What’s the hurry?

Fitness and having a good physique is commonly viewed as an end result. You work hard for X number of days, you do A, B and C and boom, in 90 days, you look exactly like that movie star in that poster.

Its okay, we’ve all  been there.

For the longest time, I approached fitness the same way. I needed to find the perfect workout, the perfect diet, and do it perfectly for a set amount of time and I would be jacked to shreds just like the fitness models I followed on Instagram. This, unfortunately, didn’t quite work out for me. I was constantly burnt out and had to force myself to get in most workouts. I tried to eat right, but always got frustrated with the lack of – or minimal – progress in 3 months (where’s my 6-pack at, dammit) and gave up. I was never happy with where I was, and more importantly, with who I was.

About 6 months ago, I started working with coach Bryan Krahn (thanks to the encouragement of my awesome business partner, Prashanti). Obviously, I ‘screwed up’ and cheated on my nutrition the first couple of weeks. He was very kind about it and gave me some helpful advice about what to do, and then he said something game changing – ‘This is a skill, and skills take YEARS of practice to master’.

#mycoachismorejackedthanyourcoach

This blew my mind. I was caught in the trap of trying to find secret exercises, workouts and diet plans that I was sure that all these people were doing that made them look that way. The truth was far from it. All the people who looked the way that I wanted to look had several things in common – they ate right 90% of the time, they trained hard and looked forward to their workouts and listened to their bodies. They also took care of sleep and stress outside of training. And most importantly, they had been doing this for many, many years.

Fitness and getting jacked, is a skill. Just like art. Just like sports. You have to fully experience and enjoy every second of it you want to be good at it. You HAVE to love the process. You can’t just drudge through your workouts and your diet and see results. You have to respect that everything about the way that you’ve lived your life so far, not good or bad, has led you to looking and feeling the way you do right now. To change that is a huge transformation that is probably going to take you as long as it took you to get here.

Contrary to feeling depressed about that or going into denial (which is what I did), take a moment and think about it from a different point of view. There’s no pressure now. No end point to get to. The goal now to enjoy the fuck out of your workouts, enjoy the process of eating right and take care of your body, in order to enjoy the way that you feel every day. And the better you get at that, the better you will look. Isn’t that awesome?

So get comfortable, breathe and enjoy the ride.

-Sandeep