Like all worthwhile projects you may undertake in your life, a sure fire way to fail is to stop working at it. More businesses fail before they succeed and it is usually a relentless salesman or founder that just keeps going to eventually reach the point of ultimate success. Relationships will always have their ups and downs and it’s only the perseverance of a couple to both keep moving forwards, forgiving and forgetting negative moments and using the energy from positive times to keep the train on the tracks, to get stronger and eventually achieve the dreams that they set for each other.
The exact same thing is to be said for your fitness. Whatever goal you set yourself needs a commitment to the process and this means eliminating reasons for giving up. We are all heading rapidly to the festive season and of course the post Christmas ‘New Year Resolution’ process which inherently involves trying to reverse and rectify the Christmas excesses by starting with an exercise regime and ‘committing’, as we do most years, to finally getting our bodies looking and feeling like the ones we see every day on our social media feeds on the influencers selling everything from magical training plans to amazing new foods and food supplements.
So why do the majority of these fitness resolutions fail? It’s the failure to be consistent, because irrelevant to what goals you are aiming for, it isn’t going to be achieved in a couple of weeks. To be honest to achieve a change will take months of commitment and even after that to maintain your achievement will require a lifestyle change which commits you to your exercise basically for your entire life.
The ‘failure’ can be accredited to many things. Not having the time to dedicate to a gym life due to a busy family or work life. Maybe the actual gym environment isn’t your cup of tea (I mean it can be a very narcissistic self absorbed place to be). Or maybe the activity you have chosen or been prescribed just doesn’t fit and isn’t the joyous experience you were promised. All of these issues can be altered to suit the individual. We can choose to workout at home or nearer your home if time is an issue, we can change the gym or type of gym to find more favoured social set within which we are happier to spend time and we can simply experiment with different activities to find something that releases enough endorphins to the brain to make us want to return time and time again.
However there is one element of exercise that, if attention is not paid, is 100% going to derail your regime and your resolutions. Whatever exercise you choose and undertake, whether it be cycling, weight training, running, group exercise, CrossFit, or any other activity, we inherently will hit it either far to hard in our first few weeks or fair too lightly. Far to hard and the sheer pain and exhaustion will make any exercise regime unpalatable and your next visit to the gym will not be looked forward to, but dreaded beyond belief causing excuses to be made and finally your commitment to waver and resolutions to fail.
Exercise far too lightly and the experience will not deliver the gains and changes you want to see. By the very nature of the fitness business, you will be subject to the market forces placed on your investment to get fit. This may involve you being told that walking on the treadmill for 15 mins is going to burn the body fat needed to get the beach body of your dreams… unfortunately we all know this is not going to happen and eventually the lack of progress will result in you choosing not to jump into your gym gear 3 or 4 times a week to achieve nothing and return to your previous lifestyle.
Consistency is all about balance. Balancing your time, balancing your lifestyle but most of all balancing your energy and recovery. Your energy and recovery can only be balanced correctly if you know how much energy you need to expend to achieve your results without expending too much that you can’t recover from. This is why cycling on a connected indoor bike is such an effective form of exercise and why CicloZone was created to use a library of rides, profiled specifically to make sure you work hard enough to achieve your goals, but not too hard that you will suffer too much post ride and not recover. This is why consistency is not an issue for CicloZone riders and goal achievement is a regular occurrence!
Sooner or later all gym equipment will carry a similar training system to CicloZone with individually profiled workouts ensuring the weight you are lifting on a bench press and number of repetitions as well as speed of movement is optimised for YOU, but until then, the bike leads the way and CicloZone takes the lead in combatting this area of intensity that is not totally understood by the fitness industry but which is critical to the success of your long term commitment to your fitness. There is a reason why activities such as CrossFit, or Insanity only have short lifespan in the fitness world and why gyms that employ these activities soon learn to diversify into other less intense areas of fitness to maintain membership and the reason why we are almost always told to ‘start light and take it easy’ when we begin our fitness journey. My issue is, when are we going to be told the truth about intensity and then given scientific advice and guidance on what intensity is correct for us? The truth is… not until gym staff are trained in this area and the equipment we train on has the ability to work intelligently with our own personal fitness profile.
Until then… try a bike… connect into the CicloZone universe and take the 30 day free trial! You will be specifically guided to regulate your RPM and resistance in line with your own ability to the sound and rhythm of a great beat to ensure that the morning after your wake from your bed ready and able to go again, and not walking like Robocop.
Enjoy the Christmas festivities, and enjoy very much the New Year parties but do it this year confident that you may now know the secret to achieving your new year’s resolutions.
Merry Christmas all!
