In our last blog post, we acknowledged the sea change that Covid-19 has enacted in our daily lives. Almost overnight, shutdowns and quarantines jostled our old routines from their places and, with respect to fitness, we were left to meander through these new days without the anchors that our gym or exercise routines had provided.

When confronted with change–especially one so drastic–our human instinct is to react. We’ve lost the ability to workout in the manner and places we’ve been accustomed to, so we seek replacements with alacrity. Something has been taken from us, and so we feel that we should circle the wagons and take up solutions as quickly as possible.

We’ve been emptied of something and we replace it with other things.

I think there’s an interim step, however, and it’s a concept I’d like to call the first New Rule of Fitness: protecting your minimums.

One of the first questions we ask our new online clients is this: when you have had the most success and enjoyment from your training, how many times a week were you working out and for how long? We don’t ask this in search of a particular answer, or because we’ll necessarily begin at that point, but because we want to start a dialogue:

*When things were going well, what were you committing to?
*How did accomplishing that make you feel?
*In this new environment, how much of that can we commit to as a starter practice? What can we protect enough to call a foundation?

This approach is different in tone than the acquisitive message we often receive within the fitness industry. We think you may already have many more of the tools and skills you need to succeed than you realize or are being told.

Instead of seeking out multiple disciplines and investments, we want to help you begin with what you tell us has worked well in the past, and then establish a winnable foundation and protect those minimums as we move forward.

If you’re game today, take some time and do a quick self-audit. What’s worked well? What have I loved? What has felt like success in the past?

Be honest but be kind to yourself as well. Start with the things that jump off the page and realize this is a unique historical moment: the goal isn’t to perfect a routine but to protect one, so we start small and begin building there.

How do we know when to start layering on top of our foundation? We’ll talk about that in our next blog post!