Creating a Routine that Fits your Life

One of the biggest reasons adults struggle to stay consistent with their training and nutrition isn’t a lack of motivation, but usually it falls back to poor alignment. Many times people try to force a fitness a nutrition plan into a life that’s already overflowing with work, family, and other responsibilities. At Showtime, we believe your training plan should fit you, not the other way around. Sustainable routines are built by blending structure, flexibility, and awareness. At the start of a new journey, it’s easy to become excited and want to tackle on a lot of the new thing. We often look for little areas where we can squeeze more of our new desire. This can become a trap because we haven’t built the foundation for long term success or understand our obstacles in our way. Here are some ways we help people get stronger and healthier without burning out. 

    Align your Schedule with Reality, Not Perfection

The first step in consistency is honesty. Many times we’ll plan our training and nutrition for and ideal week. The week where no work or family emergencies pop up, no illness, or a drop in mood and motivation. This results in missed workouts or a fast food meal which then leads to guilt and frustration. We help people map out their actual week with things like work hours, commute time, family time, and energy patterns. For some, this helps them to see that training before work is the best option to build consistency. Building your schedule in this fashion creates a more likely to follow through scenario instead of when you “should” train. Habit success like training and healthy nutrition depends on environmental consistency. The more predictable your routine, the higher your adherence rate will be leading to faster progress. Training two to three sessions a week consistently is better than five sessions a week inconsistently. 

Takeaway - Treat your workouts and meal prep time as appointments for yourself. Put it in your calendar and be strict. 

Choose the Minimum Effective Dose

You don’t need to train six days a week or live on bland chicken and rice to get the results you want. For many people, finding the minimum they can do to achieve progress is helpful and takes away stress. The great news is, if you’re just starting out then you can probably get a lot out of a small amount of training. This helps us to build out something that we can repeat over time. In training and nutrition, consistency always beats intensity. This helps us to avoid the perfection trap. Not every training session will be perfect and neither will every meal or sleep, but when we build consistency we get more opportunities to make a small amount of progress. When starting out, three sets of an exercise is better than ten sets because we don’t have the base for the movement. A qualified coach is a great asset when beginning because they can adjust your training before you think they’re needed because they know what to expect after the session. 

Takeaway- Set your non- negotiables. As an example “I will strength train Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 5am and walk Tuesday, Thursday at 5am.” Put those days and times in your calendar and protect it. 

Build Flexibility into the Framework 

Rigidity kills consistency. Anyone who has had a child quickly learned to be flexible and adaptable. A sustainable routine has non negotiables and also flexibility when life happens. This teaches you to adopt not abandon your plan. If you miss a workout, sub it for a bodyweight circuit you can do in your living room or a walk. If you miss a meal and eat junk food, aim to make the next meal healthy targeting the nutrition you might have missed previously. Your long term success comes from persistence not perfection. We can adjust our approach without compromising our goals to help with long term consistency. 

Takeaway - Have an A/B plan. I always like to have my workouts written out in my notebook, but I also have a back log of simple time effective workouts with different areas of focus if we’re traveling or in a time crunch. Do the same with your healthy meals and have a list of simple healthy meals that can be made in minimal time with little effort. 

Your health and fitness routine shouldn’t compete with your life, but it should compliment it. The best program will always be the one you can do consistently, recover from, and enjoy enough to repeat. The internet will preach about the best new workout routine or diet, but at Showtime our focus it to help design the plan for you using data, honesty, simplicity, and flexibility. 

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