Staying fit is important to maintaining your well-being, and that is true for every person on the planet. However, keeping up with your fitness can be a lot of work, and, unfortunately, many aspects of popular exercise culture only serve to make it even more difficult.
So, if you want to start making your fitness journey easier, this article aims to highlight some underappreciated fitness tips that you might need to hear.
Losing Weight Shouldn’t Be Your (Only) Goal
Many people consider fitness routines – like exercise – as if they are simply tools to get something you want. But that is never going to work. Exercise, proper dieting, and practically every other fitness routine are only effective as long as you keep up with them. Consistency is the key to fitness.
For example – if you start exercising and dieting just to lose weight, then give it up immediately after reaching your goal, you are going to find yourself back at square one again.
You have to commit to these routines as a new, permanent part of your lifestyle if you want to see lasting results – and that means you are going to need to find motivations that won’t evaporate as soon as you hit your target weight. What’s more, finding long-lasting motivators leads to fitness routines that you will enjoy more since they better fit with your long-term desires.
Social Exercise
The idea of exercising as part of a group sounds unpleasant to many people, but the fact of the matter is that humans are social creatures. As a result, you are always going to find it easier to commit to something when you have other people doing it along with you.
Fortunately, there are plenty of services – such as 55 Fitness – that make it their mission to enable convenient, communal exercise. So, whether you are planning to work out with your friends or sign up for a class in your local gym, you should give social exercise a go and see if it works for you.
Mistakes Aren’t Failures
It’s easy to make mistakes. Everyone does, and anyone who says they don’t is lying – either to you or themselves. However, a trap that people often fall into with their fitness goals is assuming that a single mistake means they’ve failed to meet their goals and often give up soon after.
But a mistake isn’t a failure. After all, the only way you could possibly avoid making a mistake in your fitness journey is to never start the journey at all. So, mistakes are more like the price of doing business. They suck, that’s for sure, but it is far better to pay the price than to never even try to reach your goals.
Perfection is an Impossible Standard
Speaking of failure, one of the worst elements of social media “fitness” culture is that it often makes people feel like failures even when they do manage to put effort into their fitness. After all, there is always more that you could be doing for your fitness, and social media “fitness” culture will never hesitate to remind you of that.
The thing is, perfection isn’t an attainable goal. You are never, ever going to be able to do everything you possibly could do to improve your fitness because you have to live your life. It is far more useful to celebrate your wins with your fitness and focus on maintaining regular and healthy routines rather than wasting your energy feeling bad for not doing more.
