The Art of Getting it Done

The Art of Getting it Done: How to Easily Innovate Your Own Fitness Solution

“I love it when a plan comes together.”

I am a sucker for the “A-Team”, “McGyver” and in general, tales of people surviving on minuscule islands in the middle of nowhere: “Castaway”, “The Count of Monte Christo”; you get my drift … ahem…

Whether or not you could potentially find yourself in the position of needing to build a speedboat out of an ironing board and a blender (I know…quite the visual, isn’t it?), or engineering and building a two story bamboo shelter to keep your family safe until help arrives, there are a couple of skills that are really going to help you in your quest to become someone who can train anywhere with anything.  Really.

First, take a moment right now to check in with your environment and get in touch with your sense of you, your body, and your breathing.

Inevitably, you are likely to identify an invisible barrier that suggests you need something else to get your “awesome” going.

Well, that’s both true and not true.  While it’s nice to be in a swanky health club, it’s certainly not necessary, and with the following two skills or principles, you really and truly can innovate your own solution to the challenges that exist to keep you from achieving your fitness goals.

Principle #1: Innovation

Tables become edges, bottles become resistance, floor space becomes a bodyweight training platform.  Fences become hurdles, ropes are things to climb, hills become something we can run up and down.  A multitude of elastic bands become portable gyms, and all of these can essentially make up your own home gym.

Bluetooth lets you run apps and music through speakers that sound as good as big systems and iPhones let you integrate all of these as makes sense for you and your specific needs.  The key is to make it work for you.

Innovators see opportunity and plan ahead.  Innovators never take no for an answer, innovators make self defense equipment out of big tubes, cabbage and a vacuum cleaner set to reverse.  So narrow the invisible barrier, make the transition between sitting and doing less and less by innovating continuously.  You will then have created the environment that invites the movement, Grasshoppers.

Principle #2: Creativity

If innovation is the house, creativity is the interior designer.  Boring is the opposite of creativity and I completely empathize that the act of getting active can feel boring.  Wow, what a huge loss that is if you don’t have the tools to overcome that feeling.  There are two strands to this skill that we all have the ability to practice and develop.

Creativity allows us to experiment and explore; the creative spirit is less bound by rules and regulations, although these aren’t mutually exclusive.  Keep playing around with your plan until it appears interesting to you, until it clicks, makes sense, and where you can develop your own unique, “just for you” programs. Remember, it only has to work for you. Nobody else.

The other side of creativity is that when we move, when we feel more fit, stronger, when our “movement literacy” improves, we often become more creative, we harness more data, more raw material that generates more ideas.  No more talking about mind and body, all is used all the time!  You may find that exercise and activity helps you produce some fantastically creative thinking, without actually consciously thinking!

Be innovative with your approach, try new things, see what sticks and when you’re there, ask yourself how you can deepen, broaden and develop what you like into a work of art, or a speedboat, or a cabbage firing machine…

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