Like anything else in life you need to determine how important your fitness is to your well-being and get on with making it happen.

by Gregory Owens Sr. February 13, 2019

My daily life involves meeting people who often admire my workout program and wish they had the same desire and drive. Needless to say, I am often shocked about why they lack desire and drive. I got it, we are all different with different wants and needs. Living in a fast pace world with competing interests perhaps is one of the major reasons why people are having trouble finding time to weight and fitness train. So after some thought, I decided to write this blog and address my 4 pillars (mental commitment, prioritize your schedule, get moving, don’t quit) to getting started and staying with a fitness program.

Mental commitment

Believe me when I say that the body can do what the mind wants you to do. Where there’s a will, there’s a way to get it done. Mind over matter is what I often say.

Doing my long military career, I learned a lot of things about myself, and what I could do with discipline and a strong mental approach.

As a fitness and weight lifting fanatic, I have learned that 90% of maintaining my near-daily fitness regime is mental and not the physical grind. I believe psychologically, it is more impactful to write out the goal you want to achieve rather than just thinking about it. The act of writing it ingrains the dedication into your brain and processes. This makes it more likely you’ll meet whatever benchmark you set for yourself.  Additionally, one of the central questions to changing your lifestyle and becoming the physical animal you imagine yourself to be is determining how bad you really want it.

How bad you want it reveals some interesting psychobiological findings, which includes:

• Mental toughness determines how close you can get to your physical limit. There is always another 10-15% left in you when you think you are physically exhausted.
• Bracing yourself for a tough workout can boost performance by 15% or more.
• The only way to improve performance is by altering how you perceive effort. Visualize your strong effort the day before.
• Choking under pressure is a form of self-consciousness.
• There’s no such thing as going as fast as you can—only going faster than before. Do not limit what you think you can do.
• Faith in your training is as important as the training itself. Believe in the process.
• Don’t go into your training with preconceived limitations on what can be accomplished.
• If you want it bad enough, you can have it.

Prioritize your schedule

I firmly believe like anything else in life, must people do the things that are important to them and the things that they really want to get done.

One of the ways that I go about making sure that my training gets done nearly each day, is to schedule my daily activities around my fitness training. It’s easier to find the time when everything else is planned around your fitness schedule. I believe you have to prioritize your workout time like all the other important things in life.

Here are some prioritization habits of highly productive people:

1. They take care of quick tasks immediately.
If a task pops into their mind and it requires less than 5 minutes of time, productive people will attend to it right away, eliminating the need to write it down or try to remember it later.

2. They prioritize their to-do list.
When the day’s list is too long to realistically complete in 24 hours (which for some of us is a daily occurrence), that list is then rearranged to reflect the absolute essentials. Their workout is an essential task.

3. They appreciate what did get done instead of stressing over what didn’t.
Like most things in life, being productive requires a good attitude. At the end of the day, looking at the bright side and choosing to see the accomplishments rather than the missteps means that you’ll feel better, sleep better, and be better prepared to be productive again tomorrow.

4. They have daily dedicated planning time.
Usually 5-10 minutes in the morning or the evening is set aside to think through that day’s (or the next day’s) tasks and to outline a game plan for getting them accomplished. Visualize your upcoming training in detail.

5. While some of us naturally have more drive than others, I still believe highly productive and successful people are made, not born. They are made by seeing challenges as less than a burden, but rather as an opportunity to succeed.

Get moving

You wake up, and the entire atmosphere seems to welcome you into the early hours. Energy flows through you like fuel. Goals and objectives sit at the forefront of your mind. You are charged up for what’s ahead of you.

Yet on a different day, you wake up and everything feels grey. It takes an hour of stumbling about and getting yourself together just to get your workplace in order. You stare at a blank page with a similarly blank mind, succumb to all sorts of distractions.  

A key ingredient which may differentiate between the two days above is motivation. For many people motivation determines the quality of their work and the extent to which they succeed in meeting their goals. It is the inner drive that facilitates goal-seeking behavior that makes it easier to overcome challenges and do what you want or must (or a mixture of both) with genuine enthusiasm.

How motivation turns a task from a chore into an enjoyment makes a combination of the two an enticing option. As with anything else, creating motivation calls for an active approach. When you find yourself in a slump, don’t wait for it to come on its own. Make a conscious choice to reinstate your inner drive, approaching your daily endeavours with energy and liveliness. As well as keeping a daily focus on your long term goals – which make powering through difficult yet necessary activities worthwhile.

Successful people show up and get it done even when they don’t feel like it. Stay focused on the things you need to do to achieve your goals and get it done. Your motivation, discipline & strong work habit will carry you across the finish line.

Don’t quit

Manage your expectations, because there will be ups and downs. It’s just part of the process. There are no quick solutions to becoming good at what you do.

You know the saying: Anything worth having doesn’t come easy. Regardless of whether you’re thinking about finding the love of your life or developing a crush on fitness, change is a work in progress. To be prosperous, you have to understand it takes time to build. Be patient, and positively reinforce the progress you are making through self-praise and rewards that are healthy. Mentally, it’s also vital to practice forgiveness if you fall short on your way to the finish line. Even if you regress, pick yourself up. Go back to the step you were at. Get the emotional support from family, friends, and other workout comrades to bolster you getting back and moving forward.

Lastly, here is a great quote from Morelia Fabrega to think about.

“Life can be compared to a card game. The hand that you’re holding may not be what you wanted, but it’s the hand you were dealt. You have to play the game to the best of your abilities with the cards you have in your hand. If you throw down the hand you were dealt in disgust, you lose. But if you play your cards right, you can get better cards, and you can even win the game.”

• Sports