Don’t even lift.
I’ve told that to more than one person who wants to begin in the weight room.
Why?
It isn’t to do with form or technique. It isn’t about risk of lifting weights for the untrained person. It sure isn’t because I, the preacher of muscle as an Elixir of Life and Youth, have lost my well-supported faith in the unrivaled power of resistance training.
Nothing like that.
It has to do with the mental shift and change of behaviors required to go into a gym and do a workout session.
Think of it like this:
The time it takes to do a session, plus any prep time and travel time on each side, is a major de-railer for a somebody who doesn’t yet have the habit of regular and consistent exercise.
Imagine a spur in your heel when you’re out on a walk. You might not notice it at first. A little later, the prickling sensation catches your attention. Before long, you can’t wait to get your shoe off and get that thing out of your foot.
Changes to your daily rituals and routines are no different.
Changes to habitual behaviors are an irritant.
With repetition they stop being an irritant, but that right there is the whole problem.
You’ve got to endure the irritation. It helps if you have the mental and behavioral tools to support endurance.
What’s better than giving a total workout plan and expecting a new recruit to show up one, two, three, or four days a week?
Do nothing.
Do so little that it may as well register as nothing.
Three one-hour sessions with a laundry list of exercises to check off is an irritant.
Doing one single body weight squat followed by one single pushup?
It’s almost harder not to do it. You’d feel pretty silly skipping a task that takes less than 60 seconds and can be done anywhere that your feet touch the ground.
You might think this isn’t having much or any effect on a person’s body, and you’d be right.
That isn’t the point.
At this stage of the journey, the reps that matter are the reps inside.
One of my major discoveries in recent years:
Life goes smoothly when you make it nearly impossible to screw up what you want to get done.
Instead of eating that whole elephant in a single sitting, which won’t happen, make it difficult or impossible to not take a bite every time you walk by.
Lots of bites done often result in a fully digested elephant.
The more you build behaviors into your environment, the less you have to think, the fewer decisions you have to make, and the easier it is to do the right thing.
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Matt Perryman