When you start exercising, it’s possible you’ll set unrealistic expectations for yourself or compare yourself with others, thus losing motivation to work out. To avoid these problems from influencing your habit, take two steps.
The first step is to learn about the realistic goals specific to what you’re doing. Set your goals according to this information and avoid assuming that you’ll beat the odds. If you do better, great. If not, you didn’t expect to anyway, so it won’t ruin your resolve.
For instance, a beginner to weightlifting may assume he’ll be able to bench press 200 pounds (91 kg) within six months. However, a quick look at realistic fitness goals shows that the average male needs up to two years of training to be able to bench press 1.2x his body weight[lxxxi].
When the unrealistic beginner realizes he’s still far away from reaching his goal, he may be tempted to give up. After all, in his mind, he has failed and wasted six months of his life – notwithstanding he had made great progress in line with what he could have realistically accomplished during this time.
Whenever starting to learn a new sport, seek out what goals you can set for yourself and educate yourself about the realities of it.
Most sports look much easier while you’re watching them than when you try them. This is because people with a lot of experience tend to make things look easy, but that’s only because they’ve been repeating the same moves over and over again for years on end. It’s precisely their experience that makes it look easy, and not the sport itself.
Unfortunately, this makes it easy to overestimate how long it’s going to take to master them. Remember this and find goals suitable for beginners so you don’t get frustrated.
The second step – the step to avoid comparing yourself with others – is related to those experienced people. Become more aware of your abilities and your limits, and then judge your performance only in relation to them, not other people. In other words, if you feel you’ve pushed yourself to the limits, blaming yourself for not being as good as others makes no sense. As long as you’re venturing outside of your comfort zone to grow and make progress, it’s all that matters.
In climbing, routes can be done in a wide variety of ways. A 6’ 1” tall (186 cm) man can easily reach a handhold a 5’ 6” tall (167 cm) female wouldn’t be able to reach without having to find another foothold before reaching the same handhold.
Why would she berate herself for not being able to finish the route if she has an entirely different set of advantages and drawbacks when climbing? As long as she’s doing all she can to climb the route, losing motivation because a much taller man did it without any problems is ridiculous.
Focus on yourself, your abilities, and your limits, and let the others do their thing.