I was pretty busy last week.  I had ordered a brand new weight bench from Amazon.com and it finally arrived at my front door.  I opened the box and quickly found that this was going to be a “some assembly required” type of project.  No problem.  I took out my tools and got to work.

After about 40 minutes, I finally had it all put together.  I set it up in the spare bedroom and it looked great.  Now I needed some barbells to use it with.

I did some comparison shopping between The Sports Authority and Academy Sports and Outdoors and settled on a basic set from Academy.  Once I got them home, I realized I would need some sort of mat to lay the weights on so they wouldn’t mark up the floor.  Back to Academy.

With all the required equipment in hand, I was finally ready to start my new strength training program, or was I?

After a couple of weeks, I still hadn’t started my new program.  Something always seemed to come up or there was always something else I needed to get (you need a rack to put the barbells on, right?).  It was about then that I realized that I had been spending most of my time planning instead of doing.

Has that ever happened to you?  For some of us, the real enjoyment seems to be in the planning instead of the doing.  Maybe it’s the engineer in me but I love planning, strategy, design.  Unfortunately, that’s not how you get results.

Sure, you need a plan.  However, putting a plan together is not the goal.  It’s only an intermediate step.  You don’t get rewarded for a great plan.  You get rewarded for actually producing results.

You can’t find a better example of this than in fitness and nutrition.  Instead of just exercising, many of us will buy a book on exercise.  Instead of making better food choices at the dinner table or the buffet line, we’ll attend a seminar on nutrition.

I watched a lecture series by John Bradshaw,  a noted Houston psychologist, on the PBS channel several years back.  He showed a cartoon that really brought home the same point.  In the cartoon, there was a lobby similar to a hotel lobby with an escalator going up.  A sign at the bottom of the escalator pointed up and said “to Heaven.”  Another sign pointed down the hall and said “to Seminar on Heaven.”  All of the “Doers” were on the escalator going up to Heaven and all of the “Planners” were headed towards the seminar.

So which are you, a Doer or a Planner?  Are you hard at work on some grand plan to improve your health and fitness or are you out there actually exercising?  Are you spending all your time researching that new exercise gizmo you saw advertised on TV or are you actually at the gym working out?

There is ALWAYS going to be another new book on exercise, fitness, and nutrition.  There is always going to be a new Ab-This or a Butt-That promising to get you in shape in less time, or with little or no effort.  There is always going to be some detail to add to your plan and if you’re not careful, you end up spending all your time planning instead of doing – and nothing ever gets done.

Don’t fall for the “planning trap.”  Once you decide on your fitness goals, get busy on them.  Don’t plan them, work on them.  While you’re working on your goals, periodically check to make sure you’re still moving in your intended direction – but don’t stop and fall back into planning mode.  If you do, you’ll lose all of your progress, all of your momemtum, and you’ll always be starting over at the beginning.

Doing this means getting comfortable with starting something before you know all of the details.  It’s kind of scary at first but you do have a sense of the general direction you want to go so you’re not totally in the dark.  And of course, you can make adjustments as you go along.  The point is to get moving, build some momentum, and start doing.

The perfect plan for your good health and fitness is worthless if you never get around to putting it into action.

So get on that escalator to good health.  Do just enough planning to set a general direction, then spend the majority of your time taking action.  You’ll be happy with the results.

Hiram
The Balanced Health Guy

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