Hello and welcome back to the blog! This week’s topic is consistency. As we have recently entered a new year, many of us are making goals for the coming months of things we want to achieve, places we want to see, habits we’d like to adopt and so on. While I think goal setting is a wonderful and productive exercise, it’s important to stress the role that consistency plays in all of it. No matter what you choose to change in your life, if you don’t practice it consistently the change will not manifest for the long term. This can be applied to any new practice though for the purpose of today’s blog I’d like to focus specifically on the health and fitness side of things. 

It’s important to remind ourselves that change takes time so please don’t feel bad if you don’t see results immediately. This is something I touched on in my blog posts about 7 healthy habits (read here). Research suggests it takes approximately twenty-one days for a new habit to stick. If you slip up a few times don’t give up because there is no deadline for living your healthiest life. Just try to make the healthiest choices you can each day and you will find that the results will follow suit. There is a chapter in Jordan Peterson’s new book 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos entitled “compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to someone else is today.” Each of us is on our own unique journey, so just do the best you can and try to do better than you did yesterday. With regard to your health and fitness, this could mean trying to run faster or lift heavier than you did previously, or cook more of your own food rather than eating out. There is always room for improvement, just make sure that you’re trying to improve upon your own actions rather than someone else’s. 

When implementing a new habit into your daily routine it’s also important to remember your deeper “why” for doing so. With respect to health and fitness, I’d recommend finding something that drives you that is stronger than the physical. While aesthetic goals are great to put things in gear, they are only short-term solutions. If you want the change to last, look for a deeper “why.” I touched on this in a previous blog post (read here) and some of the deeper “why” reasons I listed there included: being able to play with your kids, waking up without pain, reducing inflammation/ ridding yourself of an ailment, or just feeling confident and comfortable in your skin. A deeper motivation for getting and staying fit will change your lifestyle for the long run and will help you avoid the trap of looking for quick solutions to habits that have taken years to develop. 

A deeper “why” will help you when you find yourself out of your routine as well. Last week I was in the Canary Islands for a fun but very intense work trip and was not able to continue my normal workout and eating routine. This is where consistency and discipline come in. The schedule I had while there did not look anything like my schedule in Prague, but I still found time to exercise almost daily and make the healthiest food choices I could. It didn’t matter if the workouts were only 20 minutes, or if I could only manage a small side salad at dinner, what matters was the intention and consistency of my efforts. This is true in your case as well. Discipline is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. That means that every workout you don’t skip and every healthy meal you decide to make instead of ordering pizza, strengthens your discipline ‘muscle’ and makes it that much easier for you to make those choices again in the future. This will help you immensely on the days when you lack motivation to get to the gym or when you are out of your routine. It is the discipline, trained consistently over time, that will push you to do it. 

So what do you all think about discipline and consistency? What has been your experience with it? I’d be really curious to hear so let me know on Instagram or by leaving a comment down below :)

As always, if you all have any topics for next week’s blog or comments, please shoot me a DM on Instagram or leave a comment down below.

Until next week!

xoxo,

Alexandra