The most important thing about fitness is persistence

How much positive benefits you can get from fitness is not directly related to how hard you practice at a time or how standard your movements are. It is only directly related to whether you can maintain a low-threshold exercise habit for more than half a year. This is the conclusion that I came to the most deeply after practicing for five years, stepping on countless pitfalls, and meeting the real experiences of hundreds of fitnessrs.

It's a bit funny to say that in the first year of fitness, I applied for the annual pass three times in a row. Every time in the first two weeks, my chicken blood was full, I could not lift my arms while I was doing it, and I had to hold on to the handrails while riding a spinning bike. I always felt that if I didn't train myself until I was sore, my training would be in vain. The result was either a muscle strain and rest for half a month, or working overtime for a week, and then forgetting the access code to the gym. In the end, all the cards became bath cards. I spent tens of thousands of dollars, but my body fat rate did not drop at all. Instead, I always rewarded myself with hot pot after training, and gained three pounds.

There is actually a lot of quarrel over this matter in the fitness circle now. One type is bodybuilding enthusiasts who compete all year round. They say that training must be done to capacity and to exhaustion. Six training days a week is standard. Three days of fishing and two days of netting are equivalent to practicing in vain. ； The other type is popular science bloggers who specialize in mini habits. They say that even if you do 3 push-ups every day, if you can persist for a year, it will be more effective than practicing hard for a week. In fact, there is nothing wrong with both sides, but the suitable groups of people are completely different - the former has a training foundation of three to five years, and the muscles have adapted to high-intensity stimulation, and it will not grow in size if it does not increase the capacity. ； But for the 90% of ordinary people who just want to improve their physical fitness and lose some fat, demanding themselves according to elite standards from the very beginning is simply setting a threshold for themselves to quit.

My former colleague Akai is the best example. The 178-year-old boy weighed 182 pounds last year. His physical examination revealed moderate fatty liver disease, and the doctor ordered him to move. He didn’t apply for a card or buy fitness equipment that cost thousands. He just got off the subway two stops early after get off work every day, walked briskly for 20 minutes home, and walked with his wife around the community for half an hour after dinner on weekends, even holding an umbrella when it rained. I have never stopped. I went for a physical examination this year and found that my fatty liver has turned mild, I have lost 28 pounds, and I have not even had gout attacks that I often suffered from before. You may say that the amount of exercise he does is not even enough to warm up in the eyes of fitness bloggers, but he can't stop people from doing it every day.

A previous follow-up study in the "Chinese Journal of Sports Medicine" found that ordinary people who maintained a total of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week for 6 consecutive months had an improvement in cardiopulmonary function and a decrease in body fat that were 3.2 times higher than those of people who did short-term bursts of high-intensity exercise but did not persist for less than 3 months. Moreover, the former's exercise habit retention rate was more than 7 times that of the latter. To put it bluntly, low-intensity exercise that you can persist in is your effective exercise. If you cannot persist in it, no matter how efficient it is, it has nothing to do with you.

Of course, I’m not saying that just paddling casually counts as persistence. For example, if you go to the gym to take selfies for half an hour every day, lift dumbbells twice and just sit there and check your phone, it will be useless for you to take selfies for a year. The "persistence" here is not about just making up for the duration, but about really letting your body receive a signal every time you move: even if it is only 10 minutes, walking briskly until you are slightly sweating, or doing squats until your thighs are a little sore, is enough.

I didn’t believe this before. I always felt that if I wanted to practice, I had to practice until I feel good. It wasn’t until I injured my shoulder during shoulder training that I took three months off, and then I slowly changed my mind. Now I don’t force myself to run or lift a few times a week. I just set a minimum threshold for myself: even if I only do 5 burpees every day, it will be considered as completing the day’s exercise KPI. Sometimes I work overtime until 12 o'clock when I get home. I don't want to move, so I stand in the living room and do five without changing clothes. It only takes two minutes. I have persisted like this for almost two years. The lumbar prolapse that I suffered from sitting for a long time rarely occurs now. I can climb the fifth floor without gasping. I even catch less colds than before.

Harm, actually speaking of it, there is nothing mysterious about fitness. It is no different from eating, sleeping, or watering the green plants at home every day. Don’t expect flowers to blossom after just one watering, nor do you expect to lose ten pounds by practicing for three days. Don’t compare weight or time with others, just find an exercise that you find least tiring and least mentally demanding, and spend a few minutes every day doing it. When you look down over time, you will see that those days when you didn’t grit your teeth and endure, have secretly accumulated enough surprises for you.