It Takes a Year

If you have ever stayed up and watched late night television, you have heard the promises.  The promise of a flatter stomach in just thirty days.  The promise of weight loss in one week.  In just two weeks you will have abs ripping through your tactical girth.  I have never tried one of them, but I am guessing that they don’t work well.  If they did, the Wal Mart shoppers I see would look distinctly different.

Physical gains are like finances.  Real quality in both realms, takes time.  There are very few two-week financial plans worth doing.  Rarely will 60 days of financial planning, change your retirement outlook.  The same is true for improving your strength, physique, or technique.  No real quality changes can be had quickly, except in the very beginning.  Then what?  You do your sixty-day crash diet, or squat program… then what?  Do you go back to your normal eating pattern, or stop squatting?  This type of habit leads to a yo-yo affect:  improvement, relapse, improvement, relapse, etc.  You end up with no net gain in the long run.

The next challenge you decide to take on, take it on for one year.  That’s correct, one year.  This will do a couple of things for you.  If you commit to this type of time frame, you will make the “challenge” more manageable.  Thirty-day diets are thirty days for a reason.  You can only do them for thirty freakin’ days!  You will also begin to build habits that can be long lasting.  These habits become ingrained into your routine.  Every morning that you wake up, you brush your teeth.  You do this because it is part of your daily schedule, and because you don’t want to be a social outcast.

So here is the plan.  Commit to your diet, lifting routine, or learning a foreign language for one year.  Make it manageable over the long haul and you will be astonished at the progress that you make.

Speaking of a year, I could not do this workout given an entire year.  Spencer Moorman does 30 clean and jerks with 303 lbs.