It’s a fact of life that we have to invest in our health and fitness if we’re going to be at our best. There might one day be a time when it’s possible to be at your physical and mental best even without working up a sweat and eating well, but that’s certainly not the case today. By investing in your health and fitness, you’ll be giving yourself the best chance of living life to the fullest.
Alas, it’s not always as easy as we’d like it to be. In this post, we’ll run through some of the common health and fitness mistakes people routinely make. Make sure you avoid them, and you’ll find that your journey towards being the healthiest version of yourself is much more straightforward.
Signing Up For an Expensive Gym
People get pretty excited about beginning a health and fitness journey. There’s a reason why you see so many new people in the gym in January; everyone’s made a vow to themselves to get in shape. But then by February, everything is back to normal, and the majority of the people who signed up in the new year have left. While it’s not necessarily a bad thing to sign up for an expensive gym, it’s best to sign up for whichever gym is closest to you. Health and fitness is just another part of your lifestyle, and you’ll be much more likely to make it part of your routine if your gym is close to your home.
Trying to Do it Alone
Health and fitness is a complex field. And even if it wasn’t, it still requires dedication and hard work. Both of those things are difficult to have all on your own. Willpower, for example, is unlikely to yield the results you’re looking for, in large part because it’s such a slippery concept. You get results by showing up every day whether you’re motivated or not. It’s also important to get additional support from people who know what it takes for people to reach their fitness goals; Moshy, for example, provides tailored weight loss plans that can maximize the results from your gym sessions. As with most difficult things in life, success will be much easier when you have others helping you.
Retaining Bad Habits
It’s important to congratulate the hard work you’ve been doing to improve your health and fitness. However, it’s equally important not to be too proud of yourself. It’s all too easy to convince yourself that you deserve a bad-for-you treat because you’ve done so well at the gym. You can do that every now and again, but if it’s becoming as much a part of your lifestyle as the gym is, then it could be problematic. You’ll find that it’s much easier to reach your health targets if you take a full lifestyle approach to your improvement. That means saying goodbye to any bad habits — alcohol, smoking, fast food — and hello to habits that’ll really push your health forward.
Over or Under Training
You have to put the time in to improve your health and fitness. There’s no such thing as a shortcut! Only things that can make it easier for you to reach your ideal level. Newcomers often fall into the trap of overtraining, believing, wrongly, that if they push themselves as hard as possible they’ll notice improvements more quickly. However, it doesn’t work that way. It’s best to take a slow and steady approach at the beginning, such as going to the gym three times a week for an hour.
On the other hand, some people take things a little too relaxed. You won’t get results just by having a gym membership — you have to put the hours in. It’s worthwhile being mindful of your performance and checking that you are working hard. If you’re leaving the gym without breaking a sweat or needing a shower, then you’re probably taking it too easy.
Expecting Overnight Results
Everybody wants to get results from their hard work. But here’s the thing: investing in your health and fitness is more of a deferred gratification kind of thing, rather than an instant gratification one. You shouldn’t expect to see any results for the first couple of months, and even then the effects might be minimal depending on your starting point. However, you can trust that, with time, you’ll have more energy, you’ll look better, and your mood will improve. Remember that nothing worth having comes easily or quickly; put in the time, and you’ll notice results.
If you’d like to read more about health and fitness, check out this post on Why I ditched the Diets.
