Life is full of obstacles on the path to being physically active. As author Ryan Holiday highlights in his book, The Obstacle is the Way, often the problem presents a novel and valuable opportunity to succeed. This partly requires an attitude shift and partly the willingness to look at the problem from a different perspective.
Often most people’s first hurdle is our willingness to seek and accept even the most trivial justifications to avoid “doing the hard thing.” Have you ever felt a sense of relief when a delay or interruption conveniently arose to conflict with your planned workout or meal preparation? Like the nervous salesperson at the first sign of objection, the pressure to show up and do what’s hard is relieved, only to gradually surge until the next customer or next time we’re supposed to hit the gym. But for that fleeting moment, we’re absolved of responsibility for getting uncomfortable and you now have permission to hit the couch and eat fast food.
The majority of North Americans are, sadly, metabolically unhealthy. This is in part due to being both inactive and overweight. These issues share a strong underlying relationship. We begin to make a dent in this problem by attacking the common reasons why people quit, struggle to stay consistent, or simply never get started in the first place.
6 Ways To Overcome Your Fitness Obstacles
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Obstacle 1: You’ve Sustained an Injury
Even though strength training is one of the statistically safest ways to be active, if you spend enough time in the gym something will eventually hurt. More often we “sleep wrong”, twist awkwardly in the shower, or slip and fall, leaving us injured. For most people this means completely abandoning all physical activity, despite the foolishness of the choice.
How many people gleefully think, “Well, now I’m hurt so I can’t workout” and retreat guilt free to the couch. This is little more than a socially acceptable excuse to quit.
Instead of using an injury as an excuse, choose to train everything else you can. A coworker recently had ACL reconstructive surgery after suffering an injury playing soccer. Instead of completely quitting everything in order to just focus on rehabbing her knee, she chose to double down on other training elements that she felt needed improvement, such as improving pullups and bench press.
If you focus on your physique or strength performance, we all have weak body parts and deficits. This is the perfect time to channel your training and recovery into progress on those weak points. And counter to what you might expect, training the opposing healthy limb helps spare muscle and strength loss of an injured and immobilized limb. You also preserve the habit of working out, and the metabolic and mental health benefits of exercise.
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Obstacle 2: You’re Tired at the End of the Day
The classic double-edged sword: You’re too tired to work out but you’re tired because you don’t workout. Get clear on this relationship. Despite the activation energy needed to break the inertia of the couch, making the difficult choice to hit the gym or commit to cardiovascular exercise is the direct solution to your lethargy.
Let’s reframe this: What’s the problem? You’re tired all the time. What’s the solution? Be more active, start training. The hard thing you’re avoiding is the answer to your problems. Set workout time in your schedule, get uncomfortable during the earliest stage, and soon notice you have more energy for family and more focus and productivity for work. This creates an upward spiral. Better energy, focus, and productivity means you aren’t staying late for work as often, you’re getting more time for family, and you have more energy for workouts. Endure the hardest part to get started and experience a transformation in how you feel every day.
Make the decision ahead of time. Create a rule: When you leave work you go straight to the gym. Decisions take energy. Your brain uses more glucose each day than any single muscle. If you pre-load the choice and commit in advance, you’re more likely to execute on autopilot. Once at the gym it’s easier to get the first exercise in and gain momentum. How often have you gotten home on the couch after a long day, and said, “Nope. I’m not going anywhere.” Don’t give the couch a chance to seduce you, at least until the workout is done.
Embrace the opportunity to build resilience. Not only will this show up in your workouts, but in other areas of your life when faced with tough choices under fatigue.
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Obstacle 3: Not Starting Because You’re Busy
For years you’ve programmed yourself to drop healthy lifestyle behaviors when life gets busy. We sell ourselves the convenient lie that we will start again when life calms down. There are 2 problems with this logic. 1) The assumption that once life gets less busy it will stay less busy. 2) We give ourselves permission to quit every time we get busy.
This entire theme is beautifully captured in this quote from Alex Hormozi:
“If you’re waiting for when you’re less busy to start a new habit/program, it assumes that when you get busy again you’ll stop. If you want enduring change, the best time to start is when you’re busy. Learn how to make it work in the worst condition, and it’ll stick in the best”
Busy yet want to be strong and healthy? Take out your schedule, book time for your workouts and your nutrition. Make these non-negotiable. Treat them as essential parts of your life and do not compromise. Not only will you train yourself to establish boundaries around your physical and emotional well being that will serve you for life, you cement behaviors that improve your energy, mood, an focus while improve your productivity. Often the reason why we’re too busy to workout is because we’re inefficient with our work time and too tired and distracted to enjoy our quality time.
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Obstacle 4: You Put Yourself Last Because You’re a Parent or Caregiver
Most cultures expect mothers to put their own health and wellness needs last and family first. This absurd and archaic attitude does little to best serve your family in the long run. Though dutifully caring for family may be deeply rewarding for some people, it’s a great recipe for resentment and burnout for others. This isn’t exclusive to mothers either. This expectation can fall on dads, any single parent, or the caregivers of ailing parents or other disabled family members.
