Not another blog post, by a fitness writer trying to motivate the masses

Guest Contributor: Noel Flynn from ABC GYM

As I sit down to write this blog post it is now 1.39pm on Friday afternoon and I have sat over the laptop for the last hour.I met Sinead the other day and we had so many discussions around so many different topics. I was so excited and so pumped up for this series, that I thought I would never have a problem with picking topics to write about. Yet even as I sit down and write my opening paragraph, I am still unsure what the topic of this blog post will be. And here is the problem, I am not heeding my own advice.

In my previous blog post I wrote about how Simplicity + Consistency = Success, but the response to my earlier posts and with so many people reading each week, it has out the pressure on somewhat!!! As I sit and write this, I finding myself thinking “what can I write about today that is going to blow people’s minds, what can I write about that is going to keep up the level of interest in this blog series?”And then I copped it. This is what we all do, we all go Gung-Ho into things. We forget about keeping it Simple, we forget about doing it consistently.

It is like the January surge in the gym. You are pumped, you are motivated, your work colleagues are in the same boat, you are eating really well, you are attending the gym more in the last 2 weeks than you did in the previous 2 months, maybe longer…but , can you keep the momentum going? What happens when your work colleagues start eating cakes and biscuits again (they always do).

The problem was not January, the problem was not your colleagues, the problem was the build-up, the hype, the expectation. You set yourself up to fail. You decided in September or October that it was ok to eat what you wanted, it was ok to skip exercise because sure why bother when it was all going to be ruined in November and December but you will be willing to start in January!Really? What is going to be different about a day written on a calendar than any other day? You still have the same problems!

Starting back exercising after some time off and starting your journey to eating well again can be daunting. Have you found yourself saying “I better get fit, before I start in that gym?” when the whole purpose of joining the gym was to get fit. If you were able to get fit on your own, why would you even need the gym? I am not going to tell you to ‘just do it’, ‘you need to face your fears’ or ‘you need to motivate yourself’, because it is all that type of build up, that can lead to failure. Maybe just start by enquiring at your local gym. Maybe go and try something out for a few weeks to see if you like it. Perhaps you should change just your breakfast routine for a day or two, and not trying to overhaul your whole diet. The most important thing to achieve success is to keep doing super SIMPLE things CONSISTENTLY to get the SUCCESS you really want.

For some that might mean going to bed 15 minutes earlier 4 nights this week. By doing that all of a sudden you have had an extra hours sleep that week. For others, it might be to just slow down and chew your food and take as long as you can eating it. It does not even matter what the food is, just develop the habit of eating slowly and gradually you can add to it. Whatever it is you do, keep it so simple you will do it consistently.

The time is now 2.14pm on Friday, maybe you will read this maybe you won’t but I feel I can write again, who knows how you might perform with a gym routine or healthy diet until you do 1 small little thing to get started.

PS: If you have read any of the blog posts so far, thank you it is truly humbling to think anyone might read what I think or say. Thank you. Now to see if there is a title for such a blog post….hmmmm.