Our fitness center had the privilege to expand another fourteen hundred square feet this past year. The addition of a hallway, another bathroom, two office suites, and about eight hundred additional square feet to utilize for one-on-one personal training activities gave our coaching team the potential to invite more people into our business and offer our services to help people live happier, healthier, and stronger lives. It was quite the year for us, and, we have been able to successfully fit our new space with more people from the Napa community to assist people looking to improve their overall quality of life via exercise adherence.
Along with our new space came visions of grandeur involving what we could invest in to enhance our client’s exercise experience with our shiny new toy which involved a new space, a massage suite, and an office for our coaches. “Let’s get another squat stand,” “How about another front desk?” or “How about we retile the bathrooms?”. These were just a small glimpse of the requests and proposed projects that were recommended by the team and yours truly to install in our new space. The ideas were impressive. However, we forgot about one important variable that made these visions conceivable: time.
Before we got the keys to the other side of our fancy new space, we already had a maximum capacity of exercise participants in our previous space. Even though we just acquired a new frontier of expanding a successfully operating fitness business, we still needed to tend to our current clientele. Who was going to juggle both our beloved clients and the installation of our dream fitness center at the same time? You guessed right. The coaches who specialized in one-on-one personal training and exercise program design quickly became professional painters, and floor installation specialists, and quite comically, learned how to use power tools. Have you ever seen a baby giraffe walk for the first time after birth? Imagine a fitness coach learning how to use a Sawzall for the first time. The result was overwhelmingly hilarious.
Needless to say, delving into new projects takes effort, perseverance, and patience. These components involved in rendering success out of investing oneself into a new project that someone cares about takes a tremendous amount of time. This most commonly occurs with fitness goals. Achieving long-term benefits from a fitness program takes willingness, effort, and patience.
Common fitness goals include the desire to lose weight, look good in sleeveless shirts or bathing suits for a summer vacation, or overcome a substantial injury to reduce pain, increase movement, and optimize everyday life functionality. It’s important to note these desired outcomes don’t happen overnight. We understand the physiology of the human body. Losing ten pounds in a week isn’t realistic. Recovering strength from a surgical procedure takes three months of physical therapy and excruciating detail to rehabilitation tactics to chip the surface of restructuring connective tissue and re-educating the neuromuscular system to return to everyday life activities. Similar to our ventures to our build-out project for our new fitness center, fitness goals take time.
If weight loss, gaining strength, or decreasing pain is a fitness goal, time is a critically important factor toward the success of such a fitness journey. Once one, two, or three days a week of meticulously designed exercise routines are adhered to over ninety days, the journey toward a successful outcome of the efforts we invest toward a few days at the local gym, Yoga and Pilates classes, or regular visits with your personal trainer start to take effect to support goals for the long run.
Take a few deep breaths and understand that the success of a fitness journey takes time. Additionally, it’s farfetched to expect to accomplish fitness goals right away. Take small bites out of your journey and enjoy the ride. Noticing the fun of feeling better and stronger while investing time and energy in your fitness journey produces a fun and exciting experience. Before you know it, you’ll get to that finish line with a smile and a happy, healthy, and strong body.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.
