Musubi Fitness

I have a daily journaling practice, part of which uses the Daily Stoic and the Daily Stoic Journal. Today’s (June 6) reflection was on the theme “when to stick and when to quit” and it lead me to thinking about how this applies to personal fitness.

The basic idea is that just because you’ve chosen a path, it doesn’t mean you have to stick to it forever. But at the same time, you can’t be jumping from one path to another path all the time whenever something doesn’t go your way. You make changes only when the alternative is clearly better.

The same applies to physical fitness. You have to stick to something for long enough to find out whether it works for you. Just because you’re not seeing any results right away doesn’t mean that whatever you’re doing to train doesn’t work for you. You need to give it time. I generally say 6-8 weeks. Unless it causes, or you feel it will cause, something requiring medical intervention.

In the current world of social media, it’s easy to find all sorts of new ideas and “hacks” to try. Back when I started trying my hand at weight training, it was fitness magazines, Muscle & Fitness, Flex, Men’s Health. All these crazy workouts which took like 2 hours to complete, 5 days a week! I wasn’t at that fitness level, nor did I have the time to just live in the gym. Which meant that I never really followed them for any serious period of time, and the results never came. Result never came until I started putting in some real practice and some real consistent work.

Which is why I highly recommend when you’re starting your fitness journey to get a personal trainer and having them create a program tailored to you. That’s what I did, and I started seeing results.

A good personal trainer should take your goals, current condition, and circumstances into consideration in designing a personalized program suitable for YOUR situation. You just have to show up and follow the program.

That being said, just because you found a personal trainer and follow their program doesn’t mean you have to stick with them forever. Your body, your goals, and your circumstances will change. So your fitness program needs to change with them. And sometimes the program just doesn’t match your goals and you need someone with different experience to help. A good personal trainer should have your best interest in mind and either adjust your programming to try to meet your new goals and/or situation, or try to find, if they can, someone more suitable.

But before you make a change in your programming, you should be clear why you’re making that change and how long you will commit to that change. Chasing every new “hack” will not get you results.

As the Bruce Lee quote say “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”