Takeaway: Fitness is a skill that needs to be practiced. It will appear easier to those with more experience and harder for those with less. To make fitness easier, continue practicing the skills to build your mastery of living a healthy lifestyle.
Why Is Fitness Easier For Other People?
Have you ever felt like fitness was easier for other people than it is for you?
Other people are better at sticking to diets.
Other people are more fit and better at exercising.
Other people can do half the work and lose twice as much weight.
I know what you're feeling and I've been there, on both sides of the equation. When I was overweight, I would watch other people be successful and it led me to question myself.
Now that I've got the success story, other people tend to believe fitness is easy for me and always has been.
Experiencing both sides has opened my eyes to the reality.
Fitness is a skill that needs to be practiced.
No one is great at losing weight the first time they try.
No one feels great when they exercise for the first time after committing to getting in shape.
Everyone struggles to avoid the foods that tempt them throughout the day.
The only thing that separates the people who are successful from those that aren't is systems and consistency.
Fitness is a timeline: Those who are further along than you appear to have an easier time, and those earlier in their journey will appear to struggle more.
If you fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, you'll question your ability to succeed.
Instead, make the commitment to getting better at the skill of fitness.
In “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell discussed the 10,000-hour rule, which says that it requires about 10,000 hours of deliberate, focused practice to become world-class at anything.
You can see it in athletes, musicians, painters, and just about any other field you could possibly think of.
Why does it take so long to become an expert?
Not only does this amount of time allow you to learn the ins-and-outs of every facet of your craft, but it also ensures you’ve gained enough experience to have truly mastered the material.
You can learn the fundamentals of an activity fairly early on. Take the sport of football, for example. You can learn the rules of the game (without any prior knowledge) in a couple of minutes.
Just knowing the rules gives you only a basic understanding of the game—you can play, and do well, in a finite set of circumstances. Once nuance is presented, such as a player or team’s particular style of play, you won’t have the experience or knowledge of strategy to be able to adjust and perform accordingly.
Beginners can do well against other beginners because they have similar levels of understanding and practice.
A beginner against someone more experienced will most likely lose.
In another example, most people know how to apply paint to a canvas. Most even have a basic understanding of how to draw a variety of shapes and patterns to create a picture.
However, it is only after the deliberate practice that Gladwell mentions, as part of the 10,000-hour rule, that a novice painter can learn the more subtle brush stroke techniques and be able to create truly masterful works of art.
How do these examples translate to fitness?
Learning the fundamentals of exercise and nutrition isn’t very difficult. You can read a few articles to know that you need a calorie deficit and enough protein daily to lose weight while preserving muscle, or that you need to lift heavy weights to build muscle mass.
What that basic understanding won’t get you is the experience and know-how to apply that knowledge in a variety of situations—often manipulating or customizing what you already to know to fit your unique situation at any given time.
Take, for example, the situation where you’ve created a meal plan for the week. You’ve already laid out what you’re going to eat, and in many cases, have even prepped these meals ahead of time.
What happens when you forget your lunch at home or a friend invites you out to dinner?
Suddenly, you’re forced to make choices on the fly—choices that are often influenced by a variety of uncontrollable variables.
If you are unable to deviate from your plan, unable to identify some of these influencing variables, or unable to create a custom healthy meal on the fly with limited choices, then surely you will have a tough time sticking to your meal plan.
This is why fitness can seem easy for some people. It’s not that it naturally comes easy, it’s because they’ve had more experience to know how to stick to their fitness plan given all of life’s surprises.
They have better systems and consistency.
And they have more experience that creates the necessary habits to make these processes almost automatic.
You don’t need 10,000 hours to finally get a handle on your nutrition and exercise.
You don’t need to be world-class in order to see results. You just have to be good enough.
Just knowing the basics of nutrition and exercise can begin to produce results. Committing to the skill of fitness builds mastery so you can more easily navigate life’s surprises.
That's my advice for you today. Make the commitment to practice fitness as a skill.
~ Coach Alex
P.S. If you have questions about how to get better at fitness, reply to this email. I'm here to help.