Turn Your Fitness Knowledge Into A Skill You Can Act On

If you’re having trouble getting started on your fitness goals, it’s often not because you’re incapable or don’t have the knowledge. It’s probably because you haven’t yet developed all the skills necessary to act. Here’s how to turn the knowledge you have into actionable skills.

Picture: jakla

Let’s say you had to explain brushing your teeth to an alien. You can do this presumably because you have both the knowledge and the skill. Go ahead and run through all the little steps required to actually complete your task. There are a lot more steps than you realise, right? (Plus, the right order of things really matters!)

The folks at Precision Nutrition point out that you can ravenously read all of the fitness, nutrition, and science blogs you can find, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily know how to apply the information you read to your own needs. For example, if you’re finding yourself to be falling short, it may be because:

You’ve probably missed at least one step, trying to do Thing 2 before Thing 1 (or Thing 17 before Thing 1).

And/or…

You may not yet have the skills to do the things that come before the thing you want to do. You may need to practice getting better at doing Thing 1 first. You may need to get some coaching or instruction.

So it’s just a matter of process and skill acquisition — not a personal failure.

Unless you’ve practiced enough, refined and continuously assessed those skills, whatever they may be, it’s normal to have trouble. Don’t worry, it’s not a personal failure, you just have to work around your stumbling blocks and turn that knowledge into action. So, what can you do to start applying things you’ve learned?

Engineer in reverse. To map out how to do a thing you want to accomplish, first think of the outcome you want, then work backwards.

Keep it simple; don’t get overwhelmed or try to attack this all at once. All you have to do is tackle ONE small thing at a time, ideally the earliest, most fundamental step.

The quickest way to accurately assess your skill and performance — and to do things better — is to get help from an expert coach.

For more, check out the rest of the article linked below.

How to do anything (even the hard stuff) [Precision Nutrition]