Fitness has been my biggest teacher in life.

Through push-ups, squats, burpees, and sprints, I’ve become not only physically stronger and fitter than my former non-fit self, but mentally stronger, too.

Fitness helped me learn that I can do difficult things. It taught me patience and persistence. After spending most of my life hiding behind a wall of fear, always afraid to fail, fitness helped me learn to try.

Without the lessons I’ve learned so far in my fitness journey, I would be a shell of the person I am today. And I know I’m not alone.

I hear so many stories from others who have had similar experiences. From the lawyer who got through the hardship of her teenage years by running every day, to the scientist who learned how to deal with life’s unpredictability through skateboarding, fitness has the power to change lives.

Below are five ways fitness can teach you valuable life lessons, no matter your current fitness level, previous experience, age, sex, or genetics. These ring true whether your fitness activity of choice is lifting weights, playing pickup basketball, or going for an awe-inspiring hike in nature. Keep coming back to these and notice how you can use your workouts as a training ground for the rest of your life.

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People always want to know the secret to getting and staying fit.

I used to look for this magic pill, too. Years after I became a personal trainer and got in reasonably good shape, I still spent way too much time and money on programs, books, and devices I hoped would finally help me build the strength and body I wanted.

It took me a long time to figure out that there is no secret to becoming fit for life.

But…there also kind of is.

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“The problem human beings face is not that we aim too high and fail, but that we aim too low and succeed.” – Michelangelo

Setting big, audacious goals is important if you want to work toward fulfilling your potential in both fitness and life. But the reality check of setting such big goals can be demoralizing once you realize just how much work you have ahead of you.

That initial excitement you get from dreaming big is often followed by a feeling of overwhelm, prompting questions of self-doubt like, “How can I possibly go for a goal this big?” And, “Where do I even start?”

This is where learning to recognize small wins can motivate you to keep going, even when you have months (or years) of work ahead of you to get where you want to go.

Small wins are essentially progress points on the way to your larger goal. They remind your brain that no matter how futile your efforts may seem at times, you are making progress.

These small wins can act as a checklist en route to your bigger goals. Because while they may seem small in the moment, if you achieve enough over time they’ll add up to big results.

Here’s how to harness the power of small wins to achieve any fitness (or non-fitness) related goal.

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You might not realize this, but I never used to think of myself as an athlete. In fact, I never even thought of myself as a person who worked out until I reached my mid-twenties. Before that, I thought of myself as a slightly overweight, uncoordinated art school kid with zero athletic promise. That was my fitness identity, and I never expected it to change.

When I first started working out toward the end of college because I was sick of how I looked in dressing room mirrors, I tortured myself by going for three-mile runs a few times a week. I hated every minute of those runs and would use any excuse to get out of my workouts (that runner’s high? I’ve never experienced it).

It took years of experimenting with different types of exercise and various ways of motivating myself to chip away at the story I had told myself about my athletic abilities.

Even after I became a personal trainer and admittedly began to enjoy many forms of exercise, it still took a while to actually find my thing and prove to myself that I had changed my core identity from someone who avoided most forms of physical activity to someone who truly loved fitness and movement.

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We’re told to dream big and shoot for the stars, but nobody ever mentions that going after our dreams is going to be hard.

They definitely don’t tell us that it should be hard—and that if it isn’t, we’re doing something wrong.

Our society loves the myth of “uncovering” some magic ability that was unknowingly hiding this whole time. 

We cheer when the kid in the superhero movie suddenly unleashes some magical ability he never knew he had and knows how to use it perfectly with little to no training. We idolize sports icons like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, and Rafael Nadal, but we often gloss over just how much these real-life superheroes struggled along their journey.

We don’t like to struggle. But we should, because struggle is a necessary part of the growth process.

Point blank: if you don’t struggle, you won’t grow.

Reframing Struggle

When we’re struggling, most of us think something is amiss. Struggle feels negative, something to be avoided.

But this is one of the many reasons I love fitness so much: it’s such a fantastic training ground for the rest of life.

When you’re working toward a new fitness goal, whether it’s to build a new skill like a pull-up, gaining a faster sprint time, or training for an obstacle race like a Tough Mudder, you don’t expect it to come easily to you. You expect to struggle.

Training your body to become stronger and more resilient is also training your mind to do the same thing.

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“Whereas people usually say they are playing a sport, they use the term workout to describe vigorous exercise, reflecting that for many this may not be the most enjoyable part of their day.” – Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, Self-Determination Theory

There is little question among scientists and psychologists that we are made to move as humans. As kids, we naturally run, jump, bound, and play.

For kids, playgrounds equate to endless hours of enjoyment. Metal bars are viewed not as something to cringe at and avoid, but as something to delight in.

Moving is FUN.

Yet for many of us, this notion of movement as something to look forward to doesn’t last long.

Somewhere along the way, movement slowly transforms from something we naturally crave without thinking in childhood, to something we’re taught to dread (yet feel like we have to do) as we reach adulthood.

No wonder most people struggle with motivation to get and stay fit.

Fortunately, this mindset can be changed.

By learning to reframe your idea of what exercise is, you can hack motivation, break through plateaus, and make exercise fun again.

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It’s a weird time right now.

Most of us around the world are stuck in our houses or tiny apartments due to COVID-19, with no idea when—or if—life will ever go back to normal.

The days are blending together, and we haven’t gone out to a restaurant or seen a friend outside of a Zoom happy hour in weeks (or for some of us, months).

As a result of being stuck at home, we’re also sitting more. Without the natural hustle and bustle of our normal lives, most of us are moving much less than usual.

With so many of us struggling mentally and emotionally right now, exercise is more important than ever: not because of the need to look a certain way, but for our mental health.

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Think about the last time you tried a new exercise, sport, or fitness-related skill. Did you struggle at it?

Did that struggle give you a boost of motivation (“I am not going to let this thing beat me. I’ll try harder and work at it until I get it”)?

Or did encountering the struggle immediately make you feel hopeless and want to give up (“I’ll never be good at this so I might as well not even try”)?

If you responded the first way, you most likely have a growth mindset around fitness and health.

If you encountered the latter, you probably fall in with the majority of people who have more of a fixed mindset around fitness.

It’s also possible to be in between, sometimes having more of a growth mindset and other times falling more into a fixed mindset (“I’m good at basketball; bad at pull ups”).

The good news is that you can actually change this limiting mindset. And when you do, you’ll open up a whole new world of opportunities and make more progress on your fitness journey than you ever before thought possible.

Developing a growth mindset around fitness and exercise is something that I’ve had to learn throughout my own fitness journey, and I’ll talk more about that later in this post. But first, let’s look at what it actually means to have a growth or a fixed mindset around fitness and exercise.

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