The first step to change is not about the change
The first steps to learning how to exercise have nothing to do with exercise.
The vast majority of people who embark on an exercise journey will fail. No matter how good the program is, how many sales are made from late-night television, how much a TV doctor or celebrity raves about it, or how stunning the before and after photos (real or not) look as a testament to the possibility of transformation, most people will fail.
This is because learning how to exercise, at first, has absolutely nothing to do with exercise itself. And virtually no product that can be bought cares enough to tell you this; and that might be one of the main reasons why most people fail.
Learning how to exercise first has to do with learning about displacement. Any new habit you decide to make has to displace something else — it’s not like you have infinite time or energy to just keep adding on top of what you already do. And in a crunched life (which literally everyone feels like they have, regardless of number of children, or occupation or any other measure of “crunched”), it means building systems so that you can “uncrunch” your life just enough to fit exercise in. Without them, you end up trying to force-feed another 10% into your 100% day, and despite what Hollywood football coaches would have you believe, you cannot actually give one-hundred and ten percent.
The first step to learning how to exercise is realizing that you can do it. The second step is to develop systems that create enough space (some people call this “margin”) to allow what you know you can do to actually be done.
When it comes to evidence-based practice, I outlined the first step in my book, Question the Start and End with the Question. And for those of you who have a copy of the book, I’ve added the second step — yours for free for supporting my work. It’s the first module in the Critical Mass mentorships, and it’s simply called Start.
So if getting started is what you want to do, you can unlock Start at: http://criticalmass.ninja/critical-mass-start
