I had a conversation with a guy the other day about how I train.
When you’re stuck in doing your own thing, it isn’t easy to see how it looks to other people.
This fella noticed I was in the gym six days a week, split between crushing weights and chaining myself to the air bike for interval sprints.
“I couldn’t ever do that,” was the theme of the discussion.
Whenever I talk to somebody like that, I’m torn.
Part of me wants to say, “You can do whatever you want, as long as you want it and you’re willing to pay the price for it.”
I believe that most any human being who is not ill or injured can do far more than they realize. I believe even the ill and injured are capable of much more than they might realize.
Most of this “I can’t” is pure head trash.
At the same time:
I’ve learned through hard experience that people who are stuck into the “I can’t” attitude are not looking for help.
They’re looking for validation that they are right about their helplessness.
They don’t want to hear how to fix it. They want to hope and wish and dream and feel vindicated as a victim.
In such a case, I smile and nod and say something like, “yeah, you’re probably right”
No point in trying to sell someone who isn’t buying your wares.
The kicker is, there’s an “easy” path to hard.
I didn’t get to my present activity level in one step.
If you rewound back to 2022, when I was banned from the gym thanks to a mass outbreak of hypochondria in people who never gave a second thought to their health or mortality until the TV told them to panic over flu season, I couldn’t have handled what I’m doing now.
That frog had to boil slowly.
In the bigger picture, I’ve been doing this consistently for coming up on 30 years. Beating your head against a brick wall for that long will eventually build some tough calluses.
You know what they say about the best time to plant a tree. If you can’t go back in time 20 years, then you do it NOW.
My point is, what you do right now to start won’t look much like the situation in a year, in five years, or 20 years from now.
The small first steps may be underwhelming, and that is exactly what’s needed.
Small first steps pick up steam until one day you’re squatting to a max six days a week wondering how the hell you got here.
Ask me how I know that.
Fitness marketing creates the impression that you’ve got to be all-in or don’t bother showing up.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
We can get into the fine details of “optimization” (which is largely fan-fiction for nerds who panic if they can’t feel in control)
But much more important are those small steps done daily with robot-like consistency.
When it comes to positive changes in your daily activity and your daily eating habits, something is always better than doing nothing.
You don’t get points for perfect. But you can sure win big in the long run by adding up a whole lot of small daily wins.
What’s a small win for you each day?
Matt Perryman