Hello, and welcome to Currents from Black Creek Coaching. This is a podcast for people who want to stay capable for the life they want to live. I'm Hugh, and this week's episode is about starting smaller than your pride might want you to. So let's imagine it's Sunday night, and you've decided that Monday is the day. This is the time you're going to get on it and you're going to stay on it. This is probably a conversation a lot of us have had with each other, or with ourselves, excuse me. And it tends to shake out one of two ways. Monday comes around and you do the workout you think you ought to be doing, and you feel great about it. But then on Tuesday, you're really sore, and on Wednesday, sitting down feels something like a technical maneuver that would make the best people at NASA be biting their nails. That's one way it can go. The other way it might go is that you skip the workout on Monday because you didn't get up early enough, or because you don't remember the exact plan you had, or maybe it's just something like your good gym shorts are in the wash, and obviously you can't work out with the old ones, so you just have to wait until Tuesday, and then you're gonna double down and you're gonna do both Monday and Tuesday's workouts in one session. Except then Tuesday comes around, and holy shit, you now have two workouts to do. So by the following Monday, this whole like psych up process is over, and now you've got all this evidence in front of you that you can't stick with anything. Um, of course, I've presented this as two very extreme and kind of exaggerated examples, but they're not unrealistic, and I think it's something that a lot of people struggle with. So, how do you break cycles like this? You know, with exercise, uh, as with a lot of other kind of ambitious things that we pursue in our lives, it's really easy to fixate on what you think you should be doing or what you should be able to do instead of actually accepting where you are now. And acceptance is a really hard thing for a lot of people because it implies in our minds that we are also complacent. Like if I accept the fact that I'm out of shape, I'm also kind of admitting that I'm always going to be out of shape. And that's not really what true acceptance is. Acceptance is just acknowledging the reality of your current situation without giving up a sense of agency about your ability to improve or change it. So that sense of being stuck with what you should be doing can lead a lot of folks to really overly ambitious exercise plans that are either too long, they're they're too complicated, they're too hard, or some combination of all of them. So that restart uh kind of mindset, like this is the day or this is the week, uh, feeds off of that overly ambitious starting plan. Whereas a restart dose that actually works might feel like almost insultingly easy, which is kind of the point. So let me also be really clear that easy is not the goal forever when it comes to exercise. Um, you know, if you want to have like big dramatic changes, you know, you're gonna have to follow the principles of progressive overload and you're gonna have to work hard. But your body can only build and adapt to the training that you're actually doing. So a session that you can't recover from after three or four days is not training. That's an event. And your body can't uh like adapt from a single event. It has to have repeated exposures to stimuli. And likewise, a session that you never do because you never get around to it or you feel intimidated by it is by default nothing. And that's also something that your body can't adapt to, um, you know, other than prolonged accedentary uh periods, which is the topic of last week's podcast, right? Is is those aches and pains that add up as a result of not moving. So anyway, but what this means is that bodies change because of repeated bouts of exertion, repeated exposure to a challenging stimulus. So by definition, effective training has to be repeatable. So a test for whether you know you're you're doing training well isn't necessarily do you feel like you quote, did enough. It's whether you could do it again tomorrow or at least the day after tomorrow. So when you're starting out, it's okay to finish your workout feeling like you could do the whole thing over again. And that might look like taking whatever ambitious plan you had and knocking it down to two sets of each exercise instead of five, or stopping several reps short of failure, or maybe if you're planning on walking or jogging, you only go out for 15 minutes instead of 45. Uh if you're coming back to weightlifting, like if you're somebody who has previously done hard resistance training and you're getting back into it, you know, start the first couple weeks with weights that feel like they should be your warm-up weight. You know, when you're getting back into a routine, that warm-up weight is the right weight. And all this to say is it's helpful for getting into or returning to exercise. Um, it's a way to ease your body into uh you know physical exertion, but there's another layer to it as well. So let's say it's 10 o'clock at night, you feel absolutely wrecked, you were planning to do a workout today, but that's absolutely not going to happen now because you have nothing left in the tank. So what you can do instead is just do 10 push-ups on your kitchen floor. Or, you know, if you're somebody who isn't able to do 10 push-ups, that's totally fine. Do what you can do, or do 20 squats in front of the TV, and then you go back to bed. So the movement that you choose and the reps you do doesn't really matter so long as whatever it is looks vaguely like exercise and it should take you like less than one minute. So if you do that, that one set of push-ups or squats or whatever isn't really doing anything for you physically. Like nothing measurable is happening in your body. You're not going to get bigger or stronger from that one set. But you're going to do them anyway. Because what you do in that moment is you prove to yourself that taking care of yourself doesn't require ideal conditions and it doesn't require perfect plans executed perfectly. Taking care of yourself is all about consistency and repeatability, and that's the program that you build on. So those physical results will come once the pattern is there. But the pattern is the hard part for most of us. And at 10 o'clock after a bad day, those 10 push-ups or those 20 squats are the thing that you can do to keep the pattern going. You're holding that little bit of space to say, I am worth taking care of. And this is why I push a lot of folks to be a little bit less ambitious when they're starting out. Like start smaller than you want to. Not because I think they're not capable or because they're fragile or anything like that, but just because when we as humans want something, we tend to want it so badly that we can completely exhaust ourselves in that like initial burst of motivation and energy that we have. So this starting small mindset uh can protect your habit from your overenthusiasm. And again, I want to be really clear here. I'm talking about starting small. I'm not talking about, you know, having less ambitious uh or less, you know, uh just you know, less extreme goals for yourself. Like if you have a really ambitious thing you want to pursue, you should absolutely go for it. It's just that you might want to start out smaller. There's that old adage about the journey of a thousand miles starting with a single step. And I think this is a great example of a place where that's true. So try holding a dose of movement that you can hit every day or at least every other day without dread and without having to like talk yourself up or negotiate with yourself. Then after you've done that for about two weeks, you can add one more set to that movement or add a few more reps to the set you're doing. Or, you know, if it's something like walking or jogging, add five more minutes to it than you did in the previous two weeks. If you find that you start missing days, it doesn't mean that you're failing, it just means that the dose that you uh worked up to was too big. So cut it back a little bit and then uh try it at that reduced dose for two weeks before you uh move forward again. So my challenge for you for this week is to do exactly that. Like pick the version of your restart that might feel a little bit embarrassing, and then do it every day. Uh and you'll notice if you stick with that, that in six weeks or eight weeks, you'll be doing more work and more to the point, you'll still be doing it. So that's this week's episode. Um, if you find that you have like started and stalled out uh a lot of times, if that's a repeatable cycle for you, that's a place where I can help you. You can find me at BlackCreekcoaching.com. And um, the written version of this episode, along with everything else that I've created, is also at BlackCreekCoaching.com. And if you know somebody who's stuck on this same uh issue, uh share this episode with them. So next week's episode is going to be about how to read the pain signals that your body is sending to you. I'll talk to you then. Take care of yourselves.