The importance of consistency in exercise
As we go head on into the new year we wanted to speak about something that is always quite topical at this time of year. Why is it is that rehab plans and treatment processes don’t always go to plan? Why is it that sometimes you just don’t get the outcome that you want? Things like diets, joining a gym, for example. You may well set about a New Year’s resolution of stopping drinking, going to go to the gym more frequently, or that you are going to eat better and healthier. But you often will find that you’ll start these 12 week programmes and then you do the programme. And everything goes well. And then six months later, you’re back to square one, or you have every intention of starting or something comes up. So today we’re going to explore the importance of consistency in exercise and the creation of a plan to ensure that you are setting yourself to succeed with being consistent.
Overcoming the barriers to consistency.
If we think about any sort of rehabilitation process, there are certain factors I think you need to do to achieve consistency in exercise. And what we need to do is overcome those barriers. What this means is that you may be suffering with a problem with something like your Achilles tendon. And your next door neighbour may have had that problem too and then you find that your friend at the gym also has a similar ailment in the past. You most likely asked them what they did, and they will give them their different versions of their stories. They will inform you of some of the actual treatments they have tried to make the some of the same treatments you’ll likely go through.
However, your journey is unique to you. You’ll have different barriers in place. You cannot think that one persons treatment journey will be the same as yours. It simply cannot be.
The first thing you really need to do to try and help achieve consistency in exercise or your rehabilitation programme is to think about what are your possible barriers. What is going to stop you from achieving your goal? So a barrier could be time. Modern day life makes us time poor. Technology most probably makes us even more time poor. If you’ve got an iPhone you’ll most probably see that weekly message thats shows you your daily average phone usage and when you have a scroll down deeper you see how many times have you been playing games, looking on social media etc. That is time that we could be using to do our exercises but as health care professionals we need to help you find that emotional buy in to what you need to do. You need to know what is important enough for you in your current life to take time away from X to give to Y. Everyone has time in their day but they need to be onboard with their priorities.
Now when it comes to time being the barrier, some people may find it really easy to block 20 minutes out of the day, every single day. Some People may go to the gym three times a week for an hour and a half. And that always happens without fail. Other people may find that actually trying to do your exercises in five minute chunks throughout the day is much more achievable. So it’s about overcoming that barrier and finding what works for you.
Have a plan B, and C, and probably a plan D…
Another thing to ensure consistency is to have a plan B. But not only that have a Plan C possibly even have a plan D, because do you know what? Through any rehabilitation programme you undertake it is not always going to go to plan. We are human beings, we are innately reliably unreliable. That’s what makes our job so interesting. No two people that we see in clinic are the same. No two injuries are the same. We can have a clinic full of people with Achilles tendon problems and every experience is different. And that’s why we love coming into work.
If we’re going to try something, and it hasn’t worked, it’s not about chucking in the towel and stopping because it isn’t working anymore. It’s about changing paths slightly. Because in reality, if you’ve got a problem, you know where you are and you know where you want to finish, you’re going to want that nice steady trajectory of improvement. Unfortunately that doesn’t really exist and that’s not all that realistic. Life gets in the way. Actually, if you can put a consistent plan into place, you can almost make yourself little stepping stones going up. So if you have a setback, that’s all it is a setback, a setback is an opportunity for a comeback and you can still push forward.
Have realistic goals and expectations.
Without realistic goals and expectations you are almost setting yourself up for failure. And it our job here at NK Active to sit down with you in clinic to work out exactly what that is. Let’s put a plan in place. Let’s put a realistic timeframe. Let’s set mini goals along the way.
We’ll let you into a little secret…our goals change all the time. You might achieve your original goal early on and decide that it wasn’t enough. What can you go and do next? And that just doesn’t happen with when we treat patients, that happens with everything you do in your life.
If you think about everything that you do. Maybe you’re playing a sport and you think well, actually, we got promoted to that league and we thought we’d never do that, actually, can we push it? Can we get promoted out of the next League? Or perhaps you’ve pushed yourself to do a half marathon and half way along the way you’ve decided that actually you want to push for the full marathon distance, that is absolutely fine. Go change!
If you get the consistency, everything else will fall in place. So if you ever come to see us at NKActive for an injury rehabilitation process you’ll find that at the very beginning there will be a lot of discussions around what your treatment plan should look like, what barriers there might be and how we are going to overcome those barriers. We help you work out what we need to put in place and what the team around you is going to do to help you to achieve those goals. We’re going to keep motivating you and pushing you forward. Because as soon as you start seeing results from being consistent, you’ve then got what we call “emotional buy-in”. Once you’ve got emotional buy-in you will be consistent for yourself.
You will automatically tell yourself “This is worth my time and investment to achieve those goals.”
And then once you start doing it, that’s it, you’re hooked.
To listen to Nick in more detail talking about how to get more consistency in exercise and rehabilitation listen to the NK Active podcast episode below. And as always if you have any questions we want to hear from you. Drop us a message here and a member of the NK Active team would be happy to answer.
Listen to the latest episode here on your chosen platform – https://kite.link/nk-active
Stream right now via Spotify below.
Or enjoy Nick talking over on YouTube.