Fitness Barriers - If Obama has time to train...

Yesterday I took my daughter to the library. It’s one of my favorite activities. She is just so enthusiastic, like she wants to drink up every single book in the kids section.

While she leafed through countless volumes, I grabbed a French language news magazine that was sporting a feature on “andropause.” In the end, the content was pretty fluffy, but there was some food for thought in there.

One of the things that jumped out at me was a piece on how Obama leads by example with regards to physical activity. The sidebar claimed that he spends 45 minutes exercising at dawn, five to six days per week.

If true, it pretty much lays to waste the feeble excuses most of us have for not exercising. No matter what your opinion of Obama - and he seems to be pretty polarizing at the moment - you have to admit that POTUS has ostensibly the busiest schedule in the free world.

Later in the day I read an article by a blogger that I like by the name of Ramit. The gist of his post was the idea of the Barriers that we put up for ourselves and which preclude the achievement of things that we would like in favor of the comfort of what we know.

Immediate comfort is a strong motivator. What most people don’t realize is that immediate comfort also pales in comparison to the joys of future success, triumph and achievement.

So here’s what I propose. Let’s rip down some Barriers that are keeping us from moving towards fulfilling our long-term potential. I suppose there are lots of ways to do it, but I’ve found the following four steps to be very effective.

Step 1

What are the wellness or fitness goals that you have been thinking about for a while now, but have not taken action on. These are things you would like but which you have not yet turned into things you are going to achieve. Take a piece of paper and make three columns. Write down these goals in the first column.

Step 2

Make a list of all the Barriers you have thrown up against each goal. Write them down in the second column. These are things that stand in your way and that may be real or imagined. For example, you may want to lose five pounds of fat, but your boss takes you out to lunch every day at a nice restaurant. This could be a barrier to reaching your goal and should be listed in column two. Or perhaps you would like to take up a new sport, but you tell yourself you are too old.

Step 3

Examine each Barrier. Evaluate the validity of each one and look for ways to tear them down one by one. What could you do about your fat loss goal and your daily lunch date with your boss? How about talking to the restaurant staff and arranging a selection of made to order meals that meet your requirements?

And what about being too old to pick up a new sport? This is a self-imposed barrier. You may not be able to perform at an elite level, but there is no reason to preclude yourself from participation. How could you tear down that barrier? How about looking for an entry level venue? A friend of mine is an avid swimmer. At her competitions, there is always a lady in her 90s who is also competing. They have to help her down into the pool, and she does her laps from there. If she can do it…

Final Step

Act now Start taking action. You’ve identified the barriers and sought ways of ripping them down or getting around them. Now you need to start walking down the path. Are you guaranteed success? Of course not. In fact, if you are lucky you’ll have at least a couple small failures along the way. Until you fail at something, you don’t understand what it takes to succeed. And you can’t fail at something you don’t start.

This process is deceptively simple, but powerful. The force of homeostasis (remaining in a static state) is a tenacious one. Your subconscious is a master at creating or enabling barriers which keep you from change. If progress and achievement were natural to us, everyone would be exactly as they imagine themselves. But we know this is not true. Changing your current state means overcoming inertia, and that takes concerted effort. Identifying barriers and removing them is part of that process.