Personal purpose is the foundation of succeeding in any fitness challenge.
It’s not discipline, grit, or hard work. Having a personal purpose for showing up to a challenge is what you rely on when things get hard.
There are three core elements of purpose: a desire, a decision, and a program.
A desire is what gives you a vision for yourself that you want to manifest in the real world.
A decision is the seed of that desire becoming reality.
A program is the schedule of actions you take to grow that seed into a new reality in which you can live.
By identifying your desire, making a decision to commit to a program, you are engaged in the magical work of turning your mental thoughts into physical realities.
But there are certain myths about fitness goals that I want to debunk so that you can more easily experience the new reality you want to bring into your life.
1. Make your challenge to establish a habit.
People commonly make the mistake of making only results-oriented goals. These goals are good to have if you’re already in the habit of exercising and eating according to a plan. However, if you’re not already in the habit of exercising and eating well, then the best goal to begin is to have a consistent habit.
If you don’t currently have an exercise habit, I might recommend against making a weight loss or strength goal. If you succeed in building the fitness habit first, then you’ll be able to leverage that habit, not just across a single month, but across every month to achieve 12 of those goals over the course of a year.
One way of measuring this habit is to articulate your goal this way:
“My goal is to complete my program’s prescribed workout (or rest day) every day this month.”
Each day is an opportunity to learn about how you interact with the habit itself so that you can craft it to fit your personality, schedule, and needs.
If you already have an established workout habit, then it makes more sense to set a goal for how to leverage that pre-existing habit.
2. Only Build One Habit at a Time
It’s tempting to leap head-first into fitness and say, “I want to exercise daily, lose 15 pounds, eat healthily, and meditate every morning.”
This is a great idea. But it’s also four goals. Three of them are habits, and one is a result. Pursuing all of these at once will be very stressful on your mind and body. These goals also sound a little aimless and ambiguous. Why 15 pounds? Who cares? Why exercise? Why eat healthily? Don’t you like the food you’re eating now? They’re not stated in a way that showcases a connection to purpose.
This is why I recommend focusing only on building one habit at a time. Building an exercise habit can feel very difficult. I’ve been most successful building new habits when I’m focusing on only one at a time. Otherwise, I burn out. My mind has a hard time accepting the radical lifestyle change, and it doesn’t feel fitting to me. I end up falling back into previous ways of living and feeling guilty.
This year was the first time I focused on achieving radical consistency in my fitness routine for the first time. Even though I’ve years of experience using diet as a tool to achieve fitness goals, I ate whatever I wanted. The result was surprising. It wasn’t actually easier to build the habit of consistent exercise. But the difficult of building the habit came from dealing with the real reasons why I didn’t like going to the gym.
By focusing on only one habit — building more consistency in my workouts — I built a healthier relationship with that routine, and now reap the benefits of having an extremely consistent exercise habit.
Appearance-oriented goals (looking hot, being skinny, losing fat) are sometimes good if that’s what you desire. If you feel your bodyweight is lowering your quality of life, then fat loss is a fantastic goal to have. However, you have two options here. The first is to take longer to achieve your goals and establish an exercise routine first. This will increase the efficiency of your attempts to lose fat over the next year. The second option is to focus on diet and keep the intensity of your workouts very low, such as walking, low-pace elliptical work, or something that gives your mind and body the bandwidth to handle the stress of lower caloric intake.
3. Make Your Work Count for Something
Habits don’t always have to look like “traditional” exercise. I know that many people don’t enjoy going to a gym and lifting weights. Many of them have good reasons for disliking it. So give yourself freedom to engage in any kind of goal. We often think of “fitness challenges” as fat loss and muscle gain. But they can be much more.
Here are some ways you can think outside the box for your goal, depending on your interests, preferences, and history:
- Sign up for a boxing gym instead of a regular gym.
- Sign up for a skill-building program, such as an archery or kickboxing class. This can make you more active but doesn’t require exercise. Archery can get you in the habit of doing something “actively,” listen to archery podcasts on walks, and practice archery (another activity).
- Sign up for a competition in a year (bodybuilding, powerlifting, etc.). Building your habit will be to perform well in a year.
- Sign up for a certification, such as a yoga instructor certification. Establishing your habit will be about building relationships and being in the habit of showing up for certification hours without it feeling like work.
The point: make your hours count for something if you can. Working out for no reason is the hardest way to work out. I’ve been doing it for years, but it’s hard.