Consistency is Key
What if I told you that the best fitness program isn’t the one written by the highest paid celebrity personal trainer in Hollywood? What if I told you the best nutrition program isn’t the one that you paid hundreds of dollars for but never followed? What if I told you that if you followed a few simple steps consistently, you would look and feel like a completely different person in as little as a years’ time? Would you believe me?
We are all striving to achieve something, whether that’s building an incredible physique, living a long fulfilling life, or just trying to be a slightly slimmer and healthier version of ourselves. With the amount of exposure we have to other people’s success, it is so easy to think that massive, long-lasting change can be made almost overnight by following some new diet plan or workout regime. We constantly look for the next thing or person that will provide a shortcut to what we want, and granted, learning from the right sources and people can give us a huge leg up on life. But honestly, what gives us the best results in the long term is sweating the small stuff. By that I mean making small changes and focusing on implementing them over time.
Take any person you know of that has achieved something truly remarkable in their life, something you wish you could do yourself. I can just about guarantee a few things. 1. They had someone or a team of people to learn from and guide them, 2. They focused on repeatedly doing the small and seemingly simple things well and 3. They made a heck of a lot of mistakes along the way, but that did not deter them from continuing to work towards their goal. We often don’t see this side of things when it comes to success, we just see the result without any of the steps or effort that got the person to where they are. Because of this, when we start on our own journey towards achieving something worthwhile, we often try to make huge changes all at once. Inevitably, when things don’t turn out exactly as planned, or when we fail miserably, we blame ourselves, and we put the thing we are trying to achieve into the “too hard” basket.
When it comes to making a significant, long-lasting change in our life, consistency beats just about everything else. If you cannot do something consistently, you are unlikely to achieve what you want. For example, say if you have the goal of building up a more muscular body. You start going to the gym and download an awesome, six day a week training program from the internet and start to implement it. The trouble is, you have never trained before, so you don’t know how to do most of the exercises on the program and realistically, due to your work and other commitments, you can only train three days a week, not six. Rather than feeling bad about not being able to do the program, you can work with what you’ve got. Aim to train three days a week and slowly master different exercise techniques. Will the results come slower than if you were able to train six days a week? Yes, but you are much more likely to make some remarkable progress because you are able to stay consistent.
The same applies to adopting a diet plan. Trying to follow a plan that does not work with your lifestyle is a sure-fire way to end up disappointed. Say if your goal is weight loss and you decide to follow a heavily restrictive diet, cutting out most of the food you would regularly eat all at once. Even if it does yield some good results, most people will end up ditching this dieting method due to intense cravings and the impact it has on their everyday life. However, using a smaller plate to reduce portion sizes and chewing food at a slower rate can be effective weight loss strategies and are easier to stick to consistently.
We are often drawn in by the grandeur of celebrity training programs and the apparent effectiveness of fad diets. But, to truly make a difference in our own lives, the methods we need to implement are often far less fancy and complicated. Simple changes are often the best way to encourage consistency and in the long term, this is often what will lead to the best results.
