Hands Up If You're Starting Again on Monday

Hands up if you're starting again on Monday.

Now keep your hand up if you've said that more than once this year.

And while we're at it, keep it up if you've ever missed a couple of sessions and decided you'd "start fresh" next week instead.

People don't struggle to stay consistent because they're lazy or because they don't want it enough. A lot of us have been taught that if we can't do things properly, there's no point doing them at all. One missed gym session becomes two. Two becomes a week. Before you know it, you're waiting for another Monday, the first of the month or New Year because it feels like you need a clean slate.

How much of that comes from the way we're taught to think about exercise in the first place? For a lot of people, women in particular, training starts and ends with weight loss. Every session is judged by whether it gets you closer to a smaller number on the scales and a particular clothes size. It doesn't take much for it to feel like you're falling short when that's the only way you're measuring progress.

Tying your self-worth to your relationship with gravity is a dangerous game. There are so many reasons a woman’s weight can fluctuate from day to day due to hormones, hydration levels, the menstrual cycle, stress, sleep, digestion, training, and even something as simple as having eaten a meal. But thanks to the magazines we grew up with, and more recently the internet, it’s very easy to see perfectly shaped, heavily edited women and feel like you don’t measure up (and don’t get me started on what AI can create now). 

When all you see are carefully curated highlight reels showing the perfect way to live and look, and then you go back to your own reality, it's very easy to start feeling like you're constantly getting it wrong.

You miss a workout, you've failed. You have a takeaway, you've failed. The scales don't move for a couple of weeks, you've failed. When every little setback feels like proof that you're not making progress, it's hardly surprising that so many people give up altogether.

The problem is that weight loss is a slow outcome. You can do everything right for weeks and not see much change, and if that’s your only reason for training, you’re asking a lot of your motivation.

You might be losing inches off your waist or noticing your clothes fit better, but if the scale isn’t moving, it can still feel like you’re getting nowhere.

What if there was something else to measure?

Maybe it's getting stronger. Maybe it's having more energy. Maybe it's walking up the stairs without getting out of breath or realising your shopping bags don't feel as heavy as they used to. Those things can start to happen while your body changes, but we tend to ignore them because we're too busy looking at the scales.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with wanting to lose weight. If that's your goal, that's completely fair. I just don't think it should be the only reason you lace up your trainers.

The people I know who've trained consistently for years aren't the people who've never missed a session. They've just stopped believing that one missed session undoes everything. Life gets busy. People get sick. Holidays happen. Work gets in the way.(In my case I moved country twice) When things happen, they don't see those things as failure, they just get back to it when they can.

That's what consistency really is.

Not a perfect week. Not ticking every box. Not never missing a workout.

Just refusing to let one off day convince you to stop altogether.

So if you're planning to start again on Monday, maybe ask yourself one question first.

Why am I waiting until Monday?

What if this time the goal wasn’t to be perfect, but simply to still be training a month from now?