Picture it: the calendar hits January 1st. After a day of recovery from too much champagne way too late at night, you’re energized to get on top of a new exercise routine. It’s time to get shredded, build mega confidence, and conquer life. Everyone at the gym will be cheering you on as you show them what hard work looks like. The first few days are great – the hard work feels good, you sweat hard, and indulge in lovely post-workout endorphin rushes. Now, what will this scenario look like a month or two later? Does it continue on and on toward more and more progress? It certainly can. We’re interested in this “dream” outcome becoming reality, and this is what “How to get Results from Exercise” will address.
“Listen Nicholas, all this striving for simplicity around the Core 5 habits is all well and good for everyone else, but I want a six pack and toned muscles, so I need to be doing something really specific… right?”
Take 10-15 seconds to be thoughtful about a few questions. Through exercise, you want to achieve a toned body, or whatever comes to mind for you. What specifically appeals to you about achieving this? How will your life be different? What will you be doing then that you’re not doing now?
Not all motivation is equal
Let me give you a little inside info on how health coaches may respond to a question like this. Physical appearance goals, like achieving a toned body, often stem from external motivation. External motivation is when you tell yourself “I should” do something, when we are motivated because we want to impress others or conform to some group or society’s optimal way of being. External motivation often leads to guilt, frustration, and giving up, because it’s not powerful enough to keep us going when things get difficult.
What we look for in clients is their autonomous motivation. Autonomous motivation sounds like, “I want to do this for myself to feel good, to feel proud, and to achieve what I want for myself, not what anyone else wants for me.” We then engage the person in what’s called change talk, meaning we try to explore and expand on their autonomous motivation. Essentially, we guide them to talk themselves into healthy change. Before setting any goals or taking action, we dig deeper here for them to get some clarity around what they truly want. This self-exploration work can be transformative. When done well and not rushed, taking action afterwards actually turns out to be reasonably easy.
Discovering what we truly want is transformative
For example, maybe you tell yourself that you want a six pack, but through some self-exploration, you find that what you really want is confidence. Maybe confidence to get excited about dating new people or taking a beach vacation. Perhaps it’s confidence to get out and make new friends and it doesn’t have anything to do with physical prowess. Maybe you’re sick of how sluggish you tend to feel and think that getting a six pack could relieve this and make you feel more energized. It takes tremendous courage and vulnerability to do this self-exploration work (especially if you talk about it with someone else – yikes! This is also why client confidentiality is so important in coaching). Though, it can save people years of effort when they have clarity around what they truly want and can then be picky about what they spend their time doing and not doing.
Do you need a health coach for this? No. People were making healthy change way before health coaching became a thing. I’m a huge believer in health coaching (obviously I’m biased) and the evidence is there for it being effective. A coach may ask questions you’d never ask yourself, you’ll have someone to share all your thoughts, concerns, and triumphs with with the promise of confidentiality, and creating a connection with another human can be powerful, but sitting down with yourself and considering what you truly want can also be transformative. It’s your life and you get to choose your approach.
Taking action is just one piece of behavior change
In health coaching, goal setting around action steps is just a small portion of what we do. Forcing goal setting when people aren’t ready leads to discouragement, and it’s unfair for those who aren’t ready to take action yet, which is a very common stage to be in. Beginner, eager coaches, albeit with the best of intentions, can make this mistake and end up turning clients off. If goal setting, or some sort of action-oriented discussion, doesn’t arise naturally, then there’s work to be done first. The majority of the work is motivational work, and while everyone is different, often goals purely around physical appearance – like achieving six pack abs – aren’t strong enough to keep someone going when the expected ups and downs of behavior change start invading.
The correlation between physical looks and health is actually pretty weak. People with more fat can be super athletic and really healthy, while some people with defined muscles and abs can be really unhealthy. This is one among many reasons why it’s not just disrespectful, but factually incorrect to judge people based on looks. Judging people is soul-sucking way to live. If you find yourself doing this, I’ll invite you to check out my post On Imperfection.
CDC recommendations – a place to start
I’m including this paragraph because I feel like I should. While I will never stop emphasizing how important personal experimentation is, some guidelines can occasionally be useful as a starting point to which we can tailor our approach. Of course, if your doctor gives you recommendations, it’s wise to follow those first. General recommendations for adults include 150-300 minutes per week of non-vigorous exercise, or half that of vigorous, plus two sessions of strength training, ideally spread somewhat evenly throughout the week. This may look like going for a half hour walk each weeknight plus a session each of pushups and squats. For non-vigorous exercise, think simply moving your body in any way. For vigorous, think breathing hard to where you can’t keep a comfortable conversation.
Numbers vs Enjoyment
When we focus on numbers, we may get a case of the “just 5 more minutes.” We exercise and tell ourselves, “Just 5 more minutes. Just two more laps. Then I can stop.” This can be tiring, discouraging, and a constant battle. In contrast, what if we focus on the enjoyment of the activity?
