Your health journey starts here

Getting started

No matter what you want to achieve, it's never a bad time to start trying to improve your fitness, and by extension your health.

"Getting fit" doesn't have to mean "being athletic", or anything too intimidating, for many of us, it can be as simple as making small, manageable, everyday changes that cause small incremental improvements. Like trying to add an extra 1,000 steps (~10mins casual walking) a day. Even this can make a huge difference to our lifestyle and mental outlook on things, particularly when we're just getting started.

Too much, too soon

90%+ of people's jounreys fail here, so... Don't do too much, too soon. It's easy to get excited, set lofty goals, and push yourself too hard. But, this is the easiest way to fail.

When you start out, you can't possibly know how much you can achieve, for some of us it will be quick, for other's it will be a little slower, and that's ok. It's important to not set too specific a goal right now, else you might not hit it, and that can be really disheartening. Even if you do hit it, you may not next time as your body adapts quickly, which again, an be a real buzz kill!

So, when we're getting started, our goal should be persistence and consistency, not a pace / distance / weight / etc.

Enough about what not to do

Getting started in fitness is as much a battle in our minds as it is a physical challenge. So, we want to set ourselves up for a series of early successes.

A good goal for the first weeks, might be something like "deliberately get up and walk for 10 mins a day, on top of whatever you normally do". With an aim to increase this goal, or add more layers to it over time.

For the moment, we're in the business of building habits, if we can start to get on top of small manageable goals for 4-6 weeks, you'll quickly see your mindset begin to shift. Then, once we've tricked our mind into "wanting" to take part, routine will take over some of the heavy lifting instead of discipline, then we can really start to ramp things up.

Use a tracker to help

There's a few important things to stay on top of here, which can sometimes be tricky to workout on your own. A good tracking app can make a real difference, and we've spent the last few years building a free app, and community, to help with this specifically:

• 1.

  Getting your goal right over time. When you first connect to motion, the app will look at any historic data you have from an Apple Watch, fitbit, garmin, etc, or even just your step tracking data from your phone. It uses this to complete your personal activity baseline, and set you your own personalised weekly (A weekly goal gives you space to take rest time too, and not feel like you've let yourself down if you have a bad day!) goal based on your level.

  Then, based on how you get on each week, it will intelligently adjust your goal, making it a little harder or easier, to make sure you progress at a healthy and safe pace.

• 2.

  The only real battle, is against yourself. Everything in motion is based around your own personalised activity score that continuously adapts to you.

  As you move forwards, and your goal starts to grow, you can really start to feel the achievement, since your goal is so personalised, you're essentially challenge yourself to beat, well, yourself!

  Motion really tries to make everything about this, even though you can connect to friends and participate in "challenges" for some extra fun, they're _always_ based on your score, so there's no need to feel intimidated by people diferent ability, we're all here to get healthier together.