Don’t Chase Fitness Challenges
In the last couple of years, fitness challenges have been all the rage. They often come in 30, 60, and 90-day varieties, and they are designed to speak to our internal desire for competition. Most people feel we can handle the tasks of working out and eating well for 30 days, but then what?
One way you could look at these challenges is that they get unfit people started and hopefully continue after the challenge ends.
But from our experience, that’s not who’s doing them.
Many of the people doing fitness challenges already work out, but they hop from challenge to challenge. When one challenge is over, they move on to the next and often do different training methods for each one.
The problem with fitness challenges
The main problem with fitness challenges is that the way they are presented is a lie.
Proper fitness isn’t achieved in a 30, 60, or 90-day mindset. Fitness comes from years of training consistently. If you go into working out thinking that everything will be so much better after 30 or even 90 days, you will be disappointed, and your motivation will fade as you get closer to the end of the challenge.
It’s not even that the fitness methods in these challenges are wrong, but their failure is in the mindset they promote.
A True Fitness Challenge
The fittest people on earth have gotten that way because they train at least four days a week, not all of them necessarily in the gym, and they eat in a way that supports their training. They don’t do what’s flashy or trendy; they’re not constantly following a different diet or trying to mix things up.
They do the same things day in and day out for years and years and plan to do those things for the rest of their life. The key to fitness is consistency.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel like it. Stick to the plan.
It doesn’t matter if it’s cold outside. Stick to the plan.
It doesn’t matter if there is a new celebrity diet tip. Stick to the plan.
The fittest people hold themselves to a higher standard of living that they track on an internal scorecard. They get satisfaction from doing the hard work when no one else is watching. They don’t post every workout to Instagram because external validation isn’t what drives them.
They see that to be fit, they have to do the right things every day for the rest of their lives and say “Bring it on.”
Here’s a fitness challenge for you. Work out 5 days a week, using functional movements and high intensity relative to your fitness level. Eat only meat, vegetables, fruit and some starch six days a week, and don’t overeat on the 7th. Do this for 20 years.
Now that’s a real fitness challenge.