We don’t need to slog it out at the gym for hours to get an effective workout. A 15 minute workout is great. So is ten minutes. So is five. The beauty of focusing on enjoyment is we set ourselves up for staying at it a bit longer and longer over time without it being an exhausting battle. My own workouts almost never last longer than 10 to 20 minutes. I get bored. I want to exercise and get on with my day. Over time, we find what we enjoy, and this allows us to build consistency. Over months and years, the results of these consistent efforts compound, and can bring massive results to us. It all starts with taking a first tiny step from wherever we are right now.
Beyond the basics, we define what’s healthiest for ourselves
On top of this, life satisfaction and having fun are large parts of wellbeing. I will make the argument that a really solid workout routine that you don’t enjoy is actually less healthy than a just okay workout routine that you’re in love with, simply because a large part of health is enjoyment and satisfaction of the things we choose to do. Remember, what’s healthy isn’t always objective, it can differ from person to person. Beyond the broad basics, we define it for ourselves!
If you want to truly conquer the Core habit area of exercise, combine physical movement with an activity you love. If we make exercise fun rather than a chore, the amount of effort we’ll save our future self is mind-boggling.
Remember those food web diagrams back from middle school science? The Core areas are similarly like a web – when we make changes in one, it affects all the others. This means that working on one area will benefit the others. Results can never be guaranteed, though if physical transformation of your body is your goal, making incremental forward movement in each Core area, and giving it time, is often the best way to achieve this longer-term goal.
Imagine someone who’s been trying to build an exercise routine off and on for years and they finally discover a local dance class that they attend with a friend. They go to the class regularly to hang out with their friend, gain confidence from seeing results over time, realize “Hey, I actually can do this!” and with that confidence, they find motivation to try to eat healthier too. The benefits of working on one Core 5 area will leak into the other areas, and it’s this small movement forward in all of them that brings us significant results.
Confidence is contagious
I try to bring this up as much as possible because I think it’s really important. Behavior change is hard. If your body isn’t used to exercise, taking it super small, almost comfortably, to start, is the best way to achieve results. Struggles, frustrations, experiments that don’t work, adjustments, and more experiments that don’t work are normal and expected. This is the price we pay to find something that works for us personally. We put in some work up front to find what exercise we actually enjoy and can see ourselves doing consistently, and as a result, we get all the physical and mental benefits from exercise. Noticing benefits we never even knew were possible is an awesome part of putting in the effort!
Plus, with our newfound confidence, motivation and energy to make progress in the other Core areas will come about automatically. The kind of physical success that exercise brings is often quiet success, not usually as glamourous as in our dreams, it just kind of happens. You find an activity you enjoy, and after a while you wake up and notice more muscles on your body, or that you don’t get out of breath as easily.
It’s like if you look in the mirror at yourself each day, there won’t seem like much difference from one day to the next. In contrast, look at a picture of yourself from a couple years ago, and woah! Change! It’s quiet change, nothing dramatic in the short-term, but once you start seeing results, I think you’ll hardly care how it’s happening.
How to get results from exercise – conclusion
So, to answer our question of how to get results from exercise? Well, I can’t tell you exactly what exercises to do. No one can. You’re a human being, not a robot who we could predict exactly what will happen if you do a certain routine. Humans respond differently to different approaches. If we didn’t, the health industry wouldn’t really be a thing, would it? It’d just be all of us doing the same exact thing to live optimally healthy lives. How dull would that be! What is effective for you can only be found out through experimentation. So start. Start moving your body in a way you enjoy. Find your autonomous motivation, do it for yourself, and it’s okay if you don’t find it right away, or if it evolves as you move forward, this is normal.
Once you have that motivation, it’ll be reasonably easy to keep up with your exercise – if it’s not, if it feels like a drag for longer than a few days on end, it can be time to lighten up your routine and/or revisit that internal, autonomous motivation. Remind yourself that the frustrating struggles you’re enduring in the beginning will save you exponentially more time, effort, and frustration in the future. Adjust when you get bored or tired of a routine. Consciously be grateful for the benefits you’re noticing. Celebrate them, and celebrate yourself because you’re doing something really difficult. You deserve a gym full of people cheering you on. Be relentless on keeping consistent, somehow, someway. And see what happens next.
For those wanting something more specific
A quick note here to finish. When wanting to lose fat and have muscle show more prominently on our bodies, spot reducing isn’t possible. For example, there’s nothing we can do to lose fat only on our stomachs. It’ll gradually be lost or gained everywhere. Though, I am no expert on this and there may be some of you who aren’t satisfied with a non-specific approach for your exercise. For specific advice on building up certain muscle groups, or specific routines and/or outcomes, reaching out to a personal trainer could be a great idea to look into.
