Building sustainability in your fitness, health, and wellness journey
Many people are willing to start and even are more eager to start. What most people don’t consider is when you start are you able to continue? All the information in the world is meaningless if you are not able to sustain the progress you have created.
What Is The Goal?
To first build sustainability, you have to understand the reason why you are starting in the first place. For most people, the simple answer is to be healthy. What an amazing reason to start. Next is figuring out what does that even look like, '“to be healthy.”? Is that simply working out 1x/week? Is it 7x/week? Is it an hour each time or several hours each session? When work, life, and family are busy can I still sustain the effort I initially did in the beginning. Nobody really asks themselves these questions and coincidentally when those events happen people slow down, stop momentarily or all together. Why? Keeping the progression was never the goal, only starting was the goal.
Now, I am not saying starting without any intention you will 100% lose it. What I am saying is that starting without any clarity can develop into a plan or build into a loss of momentum overtime. Most times, having a clear understanding of why you start will lessen the chances of you falling off. Even when people start with a strong and clear pathway they can still fall off.
Is The Goal to Never Quit?
I would argue that when building sustainability for your fitness, health, and wellness goals, the objective isn’t to never fall off. The main goal is to keep going even when you miss the gym a week, a month, or even a year. You might be asking right now, “How is it considered sustainable if I miss the gym for a year?” I would laugh with you for having the confusion from that statement. You are able to walk, do mobility training, isometric training, yoga, stretching, breath work, and many other things that don’t require going to the gym or weight training.
That being said, I am not saying you should never weight train. Remember the goal is to build sustainability in your journey so when you do get there we can stay there indefinitely. There are many components that encompass fitness, health and wellness. Even more when creating sustainability for all of them. You don’t have to just weight train. Mobility training in itself when done properly is going to feel like a HARD workout when you are trying to build strength in your current range or build strength in newer ranges of motion. Ideally, doing something at least 1x/week is going to be what will either maintain your progress or even increase progress depending where you are along your fitness, health, and wellness journey.
Is There A “One size fits all” Approach?
Sometimes in life, your sustainable pathway is going to look a lot different than your close friends or other strangers’ pathways to fitness, health, and wellness. You could argue, almost all the time it will look different — just depends who you hang around with. Regarding this, it is okay if you have to focus on mobility in order to train with weights without pain. It is normal to work on your posture or kinetic chain FIRST before working on periodization training, a.k.a strength training with mapped out cycles, to lose fat and build muscle. Those two categories (mobility and strength training) I just mentioned can take days, weeks, or even months to get to where you need to be to lift without pain. Not to mention, the skill curve to learn all those techniques (self myofascial release, standing in the right posture, muscle activation, etc.).
You may be thinking to yourself, “All of that sounds daunting, tiring, hard, confusing and I don’t have time or patience to care about any of this.” I would respond with, “Who cares”. Who cares if it takes a week to get your posture in order vs a few months. It is your journey and only you can go on that journey to do the work. If you do nothing your health only gets worse. If you do something your health has a chance to get better. More importantly, if you start, sustain, and keep progressing your health is only going to get better.
What If I Don’t Know Where to Start?
I also want to add, there is no shame in receiving or investing for support to get to where you need to go. 100% you should focus on being independent and disciplined to get to your goals. We are only humans, and humans only know so much. Finding other resources or people to help you help yourself is the best investment you could ever do in your life and 1,000% for your own health. Your own health is priceless and you should prioritize it as such.
Closing Thoughts
All in all, I hope this post gives you a better understanding of how to look at building your sustainability into your overall fitness, health, and wellness journey. Remember, don’t be afraid to reach out to whoever you think can help you invest into yourself.
I don’t know how your sustainable journey looks like, but I would like to know. I grew up with people close to me not understanding the importance of having sustainability and it has impacted them in more ways than one. I am also no exception. I wish someone brought my attention to the value of building to keep going than building to just start — going beyond how I look, how strong I am, and how others perceive me. At Optimal Beyond Functional (OBF), we pride ourselves on fully hearing and addressing who you are as a person and the goals/obstacles you wish to overcome. If you want someone to hear you and fully you, come book an online or in person consultation.
Derreck - B.Sc. in Kinesiology | Corrective Exercise Specialist - TBMM-CES | CPT