By Michael Krueger
Personally, I’ve been working out for a relatively long time. A lot of people have been at it longer, but I’m happy with my stretch and the progress I’ve made. I’ve come a long way and, so long as I keep the same mindset going forward, I still have a long way to go.
Being a trainer, I have met many people who haven’t exercised in a long time. I’ve also met a lot of people who have started and stopped exercising more times than they care to remember. These are the people who struggle the most, and they always moan the same plaintive refrain, “I hate starting over again.”
The solution to that one is simple: Don’t ever stop.
A Quick Timeline
Every so often, I’ll run into someone I trained many years ago. We have a short catch-up conversation, and then we part. I’ve also had the experience of spotting former clients before they see me. Once they recognize me, they avert their eyes and slink away, embarrassed by what has become of them since our time together.
Obviously, the difference is that the first person has continued to train while the second had lapsed. The lapsed group is by far the larger of the two, in more ways than one. So, what causes people to abandon their hard-won fitness and fall into an untrained and unfit state? The reasons are legion, but here are a few of the most common.
As a matter of perspective, if you are young and only a few years past your competitive high school or college sports years, you probably don’t see what the big deal is. You think you’ll be able to maintain a fairly high level of fitness with little effort and you figure you will do this for the rest of your life … right, sure you will.
If you are a bit further along in life, perhaps age 30 or so, you know that those days of simply playing football or soccer on weekends as being enough to maintain your fitness are over. In fact, these bouts of frenetic physical activity only serve to remind you that your fitness has slipped and you are getting old. Add a new family and increased job stress to that mix, and the hope that you will ever see those six-pack abs again seems pretty unlikely.
Push out a few years further, and now you’re 40. You’ve tried a few times to get back to some reasonable level of fitness, or even a minimal level, and it hasn’t happened. In your annual physical, your doctor has noticed an uptick in your weight and a downward trend in your health and fitness. You spend a lot more time on the couch or the sideline watching other people being a lot more active than you. In fact, the closest you’ve come to working out recently was drill last Thursday night, and then you went out for pizza afterward.
Soon, you will be into your 50s. Who ever thought that would happen? I could predict what it will be like for most of you, but you wouldn’t like it.
And all of this happened because one day in the distant past you took a wrong turn and you quit.
To Quit …
Some people train for years before something causes them to quit. If you were a hardcore trainer where the only thing that mattered was how much weight you were moving or how fast or far were you running, what caused you to stop was probably an injury or, more likely, a bunch of injuries.
The single-minded pursuit of bigger, stronger, faster will in the end put a stop to the secondary goal of long-term health and fitness. Actually, if bigger, stronger, faster is your goal, long-term health and fitness don’t even enter your mind. All that matters is to be better than everyone else.
It’s easy to beat yourself up year after year trying to attain the ultimately unattainable. I’ve talked about genetics before, and if that’s what’s holding you back, that’s the breaks of the game. If you have good genes, then you can still push and push year after year and still come up short. Eventually, the cumulative wear and tear will take you down, and since you don’t know any other way to train, you quit.
Once you realize you’re never going to be a world champion, what are you going to do? If the external goal of showing the world your greatness was the only thing driving you, then you will quit.
If, on the other hand, you can accept that the goal you set long ago served its purpose in pushing you toward your personal peak, then it’s easier to adjust your sails and find a new goal for this new phase in your life.
Make this adjustment, and you can still be a champion without the fickle accolades of others; simply knowing you did your best is enough.
When you first begin training, you make gains like there is no tomorrow. Every workout is a new personal record, and every year there is a new audacious goal. Then, one day, the gains begin to slow. Adding another rep after three weeks of struggle qualifies as a victory, and going a year without getting hurt is cause for celebration. This is when it gets hard.
The question then is, are you going to keep going? I know a lot of people who quit at this point and I can understand why. By now, you’ll need to work incredibly hard and long for small improvements. You train week after week with nothing to show for it but plateaued workouts. The only thing that drives you is the undying belief that next time you’ll get one rep more or be a half of a second faster. This takes admirable faith in yourself and a persistent dedication to the long game.
When faced with this daunting prospect, most people quit; will you?
After many years of training, people around you will begin to question why you keep at it. I always say it’s like The Grateful Dead: if I have to explain it, you’ll never understand it. It can be difficult to maintain a training schedule, clean eating, and a consistent sleep pattern when all those around you do not. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and do what you know is right for you … or you can quit.
There are more reasons people quit than I could possibly write here. You could add a few of your own and probably some I’ve never heard. The reasons for quitting are just as personal as the reasons for persisting; and once you find yours, the thought of quitting will never enter your mind again.
…Or Not to Quit
Anyone who has personally encountered all the reasons to quit and instead redoubled their efforts and carried on has done it for their own reasons. For some, the health benefits were reason enough. For others, wanting to look good was the deciding factor. Still others accepted that superior fitness is a requirement for their chosen profession and they’ll do whatever it takes to achieve that standard. Whatever the reason, they have carried on year after year and probably will until they die.
Personally, I have never quit because training is about more than strength or looking good. It’s about discipline and dedication. It’s about setting a goal and working hard to achieve it. It’s about having the confidence to try and, whether I succeed or not, knowing that I did my best. It’s about making time for me and feeling good about that. It’s about living life to the fullest
… and never quitting.
Michael Krueger is an NSCA-certified personal trainer. He got his start in fitness training while serving in the United States Coast Guard. He works with firefighters and others in and around Madison, Wisconsin. He is available to fire departments, civic organizations, and athletic teams for training, consulting, and speaking engagements. He has published numerous articles on fitness, health, and the mind-body connection and was a featured speaker at the IAFC’s FRI 2009 Health Day in Dallas, Texas. E-mail him at MKPTLLC@gmail.
