Overcoming The Main Obstacles That Will Hinder Your Progress

We’ve stated that this chapter is going to cover the “obstacles” which will hinder your progress, but as you’ll soon find out a lot fall under one category – time.

Initially, you might find that you have all of the time in the world to dedicate to your new lifestyle. As things tick along, suddenly this time will start to disappear. Suddenly, your life might be ablaze with excuses such as “I don’t have time to work out” or “I don’t have time to cook healthily”.

Unfortunately, as time progresses, it also becomes more of an excuse. You’ll regularly state that you just don’t have sufficient amounts of it to complete your workout and in short, this is a feeble excuse. There might be a few exceptions to this rule, but on the whole everyone has enough time to dedicate to their new fitness regime.

Changing your way of thinking about obstacles

We’ve just spoken about some common reasons why people say they don’t have time to carry out a task. Let’s now take these phrases and reword them to make you understand the concept of this a little more.

The first example we used was “I don’t have time to work out”. Well, in the concept of prioritizing, this effectively means “my exercise routine isn’t a priority”. It sounds harsh, but as we’ll find out, that’s exactly how it translates.

Then, let’s take a look at healthy eating. The phrase we used was “I don’t have time to cook healthily”. You’ve probably guessed the “new look” version of this reason – “healthy eating isn’t a priority for me”.

Once you start to rephrase your obstacles like this, it starts to become easier to take action.

The concept of time

To make this topic more understandable, it’s worth breaking ‘time’ down. We’ll come onto an actionable technique shortly, but for now let’s take a look at time in plain and simple terms.

There are 168 hours in a week. Sure, a lot of this needs to be dedicated to sleep (more on this in a subsequent chapter), but that’s a lot of time to play with.

The big problem that most of us have is that we just can’t prioritize accordingly. We may think that we don’t have enough time to achieve additional tasks through the day, but when we break down our days it suddenly becomes apparent that there is a lot of wasted time.

Something that a lot of people find is that while they may say something is a priority, in terms of their actions it really isn’t. Therefore, rather than spelling out your priorities in words, start to calculate if they actually are priorities by analyzing your day. Let’s take a look at this concept further in the next section.

Using a time journal to initiate change

If you’ve studied anything about dieting, you’ll probably know all about food journals and exactly what they can do for your progress. Well, we’re going to suggest you adopt the same approach with time to make sure that you keep on top of just where your priorities are actually sat.

As such, if you are struggling with the concept of prioritizing, try and track the next few days. When we talk about tracking, you don’t have to legislate for every second of the day – but if you can break things up into 30 minute chunks you really will gain a good idea of how you have been spending your time.

You’ll start to see that you watched television for ‘x’ hours, browsed social media for a further ‘x’ and a whole host of other interesting stats.

The best thing about this approach is the shock-factor. You will genuinely be shocked at the sheer amount of time you spend doing activities, which you probably claimed were low in your priorities. From this point on, you can reshuffle your schedule and calculate just how you can squeeze more out of your fitness journey and prioritize the really important tasks.

A closing note on time being your biggest obstacle

As you can see, for most of you at least, there is just one obstacle and this comes in the form of time. This will be at the core of most of your excuses, and it’s crucial to change the way you think about it to ensure that it doesn’t halt your progress.