Bonus: Meet Your Goals and Maintain Your Gains

If your goal is to get stronger, protect your joints, maintain fat loss, build lean muscle mass, increase balance and mobility, and improve your cardiovascular system, then consistency over the long term is much more important than intensity in the short term. Going really hard and then quitting for a while is the opposite of what you need.

Approaching fitness as a lifelong habit—a continuous, fluid practice—will not only protect you from things like overuse injuries and other ailments that come with doing too much too soon. It will also bring you closer to your goals and allow you to maintain the results you work so hard to achieve

Practice Makes... Even Better Practice

So why does any of this matter? Would approaching fitness as a practice actually improve anything?

I think so.

For one, calling something a practice takes the pressure off doing it perfectly. What if not doing it "right," (missing a lift, having an unexpectedly slow and difficult run, etc.) was just part of getting better at fitness? Thinking you have to do something perfectly makes it more likely you won't do it at all. I often see clients approaching fitness with the idea that they must succeed in a specific way, and it inevitably leads to them feeling like failures—all it takes is one not-so-great workout to leave people unmotivated to try it again. On the other hand, “practicing” something seems harmless. Fun, even! I think approaching fitness as a skill to be developed and improved would increase the likelihood of people getting started, while increasing motivation for continuing.