Balance: The Key to a Fulfilling Fitness Lifestyle
Let’s face it:
Balance has become somewhat of a buzzword in the last few years. Its most common use applies to work-life balance and learning how to balance fitness and your social life.
Like most people, you’re probably tired of hearing old cliches and vague statements that don’t offer any actual value.
What does balance mean, anyway? How do we achieve it? What if we don’t want balance but prefer to go all-in on our goals?
We’ve put together this short guide to help you understand what balance truly is, why it’s essential, and how to go about achieving it. Let’s go.
What Does Balance Mean, Anyway?
Balance is simply a measure of how well you can juggle multiple things. For leading a fulfilling life, fitness balance is about doing what you can with the time and resources you have. It’s about recognizing that fitness should be part of your life and that perfection is not what matters most.
So what if you can’t follow the perfect training program or spend an hour at the gym each day? Fitness is a mindset; a way of seeing your life. It’s about recognizing that fitness should add to your life, not subtract.
In the most basic sense, balance means enjoying and benefiting from fitness without having it get in the way of other important things.
What Makes Balance So Important For Us?
Balance precedes consistency. It allows us to integrate fitness into our lives without overwhelming or burning ourselves out.
Consistency is what gets us closer to our goals by taking small, daily steps. For instance, one 30-minute workout won’t do anything. But do 150 of them in a year, and you can see tremendous improvements. A single healthy meal is also not important in the grand scheme of things. But, again, eat healthily twice per day for a year, and see your body change and health improve.
Balance is also vital for keeping us sane and fulfilled without fitness. When most people feel overwhelmed or struggle to stay consistent, the problem often lies in not knowing how to balance fitness with everything else. Even worse, some people achieve the opposite effect:
They start paying too much attention to fitness and disregard everything else.
How to Start Balancing Your Life With Fitness For Greater Fulfillment And Long-Term Results
1. Do What You Can With The Time You Have
Many people have fitness backward:
They think about their ideal training routine, so they shape their lives around it. Family, obligations, and sometimes even work have to make way for working out.
The truth is, you should examine your schedule and see how you can fit in working out without compromising on other important things. Of course, this isn’t to say you can’t cut back on leisure a bit to find time for working out. But don’t sacrifice essential things for the sake of fitness.
2. Get Back On Track Once You Slip Up
Let’s be honest for a moment:
We can’t always be perfect. Life happens, unexpected things arise, and we sometimes find ourselves having to skip a workout. But is that the end of the world? Of course not. What matters most is that we get back on track as soon as we can. This achieves two things:
First, it stops us from breaking the chain of consistency. Missing one workout can happen. But if we miss multiple in a row, we create a pattern, which can derail our efforts.
Second, it helps us stay on track and achieve great results in the long run. Sure, having to miss one workout might hurt right now, but it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, especially if you otherwise do hundreds of workouts per year.
3. Set Clear Goals And Take Small Steps Forward
Fitness is a fascinating journey, and we should learn how to enjoy it thoroughly. But we should also have some idea of what we want to achieve in the long run. In doing so, we can create more effective workout plans and align our actions better.
For a goal to be effective, it should be specific, measurable, realistic, and time-bound. For example:
“I want to lose 5 kilos in the next 10weeks.”
This goal is specific (lose 5 kilos), measurable (for instance, half a kilo per week), realistic, and time-bound (within ten weeks).
Having such goals is beneficial because it allows you to make the entire process more efficient and prune the unnecessary stuff. You can ask yourself, “Okay, what do I have to do in terms of nutrition and training to get there?”
It’s also important to avoid setting too many goals, as that can overwhelm you. Also, don’t set contradicting goals that require vastly different processes because this will stop you from making meaningful progress in any direction.
