Some days are good, some are bad, consistency is neutral
“Mhh”, I thought while descending the little house staircase in a town near Paris. The house has a tall, vertical structure and I am on the second floor. I am descending the staircase with my gym bag, a black Nike gym bag I had used for years at that point. I truly did not feel motivated to walk to the gym and do just another training session. I was not exhausted, however. Not the kind of exhausted after a long night out or crunching a hard problem that stretches your capabilities as a human being. The motivation was simply not there.
I was descending the stairs now, so there was no space for a choice anymore. I had resolved, somewhere inside me, that showing up at the training session was the most appropriate thing to do in this circumstance. So I did it. The workout was ok. The kind of ok you learn to appreciate after many years of training. You know very well how essential “ok” training bouts are in order to become a more-than-ok version of yourself. The feeling after the workout was great. It was not the best day, but a necessary stepping stone in my fitness journey. Merely another training session, where I merely showed up and did what I intended to.
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This was certainly not the first seemingly bad day to train. I had experienced that feeling multiple times before. I think I started to face that lack of motivation after about one year of training. The first year was the romance phase. I felt completely in love with the concept of resistance training and the progress unfolding before my eyes on a hot Saturday morning when I looked at myself shirtless in the vertical full-body mirror, ready to dive into the clear waters of an Italian sea.
There are good days; there are bad days; there are days in between. The psychological contract you set with yourself throughout your fitness journey is what makes a difference. What do you do in those “bad” days where motivation is lacking? How about “good” days? How do you train in those circumstances where you feel empowered and fully committed to training? How do you navigate the mundanity of training after you have been repeating the same movements for years? What is the limit that determines when you should not go to train and take an unprogrammed day off instead? That’s your contract—a subconscious contract between you and you. There is no one else who can dictate these decisions for you. Ultimately, you are the one making those choices anyways.
There is an argument to be made for consistency. Motivation is ephemeral; you cannot truly rely on it beyond the first novelty phase of when you start something new. During the first month of resistance training, you may feel inspired and always up to a session. Then, that feeling fades away, more likely than not. What you do from that occurrence onwards is what makes a difference. Consistency means believing that doing an activity for long enough, no matter how you feel about it, is pivotal in order to succeed at it. I would argue that consistency over time is a core attribute of a successful fitness journey. Not identifying with the end goal. But appreciating the mundanity of every training session that leads to—or doesn’t—the end goal.
There are cases in which not showing up is the best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA). You can discern when you truly need to rest (even if not in your program) from when you are just lacking motivation or willingness to get out of comfort for around sixty minutes. When you are depleted of energies or feel sick, or truly need a break, it is wise to take a day off, or more if necessary. That is a skill especially valuable for overachievers. Knowing when and why to stop is wisdom. Failing to stop when necessary increases the risk of injuries and overtraining/burnout.
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Consistency is not just valuable for training. It applies to nutrition too. Nutrition is a climactic component of fitness. If you craft a nutrition plan that fits your lifestyle and makes you feel and look better—whatever that means for you—you are more likely to stick with it. There is no short-term, fleeting motivation to drive your clean eating, but a genuine, consistent acceptance of a more healthy eating regimen that has become part of your life.
Those thoughts floated in my mind while I was descending the stairs in the narrow staircase of the house in Paris. It was going to be just another workout, and luckily so.
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