I was telling a client this week about a guy I trained who made some very rapid fitness gains. A long time exercise hater, he was literally doing fitness for the first time in his life when he started our training. He was a heavy smoker and drinker in his late forties and he was expecting to be a disaster at exercise. This is understandable as the only evidence he had on his capabilities was from PE classes back in school which he hated.
However, on training with me he started making progress, like everyone does, but his body went crazy and made some of the most rapid fitness improvements I have seen. He went from walking to jogging a very good pace in almost no time. This was way more than I would have expected, let alone he would have.
What this told me was he was actually good at sports. If he had given any attention to it in his younger years he would have seen this but like most people he did not enjoy sport at school. This meant he never even contemplated it once leaving the education system. He only contacted me as felt forced into it with his 50th birthday approaching and his health at an all time low level.
This story shows that you do not really know what your body is capable of until you go all in. There are literally hundreds of thousands of case studies of people who didn’t think they could become super fit yet turned it around. It is one of the reasons I am against the set point theory outlined in books such as Why We Eat (too much) which I covered previously. When you see ‘a disaster case’ on paper, such as someone who is overweight, a lifetime smoker, heavy drinker and has never exercised get great results you wonder where have all these set point barriers magically disappeared to.
The reality is that you do not know what your body is capable of unless you commit to regularly giving it an effective stimulus for your health and fitness. This needs to be done over a prolonged period of time, not just for a week or two. If you did do this….. you would see, feel and experience something you perhaps have never felt in your life.
What Does This Mean For You?
The main problem with stories such as the one above is that you have probably already imagined a whole list of things you do not want to do or think you cannot do. Therefore, you take no action before you even considered what you could or would do. Almost everything you imagine you either do not need to do, there is a way around it, or you could easily do it if part of a manageable plan.
I have seen this conversation with myself many times where I am asked about the ‘magic plan’ I used for my bodybuilding shows, as they wonder if they could follow such a plan for a day of it was too hard to do. I break this illusion with the truth…. you have already followed a plan as hard as anything I did and have achieved fat loss in the same way as well.
The difference is not the difficulty of an individual day but the number of days upon which it was built. Almost everyone who starts their preparation for a bodybuilding show is probably already at most people’s end goal in terms of body fat. From this point the bodybuilders then do another few months of fat loss. This is of course on top of building muscle over the prior years. It is not difficultly that is your issue, it is duration and consistency.
While you may agree with this in principle, it sounds like slow, hard work…so how can you forward to the good part? This links into the newsletter last week where I talked about how quickly you can start to feel better and see changes. The good part is the moment you start to get results, it then continues each day and week where you make progress. It does not matter the level you are at right now, the journey is better than the destination. You could be seeing results within just a few days. It is amazing how little it takes to change the voice in your head, your confidence and your feelings. The physical results also come much quicker than you imagine….which leaves just one question…
Will you start the journey today?
Photo – Some sports photos I have done over the years including bodybuilding, rugby, athletics, football and samba dancing.
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