Consistency: The Most Important Part of any Plan

Motivation is a great way to get started with your fitness journey, but it is unsustainable to rely on it. When you rely on motivation alone, what will happen is inconsistency of your plan. You can have the greatest plan for yourself, whether it is nutrition or exercise, but if you are inconsistent with that plan you will not see results. That is why you need to create a plan that you can be consistent with. Typically you want to start with the smallest amount of work that will elicit results. With strength training, it will be more sustainable to start with 2x/week instead of going all in with 6 days per week. In the beginning you will have the motivation to go all 6 days, but motivation is short term. What will happen when you are no longer motivated to go to the gym? You will either start skipping, or dread going to the gym. You don’t want that to happen. Frustration can build up and you will quit altogether, and that’s the last thing you want to do.  Find a plan that will help you be consistent and sustainable for the long term. 

    Consistency is key for reaching goals. You  can get amazing results from just training 2x/week. This is also much more feasible to do long term compared to 6 days/week. It is much harder to skip a day when you have to go to the gym just 2 days out of the 7. Motivation can be used in the beginning to create habits. Building habits will help you to stay consistent and build discipline around the habit you are creating. Discipline will be that force you need when motivation is not there. Trust me, there will be times you will not want to go to the gym, but creating the habit of going and building the discipline will help you get through those doors. Sometimes getting through the doors of the gym is the hardest part. You never regret going to the gym and putting in the work, but you will regret missing out. 

    Now the question is, how do I create and build a habit that allows me to be consistent? The answer is to start small, and set yourself up for success. Let’s use exercise as an example and say that you want to go to the gym. Look at your schedule and look at a time of the day that fits and how many days you can go consistently. Now ask yourself if you can maintain that a year from now? How about 5 years from now? Once you have the days and time of day picked out, block it off your schedule. Make the gym a nonnegotiable in your calendar. Write notes to remind you about the gym and your Why for going. Make that note visible everyday, I talk about this in my other post about goal setting.

    We are humans, and mistakes happen and things come up called life. I get it and we cannot be 100% all the time, that’s not sustainable. Consistency doesn’t mean 100% all the time. You would still be able to reach your goals, be sustainable with it, if you were able to be consistent 80% of the time. The progress would be a little slower, but you will not get burnt out by being 100%. The stress and anxiety from missing a training session would go away knowing that you are consistent with your other sessions. If you trained 2x/ week, 80% consistent for that month would be 6 sessions out of 8 for that month. Doesn’t sound too bad right? Life happens and sometimes things are out of our control. We just have to focus on things we can control. Here is the nice thing about starting off with 2x/week of training, if you cannot go one day because something came up, you can easily reschedule later in the week and still get 2x/week in.Make your plan easily adaptable and make it work with your schedule to help you stay consistent. I will say this again, the best plan in the world for you will not work if you are inconsistent with it. Create a plan, be consistent with it, and that will give you better results than the best plan in the world being done sparingly.