Though the airplane/oxygen mask analogy has been beaten to death, it holds true. If you create some room to be physically active and aim for better sleep (parents of newborns are exempted) given your circumstances, you’re in a far better position to sustain the physical and mental health and energy to sustain caregiving efforts long term.
Struggling to prepare healthy meals for yourself? Seek to align healthy meal preparation in large enough quantities to feed your family and have additional leftovers for yourself.
More effort to eat home-cooked meals creates room to order out and have a pizza night when truly exhausted. This establishes a healthier nutritional environment for kids while modeling balance and the ability to enjoy tastier food. This may reduce the chances of a legacy of shame, body image issues, and disordered eating because of the environment and nutrition education kids are raised with.
Or you can spend years sacrificing sleep, body image, metabolic health, and energy subscribing to a false dichotomy where to care for your family, you must come last and cannot be seen as “selfishly” doing things for yourself. Instead realize that if you care for and prioritize your own wellness, you have more to give to the important people in your life.
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Obstacle 5. You Hate Working Out
This is a false narrative. A story you tell yourself that isn’t serving you. It’s a lie wrapped in a belief that insulates you from taking responsibility for your health and choosing action. It’s a needlessly rigid identity. It’s much easier to say, “I’m terrible at that hard thing” than to say, “I haven’t tried very hard to become better at it and I’m willing to suck at it for a while before I’m proficient.”
We don’t need to go from hatred to passion in one swing. You don’t need a passion for working out. You just need to choose small actions daily. Choose to move instead of being sedentary. The faster you disabuse yourself of the idea that you’re supposed to love exercise to actually go do it, the faster you get on with it and feel it’s benefits. Passion for working out may eventually come after months or years of consistently showing up for yourself, because you know exercise is good for you.
Our identities aren’t fixed. Just consider how much your attitudes, beliefs, and personality have changed over the last decade in other areas. Unless you really haven’t evolved at all, there should be plenty of evidence you can change. A growth mindset embraces our ability to change. Too often our entire identity its defined by things we do and don’t do, things we are or aren’t. I’m not a morning person. I’m not a dog person. I’m not tech savvy. I’m not athletic. While it might take a while to love dog hair on your clothes and furniture, and you may not soon run marathons, you begin by de-programming the false narratives that are keeping you from pursuing better health.
There are a lot of things that are good for us we don’t love, but we know we need to do. Most of us don’t love getting up before the sun is up, especially on cold winter mornings to get ready for work or the kids to school. Some of us would rather play video games or stay out drinking than go to bed on time, but “that’s a problem for future Homer. Man I don’t envy that guy.” By avoiding physical activity we’re kicking the can down the road and leaving future Homer with a bigger hole to dig himself out of.
Picture your future self five to 10 years from now. Visualize the thinking, feeling, slightly older looking version of you. Ask yourself, “If I continue with my current lifestyle habits for the next X number of years, will I be better or worse off?” See your future self not as a far off abstract concept that will never arrive but as a real person who’s entirely at the mercy of the choices you make today. You have the opportunity to choose to act with kindness for that future you, by committing to healthier choices now. You don’t have to be perfect, but it starts with discarding unhelpful beliefs.
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Obstacle 6: You Got Sick and Didn’t Get Back on Track
Every new gym member who gets in a groove feels unstoppable. Each workout feels stronger, mental and physical energy feel better, and you’re hooked. Then you get sick and take time off. Only you feel like you’re back to square one and another week passes and you’ve done nothing. A few more weeks slip away, you’re back in your former habits, and the joy of working out has faded.
Everyone gets sick. Resting is the smart move. Developing the skill to bounce back when life interferes is an important test and rite of passage. When your workouts are truly your default setting, you get back on track without second thought. But at first, you need to experience such disruptions to forge this skill.
We also get hurt, take vacations, have strenuous work weeks, kids get sick, and have family emergencies that take us away from our best laid plans and best intentions. Go in knowing this will happen, plan for life to interfere, and set firm boundaries as discussed in #3 about making your personal health efforts non-negotiable against the routine ebbs and flows of busyness. This dedication and consistency creates room for the occasional week to take you off course without feeling guilty or costing you any hard earned muscle or progress.
Our modern world is engineered for convenience, and it’s only going in one direction. Most of us move less, expending less energy to earn a living. More of our food is engineered in combinations of high sugar, fat, and salt that never before existed in nature. We spend more time in front of media and algorithms designed to keep us hooked and enraged. It’s harder than ever to put yourself first and choose exercise. But you must choose. You must decide you don’t want to feel tired and sick anymore. And you must recognize your excuses and your obstacles, and weaponize them as fuel and leverage to get started and never stop. What obstacle is currently holding you back most that you will shatter now?
