As someone quickly approaching 50, with less than 2 years to go, I’ve had the opportunity to live through two sides of the average lifespan experience.

I’m old enough to remember a time where Captain Kirk was the only one with a smart phone, people had to find a pay phone to make a call, and if your spouse was at work during the day, you didn’t contact them unless it was VERY important.

Now we’ve gone from emails to text messages with read receipts and people’s expectations are that when they send you a message to interrupt your thought process, workday or whatever, they will get an immediate response.

We now feel obligated to reply immediately and if we don’t we are then held accountable at home. And what has become so much more important to be discussed over text in today’s age that wasn’t that important during the days of my parents and grandparents?

We didn’t have internet as an actual thing at home until I was nearly out of high school. When I was in college we used to set the computer to download an audio file overnight because it took so long to download. It took hours in some cases, and sometimes days to get what we wanted.

We went from taking hours on a desktop computer at home to downloading entire albums, films and more in just seconds on a mobile device.

We now order things that can be shipped to us same day.

The culture of instantaneous replies and immediate delivery, coupled with the shortening of songs to under 2 and half minutes, videos to 3 to 6 seconds has driven attention spans to nearly zero.

The health and fitness space has not been immune to this. As a matter of fact, it’s probably been one of the forefathers and pioneers of the quick and instant fad.

The shortened attention span of society, coupled with the instant gratification of Amazon Now behavior makes it so hard for people to grasp that Training Adaptation takes time.

Time under tension is how our body’s tissues adapt and “Force is the language of cells”.

Most of us rarely speak to our muscle cells in the language they love long enough to create the adaptations we need to tissue.

We expect change, but don’t realize that most human beings have been so detached from their body/mind for so long that their nervous system doesn’t know how to effectively coordinate the messages being received.

Your new client or anyone new to training stands to gain more from starting at the very basics of joint health and #Mobility before adding the load of complex movement and man made exercises, but…

We are in a culture of fast, fast, I want it all now.

So this message is often lost in the noise of Beach Body, High Intensity, Fat Loss, Barry’s, Orange Theory, Muscle & Fitness magazine madness.

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

It took you years for your body to be what it is on the day you finally decided to make a change. Walking into the forest for years and expecting to walk out in a few days is a wild expectation.

And often times when we start training, our mind is ready to write checks that our body can’t afford to cash. We want to do the big things right now.

This is how most people find themselves hurt, in physical therapy and having setbacks shortly after beginning.

Don’t get me wrong though…

Starting is better than not starting. And I’m not trying to scare anyone away from getting started.

But it’s important that we have a sensible, and sustainable approach and it’s important that as a consumer you come to this space more informed about where you and your body currently are at.

This is why an assessment is the very first thing that you should do. Even if you don’t plan to work with someone for a long time, connecting with a coach who can give you an idea of your baseline of joint function, for example, can have massive benefits.

An assessment is a means of establishing a point A. With point A, we understand where your body is in the wilderness. From there we can map out a path towards point B. You can’t plot a path to point B if you don’t even know where your point A is.

Getting to point B is not always direct either. There will be rough patches, setbacks and things to overcome. And point B isn’t the end of the journey either. There will always be somewhere to go next. Training and improving your body is a journey that has only one endpoint.

So as you embark on your journey to undertake your goals, remember to establish point A.

Not sure how to do that? Hit me up…

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