How Adjusting Your Mindset Can Set You Up For Fitness Success

Why is it so hard to lead a healthy lifestyle? It should be easy... there are thousands of exercise and healthy eating programs that can tell you exactly what you should do and how you should eat to achieve your goals. Most of those programs will give you exercises and recipes, but they won’t teach you the one thing that will make the difference between success and failure: how to build a healthy mindset.

A good mindset promotes a healthy lifestyle, lasting change, and ongoing improvement, while the wrong mindset sets you up for failure before you ever even set foot in a gym.

In my experience, most people who have struggled to make healthy changes have the wrong mental approach. If you really want to be successful in improving your fitness, you should put as much effort into your mindset training as you do your physical training.

Here are some mental approaches which help set you up for success in your fitness journey.

Focus on Consistency

No matter what you want to get out of training, the way to reach your goals is to become a regular, consistent, and skilled exerciser. That’s more important than the actual exercises you perform, the program you follow, your set and rep ranges, and pretty much everything else.

You could have the most perfect, personalized, goal-specific training program in the world, but if you don’t follow it consistently and effectively for months and even years, you’re not going to get the results you want.

If you want to be successful you need to find ways to make exercise (and healthy eating) a habit, create lasting motivation, develop resiliency, and build the mental and physical skills needed to get the most out of your training.

That’s not an easy task, but it’s so important that it’s worth focusing your effort on. There are strategies you can use, like developing plans to overcome barriers, focusing on incorporating one small, meaningful change at a time until it becomes automatic, mastering the basic exercises to build a foundation of fitness which you can expand on (more on that below), and stacking up small wins to provide motivation.

Check Your Expectations

If you start an exercise or healthy eating program expecting sudden and drastic results, you'll be disappointed. There are plenty of people peddling programs, diets, and supplements that promise quick and easy results, but unfortunately, quick-fixes just don’t work. If they did, everyone would be fit and healthy.

Mindset

The truth is that becoming active, losing weight, and improving your fitness is a long-term process. Results come from week after week, month after month, and year after year of consistent effort and small, sustainable changes.

To be successful, you have to accept that results take time, and that the slow and steady approach is the only one that will allow you to achieve and maintain your results.

Once you adopt that slow and steady mindset, you can start to appreciate changes as they come.

You’ll know that even though you might not have lost all the weight or achieved all the strength you want yet, you will get there.

It will be ok that the weight hasn’t come off after a few weeks, because you will be exercising and eating a healthy diet a year from now, and by then you will be fitter and healthier than you are now. And a year after that, you’ll be even fitter and healthier, and so on. Take it slow, be patient and persistent, and your hard work will pay off, permanently.

Forget the “All or Nothing” Approach

Here’s a common pattern for many people: they decide to get in shape by adopting a fad diet or exercise plan, the kind that says that you should never eat certain foods and you must do this exercise, this many times per week.

They try to overhaul their diet, totally eliminate certain foods or food groups, and go from not exercising at all to intense workouts several times a week.

Large and sudden changes like this are simply not sustainable and, inevitably, they have a “moment of weakness” and eat some of that forbidden food or miss a workout or two. Frustrated and disappointed, they give up altogether and find themselves back at square one.

They’re actually worse off now than when they started because that failure created a negative association with “fitness” or “dieting” and they are less likely to try again.

The main problem is that those fad diets and quick fix programs are wrong about what being fit and healthy really means.

Fitness is not about restriction, deprivation, and exercising yourself into the ground. It’s about forming sustainable, healthy habits that make your life better.

Fitness is not an all or nothing pursuit. You don’t have to be perfect at it, you don’t need to always do this and never eat that. You just need to start somewhere and try to improve a little bit at a time.

If you have a “bad eating day” or a day when you can’t complete your workout, forgive yourself and move on. Start trying again the next day. Eventually, the habits will stick.

Master The Basics 

So many people think that improving fitness, healthy eating, and weight loss are complicated and that there must be some tricks to it. They think the basics are too simple to work, and instead they search for some secret techniques and complicated rules.

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Here’s a direct quote from an article I found recently on a popular fitness site: “You’re sick of hearing that eating smaller portions and exercising are the key to weight loss. Find out what else works — these may sound weird, but give them a try!”.

One of the “tips” in this article: eat your food off blue plates, because blue is not an appetizing color. Come on. If you’re eating unhealthy food and not being physically active, changing the color of your plates is not going to help you lose weight.

At least part of the quote is true; eating smaller portions and exercising are keys to weight loss. So are drinking more water and less sugary drinks and eating whole, minimally processed foods including vegetables, whole grains, and lean protein.

If you are doing all of those things each and every day and have been for years, then you do not need these “weird” tricks.

If you haven’t truly mastered those basic habits, then you could eat your food off multicolored, metallic, glow-in-the-dark plates and it’s not going to make a bit of difference.

There is a similar mindset about exercise. People think they need complex techniques to improve their fitness and jump into complicated programs before learning the basics.

They don’t first create strategies which will help them be consistent exercisers or take the time to learn how to perform a proper push up, but instead start Tabata training from day one.

Most people are not doing the basic things they need to do to achieve their goals. In fact, I have met very few people who have completely mastered the basics, and those people don’t need any help with their health or fitness.

Sometimes people don’t really understand the basics, and sometimes they just haven’t worked on them long enough and consistently enough to see the benefits.

Learn the basic exercises and guidelines for healthy eating (you can find many of those on this site), and commit to practicing them, slowly and deliberately. Consider it an investment. Once you have mastered them, you can move on to more “advanced” techniques, but you’ll probably find that the basics are pretty much all you need.

Fitness is mental as much as it is physical. Work on cultivating a good mindset, and you will be well on your way to success!