As January approaches mid-month, New Year’s deals for group fitness classes and gym memberships are operating in full effect. The local gyms are flooded with current and annual gym members who put their attendance on the back burner. Newbies to the gym scene flock through the sliding glass front door of the gym, filling the aisles bordered with weight machines like schools of fish during a seasonal breeding season. As a veteran gym rat, this time of the year is akin to the tourist season in the summer months in Napa Valley. Visitors from afar flood the roads with rental cars traveling twenty miles below the speed limit while they fiddle with Google maps on their cell phones to find their next winery to visit. It’s not much different on the gym floor when an individual with little-to-no gym experience attempts to adjust the setting on the leg press machine. A look of bewilderment, awe, or even terror isn’t uncommon for this novice population of exercise participants in the gym throughout the first month of the year.
Our society is fortunate to embrace this New Year’s theme of self-improvement by focusing on life-enhancing factors via exercise. However, I’m sure my fellow gym rats who spend ten-plus hours a week in the fitness arena know that come February, we’ll see the number of New Year fitness enthusiasts substantially decrease. As an advocate for self-improvement using exercise as tool for success, it’s a bummer to see people veer away from such a powerfully impactful goal toward overall quality of life
I can recall when my son was attending first through sixth grade in elementary school. I happened to be starting my journey as a self-employed businessperson at the same time. I knew I needed a specific level of adherence to a solid routine to be a good parent and business owner. This meant I needed to understand the business logistics of balancing financials, communicating with clients, and maintaining a physical storefront while ensuring my son ate breakfast, got to school on time, and could be picked up from school on time. These requirements of a business owner and parent meant I needed a sturdy foundation of waking up earlier than everyone else, going to bed on time, and becoming a master of time management. Understanding that I needed to establish this foundational level of “busy” kept my business and son healthy as they both developed into thriving and strong pinnacles in my life.
Maintaining optimal fitness levels is similar to owning a business or ensuring your 1st-grade child receives adequate attention. More importantly, the consistent nourishment toward a living and breathing business and a developing human learning to read, write, and socialize is similar to optimizing our ability to stay fit and healthy. Establishing a base fitness level helps us stay in shape for the long run.
Understanding a solid base level of fitness helps to set parameters of our expectations of what defines a strong version of ourselves. An example might be to set the goal of performing ten to twenty push-ups without resting in between reps, a one-minute plank, or conducting the sun salutation by memory. Once those movements are mastered, and the desired number of repetitions is achieved, the next trick is to maintain those examples of strength for an extended period in the future. Additionally, the ability to stay in shape is forged by the expectation to avoid deviating from movements we hold ourselves accountable to be able to perform at will. If we falter from those numbers, we now have a barometer of an inadequate fitness level. Once we detect our performance in these baseline exercises is suboptimal, we know that we need to spend more time and energy on our exercise adherence.
Exercising to improve the overall quality of life is essential. Setting guidelines to stick to and ensuring specific movements can always be performed allows us to live happier, stand up to the stresses imposed upon us, and avoid psychological and physical illnesses. It’s equally, if not more important, to get in shape and then stay in shape for years to come.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.
