Making Your Workout a Priority: Two Practical Tactics

Have the Conversation

Have the conversation with your family, co-workers, and colleagues that you plan to engage in strength training two times per week as an essential modality for “sharpening your saw” (a phrase borrowed from Stephen Covey’s 7th Habit). You stepping away from a family commitment or work obligation to engage in a workout is not a selfish indulgence but instead, a selfless act that makes you better in all the roles you play.

To me, this is an important conversation with partners, family, and work teams.

Don’t Let Someone Else’s Commitment Impact Yours

Never let someone else’s commitment or lack of commitment to a workout negatively impact your workout.

For twenty years, I’ve seen clients come to Discover Strength and share with me that they want to engage in a workout with their spouse or child; they’ll schedule group workouts together or schedule 1-on-1s at the same time and day. This seems like a great idea. It rarely works after a few weeks.

Life is busy. Schedules are hectic. Someone is sick. Someone is traveling. Someone loses interest.

Instead, I encourage clients: “If it works for you to come together, great, but don’t let your partner/friend/family member’s schedule interfere with you getting in the important strength training workout that you need.”

What happens after a number of months is: we both find our own time to schedule our strength training, and then we get together for dinner that night or breakfast the next morning and talk about how brutal leg press was, how challenging negative-only chin-ups were, or how much progress we made in our low back strength (we can share the workout without actually being together).