Once you’ve found a great fitness program that is fun, safe, and effective, the next area to focus on is your ability to be consistent. Being consistent seems like a simple, almost boring, topic, but it is actually incredibly powerful. Consistency is also a result of habit formation, adjustment, and optimization.
For example, if you are excited to start something new and you spend the next month totally focused on your goal each day, but only manage to focus for a couple weeks, then lose your motivation, you’ll likely not see great results. If you focus for 6 weeks, you may see some results, but not many that will stick with you over time. 2 Months? Getting closer, but you’ll still have an easier time letting go of your new habits than keeping them.
In our experience, from a fitness and nutrition standpoint, 90-100 days is around the minimum time to commit to something to not only see substantial change, but at that 100 day mark, it seems those who can get there have a drastically easier time keeping their good new habits and making them part of their life.
For our daily lives, if you sit down and think about it, we’re defined by many different daily habits. These include getting up at a certain time each time, when we eat dinner, what books we read, TV we watch, people we eat lunch with, times we check our e-mail, when we work, and the list goes on. The fun thing about habits is the fact that you can modify them!
If you have something you normally do, (like scrolling through Facebook while you eat lunch), you can easily replace this with having a good conversation with your co-workers. It takes making the effort to invite others to lunch, but after awhile, it’ll be a positive habit in your life and a whole lot more valuable than Facebook!
Once you have adjusted or created a habit, it is far easier to stick to it. If it’s reading a few minutes early in the morning before work, making a point to have a date night once a week with your significant other, or working out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, fight to be as consistent as you can, no matter how you feel, for the first 100 days (or 2-3 months) and after that, you’ll find these things simply part of your life and much easier to continue doing.
At Recursive, we encourage new people to start with our 6 Week Intro to Fitness and Nutrition program to get them off to the best start. We’ve then designed our first 100 days with new clients very specifically to help everyone reach that pivotal sticking point. We have multiple accountability points and systems, as well as quite a few ways we bring our clients into a healthy lifestyle they’ll not only see success with, but enjoy and hold on to for a lifetime.