It’s important to be realistic. You cannot achieve enhanced fitness or wellness in an instant, or even, in some cases, in short duration.

The move from current state to a better state requires time and patience.

The most common reason for failure is a lack of persistence, based on disappointing initial results.

Weight loss is a classic example, although ironically it is probably the easiest target to achieve quickly.  You can simply stop eating, and you will lose weight.

That’s not especially effective because it fails to respect the fact that there is a counteracting factor, your body needs food, your mind is conditioned to eat. So, you could apply the discipline of fasting or starvation and quickly hit your goal, but you are unlikely to see this through or you cause yourself health problems in other ways.

With more nuanced objectives, such as gaining strength, improving flexibility or simply getting fit, those will definitely need time.

The best way to look at this is by considering any target in the context of changing a habit.

You either need to eradicate a bad habit or develop a good one. Probably, both.

If you honestly appraise your current state of health and fitness, it is likely that you are the product of your habits.

Habits that may have persisted for decades.

To pivot away from those that are not helping to ones that do help, to become a new you, is a big task.

You can help yourself by doing so incrementally. By not trying to change too much, too quickly. By looking at what you need to do, creating a goal or target, and then planning this out so that you ingrain the new habit.

If we go back to the weight loss goal that so many people have, then it is more likely to work if the plan is to lose weight slowly, in incremental steps.

The reality is that you will be aiming to change your nutritional habits, and rather than knocking out everything at once,  you can do so in stages, one thing at a time.

Probably best to start with sugar, in this example!

The same is true of any health or fitness improvement you target, whether it is to build strength, improve your flexibility or learn new healthy mindset techniques – chunk it down.

Evolving a habit is so much more effective in making it stick, than trying to enforce it upon yourself in one moment.

Indeed, with so many health objectives, which cannot be forced whether you like it or not, you have little choice. You cannot move the dial at any other pace than slowly.

By taking an incremental steps approach, you can target small regular gains, or wins, providing a much greater sense of achievement, rather than waiting for the big breakthrough day.