Why Do Fitness and Health Initiatives Just Feel Like More Work?

After having worked in the industry for 24 years, it’s pretty easy to categorize the challenges most people encounter along their health and fitness journey. The wide range from time concerns to limited experience with modes of exercise can seemingly create a definite sense of great challenge to overcome obstacles.

One of these obstacles often appears at not only the start of each program but often at each step along the way: this feels like more I have to add to an already full plate.

After having helped hundreds of people achieve their goals, the best advice I can give is a simple one. Things are not often as they appear. While it’s true that fitness and health tasks certainly require work, these tasks are different from any other. But people so often and so easily misrepresent these tasks.

While one could literally write BOOKS on this dynamic, there’s a simple reality:

We, people, are encoded to follow a path that utilizes our intellect to find solutions that require less work, and greater energy saving which makes fitness efforts APPEAR problematic.

Let me explain.

One of the elements that has long separated mankind from other similar members of the animal kingdom is our amazing ability to find easier ways to achieve any goal. This includes finding food and relinquishing energy to maintain multiple food sources. We literally dial in the dynamic between energy acquisition and energy expenditure.

Mankind has been able to achieve great things by way of producing, maintaining, utilizing, and streamlining food, energy, technology, and societal interactions to such a degree that when one looks at the prospect of adding any more efforts to this rhythm (such as daily activity) it can quickly look like a threat to our lifestyle.

All lifestyle has moving parts that have to work together. Scheduling, commitments, and transition from one event to another, just to name a few.

Any system with moving parts requires energy and something that we often overlook: mechanism. It’s like a car, for example. It’s a great machine that gets you from one place to another, but what happens if you don’t maintain it? You are stuck.

The human body is the exact same kind of mechanism. Just as the car requires fuel, regular use, and regular maintenance, so does the human body, and really the mind. And like any other machine, with regular upkeep one’s car, and ones body/mind can and will run at an incredible rate.

So, while fitness and health-related efforts may appear to overwork one’s system they are actually the effort that will produce a faster rate due to the body’s incredible mechanism to become more EFFICIENT!

It’s like changing the oil, tightening the bolts, and adding a turbo to what used to feel like a tired engine. That’s what optimal nutrition, regular cardiovascular training, and functional strength training bring to the table.

They are the effort that makes things work better!