One of the things I often advise clients to do is find a buddy who shares a similar goal, and work toward them together.
If you have a fitness goal, this can be an easy thing to do. The world is full of people who want to get fit, but for one reason or another, can’t stick to a regular fitness routine.
Regularly going to the gym is one of those activities I’ve struggled with over the years until, about five or six years ago, when I teamed up with a friend and together we’ve kept each other on track by setting gym appointments with each.
It is a lot harder to miss an exercise session when you know your training partner got out of bed at 5am and is standing there waiting for you.
The hidden downside of regular exercise
Making an appointment with your workout buddy really helps to keep you motivated. But simply turning up and doing your workout together is not the final solution.
If you aren’t constantly vigilant, complacency can easily sneak up on you. Sure, you are regularly doing some exercise, but the benefit you get from it can easily diminish.
When you first start doing regular exercise, it is hard. Then, over time it becomes easier and easier as your body adjusts to the routine, until it reaches a point where your body hardly notices the exercise at all.
What happened?
Your body reaches a point where lifting a certain weight becomes comfortable. You find yourself doing ten reps and you stop, because 10 reps is what you’ve told yourself you need to do. You have just created your very own glass ceiling and complacency sets in when you don’t push yourself much past it.
It is funny, but it sneaks up on you. This happened to Don and I a few weeks ago. I suddenly realised the exercise wasn’t really having much effect on us ‘? it had become too easy and we had stopped improving.
We decided to change to drop sets, starting our workout with a weight that we could hardly lift and dropping down a bit in weight until we had achieved our goal for the set.
Continued… Breaking the glass ceiling when running
See also: