Here are the twelve biggest progress killers, in no particular order:
This one is a big trap at the start of the year.
You’ve not done much for weeks, months or years, and you’re ready to start kicking ass and getting to where you want to be. You go at it HARD for 15 days straight, then burn out or get injured. Your training falls off, your diet goes off the rails, and you end up in a worse place than when you started.
It’s better to be training 2-4x a week, for six months, than 5-7x week, for three weeks.
Whatever your goal, being tired makes it so much harder. It deflates your motivation, inhibits your recovery, screws up your diet and how your body metabolises food. For every goal, prioritise rest.
This is my biggest personal pitfall, especially in a work-from-home scenario. I fall out of routine, don’t have my schedule planned, and end up pushing back the faint notion of ‘the workout’ further and further in the day. Eventually, that gets pushed to the next day. Rinse and repeat.
You don’t have to train at the same time every day, but diarising your workouts and treating them with the same importance as a work meeting (you’ll work better after, anyway) makes it far more likely to happen than just saying you’ll work out at some point today.
Going it alone is easy when the sun is shining and you’re in the ‘fuck yeah, let’s go!’ stage of your training journey. It’s less easy when the novelty wears off. Anticipate this pitfall, share your journey with others, get support.
If you don’t have goals, you have zero metrics to measure progress. It’s totally fine to want to exercise to feel a bit better or because you need to shift a bit of timber, but finding a way to measure that will help you on the days when you’re busy or demotivated.
I know a lot of people who routinely exercise all year round with no specific goals, and I hope to be one of those badass 70-year-olds running 10km every day for the sake of it. BUT, if you’re just starting, not having a goal or direction is likely to kill your motivation, consistency and ultimately your progress.
Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. This one is straightforward. You need a plan. If you’re working out by yourself then have a plan to follow in line with your goals. If you’re smashing classes, choose classes that fit your goals. Random action is unlikely to push you in the right direction.
It’s really easy to convince ourselves we’ve been better and more consistent than we actually have been.
For example, if you start training well for four weeks, then pretty much drop off completely for the next four weeks, it’s easy to remember those initial four weeks of good training as if they were yesterday.
Be honest with yourself and reflect on what you have or haven’t done recently. It can be painful, but it will stop you from derailing your progress further.
I don’t mean lack of training; I mean lack of consistency in how you train. For example, are you a runner one week, a HIIT addict the next week, then a powerlifter the next? Try and get some consistency in your routine to make consistent progress.
You’ve got to push harder consistently in your training to keep getting results. If you do the same workout at the same intensity for months on end, your body will adapt to it and plateau.
It’s easy to have unrealistic expectations of the time it will take you to hit your goal. The media is constantly lying to you about it and how easy it is, in order to get more clicks and sell more magazines that tell you (lie to you) about how to get a six-pack in 14 days.
When you don’t get anywhere near in that time, it’s easy to get disheartened. 4-6 months is usually more accurate than 4-6 weeks, but the juice will be worth the squeeze and the commitment involved means you’re more likely to maintain your progress when you hit your goal.
Injuries suck, but they are a very real and very common reality if you take up regular exercise. It’s almost a certainty. How you deal with it will determine whether this is the end of your journey.
Injuries are an absolute motivation killer, but they don’t necessarily have to stop you completely. Is there anything you can do? How will you rebuild after you recover to come out stronger and better than before?
The past few years have shown us that so much is out of our hands. But, Covid and Lockdown aside, a refusal to adapt to circumstances in normal, every day life is a progress killer.
Shit happens; things change. If you let it take weeks or months out of your training, your progress will suffer. Figure out what you can do, don’t fixate on what you can’t.
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