The cycle of unfitness goes like this:
- You don’t use your body well, it starts to deteriorate
- The pain motivates you to change something
- You start an exercise program
- It does not work as expected
- You give up
Frustration comes from the discrepancy between your expectations and reality. You can’t magically change the reality of fitness and lose fat faster or build muscle with less effort; it is what it is. What you can change is your expectations. For some, that means accepting that you need to spend at least 4 hours per week on improving your fitness, otherwise, there will be no change.
For others, it’s about having the right timeline in mind. In 6-8 weeks, you can make progress that your friends will ask you about, but fully reversing a few decades of not doing anything takes some time. Equally, you can’t expect to lose much weight by jogging, and your back pain will not disappear from doing yoga.
Besides expectations around training, some common misconceptions about working out itself keep people from their results. A big one is the expectation of how hard the training should feel. Some high performers think it has to be balls-to-the-wall every time and are surprised when they don’t build muscle. They don’t expect recovery to be equally as important, that’s why they don’t prioritize it.
The other side of that is constantly training with too little intensity, expecting high intensities to be too dangerous or just for young guys who want to show off.
Are you unhappy with the state of your fitness? It’s worth comparing your expectations with the reality of your situation. Some things do need to feel hard, some take time. But there’s no need to be frustrated about it.
