Creating The Ideal Exercise Routine

Good Evening!

Happy December.

The last month of the year.

Now’s about when fitness coaches (like myself) and gyms will flood your inbox with offers to join, saying that “waiting until January is too late to make a change.”

Some gyms even went so far as to discourage New Year’s Resolutioning altogether last year.

While it’s true that waiting for the right time is a myth we tell ourselves to prolong procrastination, I think it’s worth rethinking how to change people’s minds (yours included, if you’re reading this) about how to get into — and stay into — exercise.

Consider this somewhat of a mea culpa from last year — just before I launched my own coaching business — where I took a major leap and paid for a business coaching service to help launch my product (online/remote coaching).

Also, if any other fitness professionals are reading this, consider it advice from someone who’s heard from numerous people far older than himself that guilting people into a New Year’s routine hardly ever results in long-term success.

Last year, a lot of my marketing was centered around January 1st.

I predicated my message on the “New Year, New Me” trope, taking full advantage of the opportunity most people seek when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st (or instead, around 2 pm on January 1st when the hangover wears off).

You’d think clients would come falling into my lap, right?

Wrong.

I scored a whopping ONE new client 2 weeks into January, which had me questioning if leaving my big box gym was the right move after a leap of faith into entrepreneurship.

One year later, after trudging through the challenging (but sometimes super rewarding) path of being a small business owner, I’ve realized that changing people’s minds about fitness goes further than a quick marketing slogan.

Routines start in the brain and end with action, and it takes more than just a convincing hook to get someone to build a routine.

Creating The Ideal Exercise Routine

In my hundreds of conversations with clients over the years, time management seems to be a recurring theme.

And that’s fine — you shouldn’t feel like a failure for being unable to budget time. Hell, I’m still working on it myself.

But fortunately, after a lot of thinking, I’ve compiled a list of things — mental things, not physical — that you can do to create time.

And while some of you reading might only have so much brain power allotted for scheduling and planning, let me challenge you with my personal spin on a quote from Jim Kwik’s new book, Limitless:

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted that, “Life is C between B and D,” meaning that the life we live is the choices (C) we make between the “B” of birth and the “D” of death.

I want to add some letters to that alphabetical philosophy.

Outside B, C, and D are A and E, Anything and Everything.

In this five-letter sandwich, the hierarchy of importance descends outward — the choices we make between life and death are more important than anything or everything else.

ABCDE

Where am I going with this word salad? In my eyes, this quote emphasizes the importance of choice — all we have, at the end of the day, are choices, and more things are within our choices and selection than we believe.

So when we tell ourselves we’re short on time or can’t make any, my first tip in building a routine that lets you optimize your health is this: Realize that you have a choice — you have a choice to be busy, to be exercising, to be occupied, to be distracted.

Reeling this in, we can start to compartmentalize your routine down to a series of choices.

That scrolling binge you go on after shutting the laptop is a choice.

The hour you spend horizontally after playing with the kids is a choice.

The food you ate an hour before bed, knowing damn well you could’ve abstained with another distraction from the hunger, was a choice.

I’m not saying these are all bad choices, either. Sometimes, these choices happen, and that’s fine!

But awareness around the impermanence of these things — realizing that they don’t define you insofar as you eliminate their constant choosing — is a superpower that can dramatically help you reshape your routine.

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See you next week!