Fit­ness Tip: You are Go­ing Too Fast

MISHAWAKA — You have seen it—the gym park­ing lot packed to max­i­mum all day for the two to three weeks fol­low­ing the New Year fes­tiv­i­ties. Then, all of a sud­den, the gym is back to be­ing a ghost town. Why does this hap­pen? Per­haps you may be one of those “res­o­lu­tion­ers” who put in their best ef­fort for a few weeks, then be­gin to re­al­ize it is not sus­tain­able for you. Thoughts in your head quickly turn to: “I don’t have time to get in shape,” or “Peo­ple who do this must have no life,” and even “They’re just ge­net­i­cally gifted.”  

Those are com­mon and com­pletely un­der­stand­able thoughts. Yet, they are ex­tremely dam­ag­ing and not com­pletely true. Yet there is some truth in the thoughts that some of those peo­ple have no lives. Some ded­i­cated stu­dent ath­letes, fit­ness icons, and even peo­ple for whom fit­ness is a hobby do spend a ma­jor­ity of their time ded­i­cat­ing how they eat, sleep, and ex­er­cise to the goal of be­ing in the best shape they pos­si­bly can. Some oth­ers ac­tu­ally are ge­net­i­cally gifted to carry less fat or to have slightly higher mus­cle mass than av­er­age. How­ever, if that is not you, then quit com­par­ing your­self to those peo­ple.  

To pre­vent your­self from be­com­ing a res­o­lu­tioner, you must change your think­ing about fit­ness and how to achieve it. Here are two ways to keep your­self from burn­ing out while try­ing to bet­ter your­self this year. 

First, do not ex­pect a fast change. The hu­man body is de­signed to re­main in some­thing known as “home­osta­sis.” This means that the body wants the in­ter­nal en­vi­ron­ment to re­main as con­stant as pos­si­ble. If you have been in your cur­rent phys­i­cal shape for a while, odds are that your body is cur­rently pro­gramed to stay there. But there is hope! The hu­man body is amaz­ing at adapt­ing to change, but you have to trick it. Change things too fast, and your body will fight back and try to re­main in that pre­vi­ous state. How­ever, if you find that place where each day you push your­self just a lit­tle fur­ther, your body will adapt and change to meet the new de­mands. It will not al­ways be fun, and some days it will even seem like you are go­ing back­wards; but re­main con­sis­tent and re­sults will show. 

Sec­ond, start small. This is per­haps the biggest rea­son so many peo­ple strug­gle come New Year’s Day. They want to change their lives for the bet­ter, so they think “Go big or go home!” In­evitably, they go home. They never counted on the fact that spend­ing hun­dreds of dol­lars on ex­pen­sive sup­ple­ments (many of which don’t re­ally work), to­tally chang­ing their diet, and spend­ing hours every day in the gym or on the tread­mill would be hard to sus­tain long term. It might seem silly, but at first, don’t do any of that. Do not to­tally change any­thing. Start small and con­tinue for­ward each day. Set small, achiev­able goals for your­self and have friends and fam­ily hold you ac­count­able to those goals. In­stead of toss­ing out your whole re­frig­er­a­tor, cut out French fries and add rice to start. Then the next week make an­other change! In­stead of go­ing to the gym every day for two hours, go two or three times a week for 45 min­utes. Then add a lit­tle more the next week if you want to. In­stead of buy­ing ex­pen­sive sup­ple­ments, fo­cus on get­ting good sleep and drink­ing plenty of wa­ter. Get­ting in shape re­quires small changes each day and week to keep your­self mov­ing for­ward. Do not fall into the trap of diet pills and highly re­stric­tive di­ets as they of­ten do more harm than good. 

Lastly, do not hold your­self to any­one else’s stan­dards. You are not them, so do not try to be them. If you want to im­prove your­self, use you the day, the week, the month be­fore as your stan­dard. What do you want to do? Gain a bit of mus­cle? Lose a bit of fat? Be able to run 5k with your friends? Go on that spring break trip and feel con­fi­dent in your­self? Find your rea­son and stick to it.  

The won­der­ful thing about be­ing on this jour­ney is that you are never in it alone. There are mil­lions of peo­ple around the world who are try­ing to bet­ter them­selves as well. Along the way, you might just dis­cover some new foods you re­ally like, new ac­tiv­i­ties that you want to keep do­ing, new places you’ve never been, and new things about your­self that you never would have re­al­ized oth­er­wise. Bet­ter­ing your­self is not about feel­ing bad now, it is about im­prov­ing your­self so you can grow into the per­son you want to be later.