What is the Snowball Effect?
This is another technique I borrowed from personal finance (like the Ten Second Rule). If you visit Dave Ramsey’s website you can read about his effective snowball plan to become debt free. Basically instead of trying chip away at all of your debts, you pay only minimum payments and take your smallest debt and devote all of your income to paying that off. Once this has been paid off you no longer have to pay one minimum payment so you can take that little bit extra and use it to attack your second smallest debt. By the time you have reached your largest debt you have a lot more firepower.
Snowball your fitness progress
How does this help with fitness you ask? Well, chances are, there will be a whole raft of things in your life right now that are stopping you from reaching your goals (be it toned legs, six pack, bigger biceps or whatever). What many people will try to do is completely change their lives around and try and fix everything in one hurdle. Unfortunately I have yet to meet someone who has been able to successfully accomplish that on their first try.
You see it just takes so long to see any results that we end up stumbling after a week or too and before we know it we are no better than before we started. By utilizing the Snowball Effect we can achieve moral victories each week which collectively over an extended period of time will add up to the ultimate victory.
The Snowball Effect In Practice
Stop and think for a moment of what would kind of lifestyle you would need to have to achieve your fitness goals. Start eating certain types of foods, stop eating others (you know the ones!), start walking to work, use the stairs instead of the lift, going to the gym 3 times a week and so on. Now instead of doing all these things the first week, just chose one of them. Concentrate on achieving that one goal for the first week, then once you can tick that goal on your list, move on to another goal for the second week. By the end of your first month you will be doing four new things that will all be working towards your fitness goal.
Obviously some things will be a lot harder than others. For instance if one of your goals is to run 40 minutes every day you would be best to start off with running 3 times a week for 15-20 minutes and work up from there. The important thing is to be achieving small successes which will eventually lead to one big success of a body you can be proud of.
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