Zero To Face-Melting Difficulty

Here's a quick thought experiment: Your mission is to get to the top of the tallest mountain known to man (Everest).

You have two options for getting to the top.

Option A: Climb up to the top cliff-hanger style using two butter knives (faster).

Option B: The long slow winding trail up the side that you can skip across with the least amount of hassle involved (slower).

Which do you choose? There's no right or wrong answer here. It really depends on how fast you want to achieve your goal and how much you're willing to endure to get there.

Let's emphasize that last point: willing to endure...

I firmly believe that most people given the option will not put up with more hassle than they really need to.

At least they will not unless there's some outstanding reason to shoulder that burden.

Yet, for some reason,  when it comes to fitness, people always go from zero to face-melting difficulty (think Wyle E. Coyote and the Road Runner).

How Do People Make Things Harder On Themselves?

The simple answer is that people make too many changes too quickly. All of those changes compound and make the task ahead seem insurmountable.

Look, if you've been a couch potato most of your life (no judgement) is it really likely that you're going to start a new diet and workout regimen and stick to it religiously without that being a monumental shift in the way that you operate?

What makes more sense if that happens to be the case?

Too Many Degrees of Separation

The bigger the change the more inconvenient it's likely to be.

Before changing or doing anything, assess what your ground zero really is. Take inventory of your current habits or lifestyle, and then ask yourself, what change can I make today that is the lowest possible shift in the right direction?

This isn't that different from banking a dollar by picking up one hundred pennies versus chiseling a dollar bill from a block of ice. Compounding lower effort shifts is still a step in the right direction. But the key here is going to be time.

Skipping to hard mode isn't a recipe for success.

Imposing Weird Deadlines

People looking to get fit will sometimes add a weird deadline into the mix. This might be a beach vacation by a certain date, a wedding, or a high school reunion. The individuals that do this impose an artificial time constraint that could either demotivate or work against then. You can't always shoehorn progress into a time frame that works for you. Even in the tech sector people know projects aren't often completed on time or might run over. It's the same deal here.

Working Out Harder Than They Need to

The thinking on this one goes like this - If less is more, then more must be even more, and even more must therefore be better.

Yep. Been there done that. You go into the gym all pumped for your muscle-bound destiny only to feel like you've been run over by a convoy of 18-wheelers the day after. You then skip a workout or two until you feel better and eventually that habit never sticks.

None of us is one workout or one maximal effort away from transcending to a new plane of existence.

The whole point here is that there is a range to all of this and jumping to the top of the range out of the gate isn't going to automatically get you the brass ring.

We're going to talk about ways to work around that...