The Process

Let me share with you the number one obstacle to achieving your fitness goals.

Having a fitness goal!

We all hear, every day, that the trick to achieving anything is setting a goal and relentlessly pursuing it. I think this is one of the biggest problems when it comes to fitness and living a healthy life. Why?

Life isn’t really about the goal. Life is about the living. Setting the typical goals we are often asked to set by fitness professionals: What’s your goal weight? What’s your percent body fat goal? How fast do you want to run? How much do you want to press? in my belief is the number one challenge to achieving real wellness and overall health.

Why?

Too often I’ve seen people pour their heart and soul into achieving one of these goals. Honestly, many people reach them. However, inevitably what I see is that the achievement is often unsustainable and we quickly slip back into bad habits that put us right back where we started.

Why is this and what can we do to break this never ending cycle!

These goals should be the outcome of changing behaviors and new habits. The problem, too often, is that we focus almost exclusively on the goal and adopt unsustainable behaviors to achieve them. We deny ourselves. We push ourselves. We do things we wouldn’t normally do. That is not the way to create healthy habits and life altering change.

For me it’s not about goals…it’s about habits.

If you want anything to be sustainable you want to create habits that support you reaching and maintaining your newfound health and fitness.

A shift I have begun to make with my clients is reframing goal setting from a numbers based approach to a PROCESS based approach.  Here are two examples:

“I want to lose 15 pounds in the next 3 months!”

“I want to reach 10,000 steps every day!”

The first is obviously a numerical goal, and the second is a process based habit.

This habit based approach is designed to help us get to a point where we have fundamentally changed our lifestyle, as opposed to doing “whatever it takes” to reach a relatively random numerical goal.

Once we change our focus to these habits, then whatever numerical goals we might have are going to happen inevitably!  I find it can also be helpful to make sure these habits are things that we can gradually build on, and that you are really willing to live with for the rest of your life!

A very important note here is to take your habits one at a time.  Don’t try to try to start a million different lifestyle changes at once, but rather small changes that we can build on over time.

Maybe you start with switching from white bread to whole wheat on your sandwiches.  Then maybe take the cream out of your daily coffee.  Once that feels pretty easy, maybe try to start off each day with a nice long walk.

These are all just examples, the real key is figuring out how these habits fit into YOUR lifestyle.  If your lunch break seems like the time that best suits you hitting the gym, make that a habit for yourself.  If you can only fit in some walking at the end of the day after work, maybe get the whole family out for a long walk instead of watching TV.

As you can see, the focus is on the process here.  We have a direction of where we want to go, and we are focusing on the steps to get there!