Community: The key to reaching your fitness goals

If you desire fitness to be a natural part of your life, then it is going to be crucial that you get into a community with likeminded people who already have an established fitness routine.

If hitting the gym, doing a home HIT workout, going for a walk is not part of your routine, then finding yourself in a community of people who indulge in fitness is crucial to your long term success.  And bottom line, it just makes it easier.

Exercise and a healthy lifestyle are generally contagious.

You can catch the exercise bug, just like you can catch a cold. 

While everyone else is out catching colds, you can be catching the exercise bug by putting yourself in consistent proximity to others who are engaging in fitness activities. 

For myself, when I am around a group that is really proficient at running, I start running more, when I am around crossfitters I start doing more crossfit, when I am around guys that are really strong, I start hedging towards strength training. If everybody you hang around is talking about enneagrams guess what you are going to become naturally interested in…enneagrams.

If you are a mom and you want to get fit, then hang around other moms who have figured out how to engage in fitness while still being excellent mothers. Be on the lookout for other ladies who are walking daily, going to aerobics classes, dance classes, weight training, and get yourself in and around that group. 

Multiple studies have shown that men have minimal influence over women but other women carry significant influence and create a contagious fitness atmosphere.

I have multiple female patients who walk with each other every morning and have done it for 20 years and nobody would ever think they were in their 70s.  I also have 50-year-old patients who don’t have a consistent fitness routine and you would think their 80th birthday was just around the corner given their physical capacity. 

I have a couple of male patients that are turning 60 in the next 6 months who talk about how they feel better now than when they were turning 50 because they started strength training 3-4x per week the past year.

Not only do friends influence us to be active, if they are active…they also cause us to increase our activity over time. 

In fact, studies show that when groups of friends regularly exercise together they will exercise for 30% longer than they would on days they were exercising alone.

If you have an area of your life you want to improve on or a goal you are trying to reach but have not been able to push yourself over the top, I cannot recommend highly enough setting a couple of reasonable fitness goals and then sharing those with others and going for it. 

You are going to be shocked, by the fact that when you reach those fitness goals, that momentum created will lead to improvements in your career, relationships and generally how you view your capacity to do life.

What has made the biggest difference in your fitness life? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

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