Taking the right steps early in your fitness journey can lead you on a course towards success and reward. Often, when we try to adopt new skills or habits, we uncover obstacles that require us to choose if we proceed or give up. This article is to help you think about those first steps and decide on solutions and adaptations before the temptation to take it easy wins over.
"Adaptive Fitness is about finding appropriate challenges and creating ways to overcome."
The Recipe
Think about starting your fitness path as if you’re beginning a recipe. Just like in cooking, your fitness requires certain ingredients to end up tasting the way you want it to. If we think about exercise as ingredients to the recipe, then we have started to understand how we will be able to succeed. Fitness is simply a matter of putting in the right ingredients at the right time and letting things cook for a while.
Ingredients
- Build Team – This first main ingredient are the individuals who are going to be a part of our team. If you thought fitness was an individual activity, think again. Throughout history, humans have achieved the impossible by working together. Whether friends, family, co-workers or caretakers, we always want to identify and communicate our intentions with our team prior to getting started.
- Establish Goals – Once we have the team identified, we need to make clear the goals of the individuals and of the team. Individual goals or personal goals may be things like improving strength or completing a race. A team goal might be to take a trip or go on an adventure when everyone has met their personal goals. Goals help everyone to establish a beacon of motivation and can keep your recipe on course to be just the way you want it.
- Accessible Locations – Now that we know who is a part of our journey, and what our goals are, we can figure out the places that are accessible to help us achieve. Maybe we want to do exercise at home or a local park. Maybe you’d like to try a gym or recreational center. Maybe you want to go outdoors and explore, finding places that strengthen our body and our connection with nature. A nice list of places you can associate with exercise will help you be strategic in planning your day by knowing these are places to make progress.
- Equipment & Resources – With our team members, goals, and training places understood, we now want to think about the equipment and resources needed to continue with the plan. If our goals are strength focused, then strength training equipment or a facility might be required. If our goals are focused on mindfulness, then a quiet space, yoga mat, and journal may be what we need. By working with our team, we can identify what we already have, what we can craft together, and what can wait until later down the road. Build your resources piece by piece, allowing yourself to become comfortable with the equipment you have and enjoy before introducing new items.
- Create Fitness Plan – Finally, with all our main ingredients in, our last step is to create a fitness plan. This plan will include the team members, their goals and the target time to reach them. In this plan, you would create a schedule that works with your current time commitments. This schedule can change over time but ideally you want to keep consistent with your exercise. Following a good schedule can surprise you with results. This fitness plan should be written down in your fitness journal or on a paper where you can see it daily. We have to remind ourselves even in the beginning of our journey that we are on the right track and have a plan to get down the path.
TruFit Adaptive Fitness is here to help add some flavor in your recipe for success. Our inclusive exercise library and workouts can provide the ideas and ingredients you need to reach your goals and beyond. By joining a fitness community like TruFit, you become a part of the team and open a world of resources, connections, and opportunity. Download our app and start exploring all the tools that can help you get started on your fitness journey!
