In training, as in everyday life, consistency is not innate; it has to be learned. Fortunately, there are tricks to ensure constant progression in your fitness journey. With a clearly set aim, realistic deadlines and the options to adjust your training plan at any time, you should quickly see the difference and move step by step towards success.

Regularity is Measured Over Time 

Alternating between successful sessions and those where nothing seems to go according to plan can be a source of frustration for many athletes. If you are looking to improve the consistency of your progress, implement a long-term strategy:

• Establish rituals and routines associated with key actions: training schedule, mental preparation, visualisation, etc. Through the sequencing of specific movements always in the same order, your mind and body prepare for the effort and become conditioned for performance.

• Focus on preparation to perform in a competition: the consistency of performance is linked to the number of hours devoted to training. Behind the natural performance of the athletes you admire, there are hours of trials and failures that have been transformed into constructive experiences.

• Have a training plan, divided into small actions that are easy to reproduce and memorise: if you have a problem with a particular movement, break it down into more straightforward gestures, helping you overcome any difficulties. Think of your sessions as a pianist rehearsing his scales to warm up before performing his piece like a virtuoso.

Set Yourself Deadlines and Challenges

To continue making progress, remember that your body gets used to the effort. To achieve the same degree of improvement, you will need to increase the difficulty and volume of training little by little. This is best done by challenging yourself, if you can do it and if it suits your goals:

• Sign up for a competition or a race: having a deadline forces you to get out of your comfort zone, to organise your sessions better and to improve the technical points that may have been neglected in a routine in which the stakes were low.
• Follow the news and the iFit® blog where new challenges are launched each month: for example, recently, the Consistency Challenge dealt with the problem of regularity in training. For the duration of the challenge, all iFit® community members received a reward if they trained at least 3 times a week.
• Monitor your performance with a tracking application: the metrics provided are a good source of motivation and allow you to cross-reference several parameters to understand what reasons may have led you to be inconsistent from one week to another. You are also given challenges and badges to reward your diligence. Running an extra mile today to finally get your Paris-London badge is tempting and breaking an 8-week chain of training success will be much harder to do when you can visualise your progress.

In Training Too, the Best is the Enemy of the Good 

If you are wondering about the consistency of your fitness journey, perhaps you are putting a little too much pressure on yourself regarding the results of your efforts. A bit of a challenge and firm goals can be an important driving force for success, but it’s all a question of balance:

• If you sometimes miss a session because the previous day’s session was too tiring, perhaps it’s time to rethink your training schedule and space out the sessions, or at least allow for more recovery time after the most intense ones?

• A series of failures during a particular exercise can lead to discouragement: to stay motivated, think about working around the difficulties and letting go if you feel that the work is not constructive. Sometimes letting a night’s sleep pass or approaching a concern from a different angle is the best strategy.

• Be confident and articulate your goals to remember them and do everything you can to achieve them! Breaking down an ambitious goal into smaller steps is an excellent way to move slowly but surely toward success!

Bonus Tip: Have fun first! If you enjoy your activity, you will find the right solutions for you!

Check out our Fitness & Training page for more advice.