenly realized that it doesn’t matter that I missed one , because I’ve already done so many workouts, and there will be many more in the future. My self-image as an athlete was independent of what happened that day; on the contrary, it was shaped by the fact that I showed up so often and so constantly.
Consistency also means you don’t have to challenge super-intense workouts for no good reason. You may feel the need to sweat and tire yourself out to convince yourself that you are cool . But if you train constantly, these overly intense workouts will stand out like sore fingers. You made yourself unhappy … for what? Did this workout teach you anything? Was this necessary for the progress you are trying to achieve?
There will be important days and stressful ones. If you are competing, your race day or race day may be one of them. But even then, in the long run, how much does this competition mean when you know there will be many others? Not so much.
Consistency Leads to Progress
Think for years, not months or weeks. What happens if you train consistently for five years? Ten? How strong, fast, flexible could you be? Sometimes I despair when looking at a young athlete who seems stronger than I will ever be. Then I check how long ago they started their sports, and I see that they have spent far more hours training than I ever did. Consistency develops over time.
But progress is not only about time, although it is part of it. You make progress when you purposefully exercise to achieve a goal. If all you do is the random mini workouts you find on YouTube, you will establish a baseline fitness level, but it may not be enough to push yourself to get stronger and stronger.
When you train purposefully, you are using a program that puts a little more in front of you every week, every month, and every year. If you lift weights, they get heavier. If you do yoga, your body will become more flexible and you will learn to position yourself more accurately. If you choose a running program – whether it’s a 5K couch or going to a marathon – the program will gradually increase your mileage and bring you closer to your goal.
When you train consistently, you have the opportunity to complete a full training cycle, and then another, and then another. You will learn how your body and mind cope with different types of workouts, and you will see what it feels like to shift your focus from the offseason to something that will help you in competition. This is not the same as periodically losing interest and then running the same program over and over again.
How to develop consistency
If you haven’t already, the first step is to realize that whatever your real fitness goal is, the plan to help you achieve that goal is to develop consistency.
So if you want to get stronger, your goal is not to lift 100 more pounds than you are currently doing. It’s not even about adding 10 pounds the next workout. This is in order to create a schedule for yourself that forces you to do deadlifts on a regular basis, and to complete the rest of that schedule in a way that suits your goal. You can choose a program that gives you a smart mix of hard days, light days, and supportive work to make you a stronger person overall. Over time, those 100 pounds will come. ( From here, I use the intermediate program once a week if you want advice on deadlifts.)
Or, if you want to get faster, it’s not about running your next three-mile run on a weekday night in slightly less time than the last. It’s about finding a plan that will make you faster over time, which may well include a lot of slow jogging . (As the saying goes, you run faster if you run more; you run more when you run slower.) Strength training, speed work, and long runs can all be included, even if all you want to do is run the same distance. Faster.
Once you choose consistency as your goal, the ramp up is more manageable. Instead of giving yourself ultra-long or high-intensity workouts to compensate for the fact that you’ve been sitting on your glutes for the past week, choose a program and see what it takes to get ready for it. (For example, a marathon program may require you to run three to five miles several times a week for a couple of months before starting.) Start where you are and add a little at a time. Instead of treating each day as a separate unique challenge, build on what you’ve done before.