Being open as a boutique gym in Brisbane for close to 8 years now, and myself personally having coached hundreds of people over the past 18 years there are a few common themes I have seen that stop people from starting training.
The first barrier is time. ‘I don’t have enough time to train’. Most of us have said this before. We have also heard the analogy ‘ we all have the same 24 hours in a day’. Why is it that some ‘busy’ people still ‘find’ time to train and others don’t?
From my experience (not necessarily gospel) a big part to this is the mindset we have. If we are by default someone that has a perfectionist streak or an ‘all or nothing’ mindset we may rationalise that unless the training can be x, y, z (insert your expectation) what is the point? There is so much information these days that its easy to see that in order to get x we need to do ‘this ‘exact’ formula. It sells. What sells does not always take into the reality of peoples lives. Here at The Wild Movement we have ‘Wild Commandments’ up in our reception area. One of the rules is ‘something is always better than nothing’.
What this means when it comes to training is that the consistency of doing the thing will always beat doing the thing less often, but ‘perfectly’. What this may look like practically could be a number of things. Perhaps you have an upper body session scheduled with a main exercise and then 4 different other accessory exercises. If it normally takes you 50 minutes to get through and you know you only have 20 minutes is it worth doing? Context is important, but if you are prone to skipping a session altogther in this instance I can almost say with certainty that you are 100% best to Not skip the session altogether. Some modifications I would make in this scenario (and have probably hundreds of times):
- Do the main exercise still. Make the first warm up set a hard working set. Instead of taking 5-10 minutes to build up to your weight just start light but do lots of reps so you are still close to failure (even from the first set). Add load each set and just drop the reps. Your body doesn’t really care about how many reps you are doing at what weight. The more important thing (at least for holding on or building muscle) is how close you are to failure on the set. Instead of the main exercise potentially taking 15 minutes you can be done in 8 from start to finish. Optimised? No, but better than nothing? Yes!!
- Choose the 2 exercises out of 4 that you like the most (or for more points – that you need the most) and do them back to back. Wrap it up with some maximum reps on your last sets and you will be finished in under 20 minutes including a warm up, no worries. You will also have a healthy ‘pump’ which will give you some endorphins, some stimulis to grow or maintain muscle and be great for your mental health. You were busy, you could have easily rationalised not doing the session, but you found a way forward. This sets an important precedent for yourself.
Sometimes we have clients that train at 430am and they don’t have time to do a whole session still. We don’t tell them not to come, we tell them ‘come and do what you can, until you need to go!’.
Another common barrier we see especially with working professionals and young parents is poor sleep. I have been there myself (from kids and from my own demons!). I totally get this one, but it also can be solved by getting out of the same ‘perfectionist’ mindset. I am someone that likes to train pretty hard most of the time as many of us do. If you are going through a long bout of poor sleep though it is not sustainable to keep this approach however. During these times, especially if it’s a chronic period it is all about the goldilocks effect. Go too hard and you will just run yourself into the ground. You don’t have infinite resources to use for recovery and sleep is the biggest part to the equation. It’s not uncommon for injuries to occur or niggles to start shining through at these times. Do too little though (including not training altogether) and it is likely that your mental health will take a dive if exercise has been part of your life. This goldilocks amount is going to be different for everyone. For me when I was in an 8 week period of very poor to little sleep I made sure I still did something every day. Some days it was sitting on my air dyne bike out in the sun for 15 minutes, other days it was doing a shorter than usual strength session (but still pushing hard on my sets). This approach for me personally made me feel like I was doing enough to ‘maintain’ my fitness and body composition. This made me feel good, resilient and not as worried about the effect that the poor sleep was having on me. If it it just one night of poor sleep you could do a couple of things: Push through and complete the session as usual. Know this okay and you will probably still perform well, but it will feel harder and will take a little more out of your recovery ‘tank’. Another suggestion is to cut down the volume of the session by doing less sets per exercise. If there are three work sets on the program, do 2 and either have more rest, or get it done quicker. This will work into the mindset that ‘Something is better than nothing’ and will not add quite as much systemic fatigue.
The last barrier I want to mention that comes up some times talking to prospective clients, or just people around us is money. ‘I don’t have the money to train’. I see this one as the least legitimate excuse of all. If there is some will to train it’s not hard to see ways you can do it for free. Yes having a coach is nice. It may fast forward your results vastly But a big part of training is the health we get from just doing the movement practice.
Some of my personal favourite ways to train without access to a gym include:
- An outdoor kettle bell workout. Invest in even one kettle bell and you could do a whole 30 minute full body strength workout, no worries. Look up Pavel Tsatsouline for some inspiration on this one.
- Hill Sprints. Find a hill and sprint up it, walk back. For more strength and power adaptations focus on short and fast. For more of an aerobic effect choose a longer distance.
- Bodyweight park session. Almost any kids playground can be turned into equipment to do things such as step ups, chin up progressions, push up progressions and core movements.
Using the park whilst the kids playground
One Kettlebell, one workout.
I hope you have found this to be helpful in some small way today. If you would like more ideas on how to remove one of these barriers for YOU please feel free to book in for a no obligations chat with us Here.
Yours in movement, Luke
