Too Many Priorities is the Same as No Priorities

You can only focus on so many things within a given time period. This holds true for anything you want to do. Exercise is no exception. I have always had a bad habit of trying to accomplish too many divergent goals at the same time. What I have learned over the years, is how to prioritize and focus on what is most important too me.I’m not trying to say those other goals should just be forgotten, but maybe reevaluated at a later time. These days my major focus is rock climbing. I have forgone a lot of heavy weight lifting, which I also enjoy, because I have found that with the weight lifting on top of work, my rock climbing greatly suffers. Rock climbing is just more important to me.

One of the reasons that I enjoy natural movement training so much is that it integrates so well with not just rock climbing, but my life in general. The more time I spend moving in a variety of ways, the easier everything physical in my life is. Let’s be honest here… We really were built to move so it makes sense that moving would make us feel better.

When I was younger, and quite a lot more big headed, I would just write a list of things I wanted to be able to do, which were often not related at all. In a lot of cases with very careful planning and a huge time commitment, I could have achieved everything on those lists. But the reality was that my schedule wouldn’t accommodate the steps needed to reach those goals. I was unable to edit my list to what mattered most.

Now that I’m older and I’ve screwed it up enough, I break down my goals to see what will work together and what will have to be sacrificed to make the goals. Things that don’t interfere too much with other goals or needs can all be worked on together. Anything that takes away from the more important goals and needs is pushed off to a later date.

This has allowed me to improve in many areas over a longer time span instead of racing halfway to a ton of goals, stalling out, and never reaching any of them. I’ve also learned to reassess along the way to make sure the goal is still important and feasible. There are times when I’ve had to back away from a goal due to life situations, like injuries or family emergencies.

In my youth, I always trained through problems. Usually at the same intensity as without the problems. This almost always resulted in my making the problem worse. This was virtually always the case for me when I was injured. Sometimes your top priority has to be back shuffled so that something else that has happened can be the new top priority. When that’s resolved you can come back to the priority that had to be sidelined.

Life is a marathon. It took me a very long time to figure that out. Keep your attention on the things that really matter to you and try to minimize the distractions and you’ll get where you want to go.

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