This is part of an ongoing series where I take a look at motivational images, phrases and soundbites culled from “fitness motivation” websites and other sources.  I break them down and try to figure out what makes them effective or ineffective motivation for me.

I absolutely LOVE this one.  I think it is an utterly accurate and seriously uncomfortable truth.

Anytime you skip a run because of the weather; don’t go to the gym because you started to watch TV; or decided not to do calisthenics in your hotel room because you’re traveling, you are finding an excuse because your health and fitness isn’t really important to you.

Think about the last time that something was seriously important to you.  Could be a major work project, a paper for school, getting your wife to the hospital while she’s in labor, anything that was REALLY important.  Did you find and excuse not to do it or did you find a way to make it happen?

You made it happen didn’t you?  If something is really, honestly important to you, then you’ll get it done almost no matter what.  You’ll stay up all night; work feverishly; run red lights; call in favors; brow beat lackadaisical group members; and metaphorically (hopefully) lie, cheat, and steal to get it done.

The problem is that for most of us the “importance” of those moments we’re remembering were IMPOSED on us externally: losing our job, failing out of school, having a baby in the backseat of the car, and so on.  Unless there’s an external factor involved then we’re all too likely to leap at the first obstacle we encounter as an acceptable excuse to cop out.

The trick is to impart “importance” to things ourselves in such a way that it drives us to overcome excuses and find a way.  Here are a few ways to do it:

1)     Explicitly state that it’s important.  Tell yourself – in writing and/or out loud to yourself – that the thing you should be doing is important to you and why.  Eliminate any vague notions your “other self” has that this isn’t a big deal.

2)     Identify that whatever you are doing instead or whatever condition you think is keeping you from doing what you should be doing is just an excuse.  Clearly state – to yourself, or better yet to your roommate or significant other – that [the TV, the weather, your mild muscle soreness, your attitude, etc] is a weak excuse not to do something that you know you should.

3)     Take a look at your written fitness goals (you do have those don’t you?) and remind yourself of why it’s IMPORTANT to go do your workout.

4)     Ask yourself, “what’s more IMPORTANT to me?  My [health/fitness/physical appearance/athletic performance] or [watching TV/taking a nap/going to the movies/sleeping in/etc. ?”  Hint: the answer should be one of the former NOT the latter.

5) Create a blog and generate external pressure (i.e. a sense of importance) by exposing your real priorities (i.e. potential hypocrisy) to your friends and family (and complete strangers).

6) Put your money where your mouth is.  Bet a friend.  Use a commitment system like Beeminder or Stikk.

Pushups tonight: week 5 day 1.  I’ve got a long way to go to get from 75 to 100 and I think the program is only two more weeks long.  We’ll see what happens but I may be repeating week 5 and 6 a couple times.

I also had to give myself an extra 30-seconds of rest before the last set (something which has built in functionality in the app so it isn’t cheating . . . much).  But that combined with the fact that the last two sets required some Army-standard rest breaks does show that a few more laps through the last two weeks of the program still has the potential for significant improvement.  We’ll do what’s necessary.

And then a 5-miler.  The normal route.

It wasn’t brutal, but I sure FELT like I was running faster than a 9:30 pace, even though I was just out for an easy run.  I need to drink more water.

I veered off my Beeminder yellow brick road due to my decision earlier this week to defer my scheduled workout by a day.

I’m back on track, $10 poorer and the stakes have gone up.  Next time I go off the rails it’s a $30 penalty.

I’m going to keep a running tally of my Beeminder penalties and whatever the total is when I hit my goal is what I’ll donate to charity.

Ouch.  Going back to interval work after ANY kind of a break is brutal.

I need to control myself on my lead off intervals a little better.

Pushup workout today was a best effort test.  Result: 75 pushups.  19% improvement from my first test.

Awwww-yeeeeeeaaaahhhhhh . . . .

Quick spin on the bike.

I considered going out into the countryside to go for a proper ride, but I hate dislike riding by myself and the weather was a little dodgy as well which gave me a nice justification to wuss out.

Here’s the tricky bit about fitness goals: you can’t really control them.  Almost all of the metrics for fitness that are commonly used as goals or benchmarks or measures of success such as bodyweight, run times, lift amounts, etc. are secondary effects.

For example, let’s say you wanted to lose twenty pounds.  It’s easy to make that your goal and create a plan to lose one pound a week for twenty weeks.  So you create a diet plan and a workout schedule and you get started.  The problem is that your body is a complex system.  You might follow your diet and workout plans to the letter, but some weeks you might lose two pounds (or more) and other weeks you might not lose anything.  At the end of twenty weeks you could have executed your plan faithfully and still failed at your goal.  The same holds true for any fitness goal.  Running faster, lifting more, doing more pushups, anything.

That isn’t to say that fitness results are random or not correlated to diet and exercise.  They are, but it’s a complicated relationship.  It’s important to have goals if you want to improve (or maintain) your fitness because those goals help you structure your regimen and develop your plan.  But in my opinion it’s much more important on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis to track and adhere to process or program related benchmarks, than it is to only track your goal metric.  Your goal metric should be something that you only return to occasionally to assess the effectiveness of your planning and effort.

For example, on my goal to achieve 100 consecutive push-ups I don’t grade myself on how many push-ups I do each day.  I might be tired one day, I might do my pushups after a cardio workout or on a floor surface that doesn’t provide ideal traction.  There are a ton of things that could impact the number of pushups I do and failing to hit a specific number or to reach a specific number by a specific date could be frustrating or interpreted as a personal failure rather than a data point.

My Beeminder tracker is set up to track whether or not I do the workouts.  I didn’t make my plan to do a certain number of consecutive pushups every day or every other day or anything like that.  I track my workout consistency, do what the workouts in the program require and then every couple of weeks or so do a diagnostic test to see what my goal metric performance is.  Then based on those tests I can decide to tweak my plan to improve my performance.

Likewise, if I was trying to lose weight I wouldn’t use my daily weight as a performance metric (although I might still record it daily, complicated, I know).  I’d have goals related to caloric intake; exercise intensity, duration and consistency; and rest and stress reduction goals.  Then I’d concentrate on achieving those objectives and periodically check my weight to ensure that my plan was having the desired affect.  If my overall weight trend wasn’t what I wanted I would adjust the parameters of my plan to get the results I want.

This is a tricky issue because if you aren’t careful it can lead to fatalism about your results (or lack thereof) rather than treating it as feedback about the effectiveness of your plan.

Run:

Pushups:

I got a little off track with my pushups while I was traveling last week (BKK-NRT-ORD-MBS-Norfolk, VA-Upper Peninsula-MBS-ORD-NRT-BKK).  I got COMPLETELY off track with my other training but considering I spent more than 80-hours flying and driving during that time and the weather was below freezing and snowing the whole time, I’m giving myself a pass on that.

The pushups though I coulda/shoulda stayed on track with.  I’m still relatively close to schedule but we’ll see.  I entered my retroactive data in to Beeminder and emailed their support team to update my charts.  Once they do that I’ll see if I’m still off track.  If so, I’ll pay up again and drive on.

Turns out I’m not working out tonight. I was going to do Week 4, Day 3 of my push-up program which would have put me JUST BARELY on the outer edge of being on track with that plan. And then throw in a nice easy jog just to start up my workout streak again.

But I am completely toasted. I have got to go to bed and get my routine back in sync. And you know what? I am totally okay with that. I’m calling this a holistic fitness decision.

I’ll be ready to hit it hard tomorrow. Including figuring out what is going on with my Beeminder tracking.

Cheers.