What is fitness?
Fitness, broadly defined, is your ability to do work. Think of your fitness in terms of your ability to run, move your body, and move a load or object. Most people have SOME capacity in each of those three areas. Therefore, to improve your fitness is to be able to improve your ability to run, move your body, and move objects/weights. That sounds easy enough? Sure. Unfortunately, while most people have some capacity in each of those areas, they also are going through their life decreasing their capacity each day, month, or year, let alone maintaining or even improving their capacity.
What is Behavior?
Behavior, simply, is the way in which a person conducts themselves or operates. Speaking more in a fitness sense, behavior speaks more to the things that a person is already doing with their fitness. What does the routine look like? What are the current habits? This is the part that has the greatest impact on what is currently happening in your fitness.
What is Head Knowledge?
Head knowledge is the information that a person already knows about any given topic. In this case, head knowledge relates to the information already known about how to live a healthy life. If you were to walk down the street and ask people how to be healthy or fit, they are going to give a host of answers that will, undoubtedly, improve another person’s fitness. You might hear people give some of these responses:
- eat whole foods
- exercise regularly
- lift weights
- walk a lot
- don’t drink alcohol or smoke
- sleep 7-9 hours per night
If you just did those things with a degree of consistency, you would get more fit than you might think possible. You would for sure improve your ability to run, move your body, and lift weights or objects. The problem, though, is that everyone In the world already knows most, if not all of it, does not act with a degree of predictability and consistency in those behaviors. As mentioned above, behaviors are the things you do on a regular, consistent basis.
How to Beat the 80%
The 80% behavior problem creates a tricky situation to navigate for most people who are looking to improve their fitness. They spend their time on the wrong solution. They will look through Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, Facebook, Snapchat, or their buddy at work for the latest and greatest solution to improved fitness. They want the exercise that will fix their problem. They want the perfect routine that will build their perfect body and solve confidence issues.
These are the wrong places to look.
The right places to look are the sources that will embrace and encourage behavior change. The trick is to plug in fitness, exercise, sleep, healthy eating, etc to the behavior change strategy that the source is promoting. For example, Atomic Habits by James Clear talks about the power of stacking habits on each other to embrace and build behavior change.
Here’s what that would look like:
You can take a habit that you already do, and then stack a new habit immediately after the original habit. In this example, let’s say you automatically brush your teeth every morning.
I will brush my teeth in the morning, then I will put on my workout shoes and do two rounds of 20 squats and 10 push ups.
- Why this works: brushing your teeth is already wired. Add on the tiny fitness task to build momentum and you’re relying on an unbreakable cue instead of motivation.
- Start small: the goal is habit change not an amazing or killer fitness workout. Remember, change the behavior, not the knowledge.
- Scale it naturally: after a couple weeks of perfect implementation, the fitness will likely get easier. In this case, you can simply add another movement or more repetitions to continue the build
So, how do you beat the 80% problem? You tackle your fitness from a different angle: you break down the behaviors that inhibit your change rather than finding the perfect system.
Hire a Coach
I want to be extremely clear before I say this, improving your fitness can and should be free. A person should and definitely could make meaningful, long lasting positive improvements on their health and fitness with no financial cost associated.
With that said, there is another way. You can hire a coach to work with you on the behaviors that will have the greatest impact on your overall health and fitness. You can hire a coach to keep you accountable on the days where it just feels a little easier to brush your teeth and head straight to work instead of doing your 2 minutes of work.
Hiring a coach buys you speed, responsibility, and consistency to a solution that you already know the answers to.
IF that resonates with you, schedule a meeting today and we can talk about how to help you live a life better than you thought imaginable.
