An age old question that’s often asked when it comes to exercise: is doing a little something better than doing nothing? If you only had 15 minutes, is doing a short workout better than no workout at all? I think most of us intuitively know the answer to this. Of course it is! But I think we also underestimate the huge impact of a short workout versus doing nothing at all.
Degrees of success
In life there are varying degrees of success. Most of us live in a gray area somewhere in between extreme triumphs and dramatic failures. Nobody, I don’t care who you are, is going achieve wild success all the time. Even the people at the top of their fields aren’t at their best all the time. Michael Jordan had bad games, Jerry Seinfeld told bad jokes, Warren Buffett made bad investments. But one thing that all of these people had in common is that they were relentless in pursuing their vision. They all kept at it, even when their efforts didn’t produce great results.
Let’s be honest, doing burpees on and off for 5 minutes isn’t going to be as good for you as an hour long comprehensive workout. But those burpees are going to be way better than doing nothing at all. Not only will you benefit from the burpees themselves but the impact on your behavior is going to be even greater.
Consistency in performance is the true measure of greatness. Sometimes we put way too much emphasis on performance and don’t give enough importance to consistency. I strongly believe you have to achieve consistency before you can achieve great performance. If you don’t have an hour to do a big workout and decide to do nothing, you are damaging your consistency. If you decide to do half a workout or even 10 minutes of a workout you still score a minor win for consistency versus a total loss. You are “still in the game” as they say. You didn’t completely break your habit of exercise. Not breaking the habit will make it much easier to get back to your desired exercise much sooner rather than later.
Have a fallback
The people I work with all have a “default exercise” that they can fall back on when they need to. The default is something that they can do in about 2-5 minutes and doesn’t have any major barriers to perform. Major barriers would be things like needing special equipment or needing to go to the gym. Common defaults are a 5 minute stretching routine, 3 sets of some exercise or just the warm-up portion of a Gold Arrow beginner HIIT workout.
Doing something over nothing extends into healthy eating as well. Nobody eats perfectly. But all too often we let one slip-up turn into total disaster. You can ask if having one cookie is just as bad as eating anything you want all day long. One cookie, soda, piece of pie or whatever is never going to ruin your day when it comes to eating healthy. The question is: are you going to let the flood gates open up at that point or get back to eating healthy?
Success in weight loss is all about degrees. Our brains do poorly when thinking of degrees of success. We want something to be black or white, pass or fail, good or bad, etc. This is easy for us to wrap our minds around. But in reality we rarely run into absolutes. Weight loss is going to occur at varying degrees of success. That’s why something is always going to be better than noting.
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