The best advice you will ever get when it comes to fitness is to turn up. What does this mean?
Do the press ups, balancing exercises, breathing, stretching, moving, yoga, Pilates – whatever you have set out to do, and turn up.
Go to your gym, your class or your sitting room and do it.
The problem is that it becomes easy to fail to turn up every time. Skipping a session or having a day off is the route to failure. In this case, a failure to get fitter.
The key to fitness is repetition. You become what you think, you become what you do. If you are always turning up and working on your fitness, you become fit.
It needs to be relentless, in the sense that this becomes your ‘thing’ and if your attitude is to turn up come what may, rain or shine, feeling like it or not feeling like it, you will succeed.
It’s a bit like giving up smoking, you stop for a while, but the moment you have just that one sneaky fag, you are in a big trouble. In this case, it’s those moments where you don’t bother today to do that 20-30 minutes of exercising – it can be left until tomorrow. That’s failing to turn up.
You have to build the habit of getting fit.
If you are on a new path, or about to start, sure take your time to build/design your own programme, but even in the early stage you can do steps, walk, practice balancing, dance a little, all simple things that act as the foundation for more complex things.
“Turning up” is a phrase to describe the mindset, the attitude of getting fit. It means making sure you are constantly attending to your fitness, and every day you “go” to your fitness work and sessions.