How to Build and Maintain a Consistent Routine Amidst a Busy Schedule

Introduction to Consistency Hacks for Working People

Consistency seems to be the key to a lot of success; if you want to get better at a language, you have to be consistent with learning, want to improve a skill, you need to be consistent with practising it, you like to enhance your nutrition you need to be consistent with maintaining good nutritional habit. 

From my time training and coaching, the most significant area people struggle with is having a consistent training schedule that fits around their work/life. Either work is too busy, or you have too many things going on, making consistency more of a task. A typical story is that you do well for a few weeks (2-3), then a trip or a busy period at work comes up, and it breaks up your routine. 

This article aims to help you better understand consistency, how to build a consistent routine, and how to prepare for and deal with unexpected setbacks.

Establishing a Consistent Routine

What are routines

COVID was a strange time but birthed many habits and new routines. Some took up cooking more, others began to run more with the Couch to 5K initiative, and others began taking more walks to increase their daily movement. 

Most people still follow the same habits they formed during that time. Personally, I feel weird if I do not go for a long walk at some point during the week. The reason these habits stuck was because we were doing them so consistently 

Having a routine is the first big hurdle you will have to tackle. A routine, in essence, is a consistent habit you perform daily to the point where it is unconsciously performed. You already have set routines within your day. 

An example:

The alarm goes off at 6:30 am

You sleep an extra 5 minutes +/-

Drink some water

Brush your teeth

Get changed 

Have breakfast 

Go to work 

These are all habits you have built over years of repetition. If you were to have breakfast before brushing your teeth, you would feel weird, not for dental reasons but because it's different from your norm and a break in your routine.

Building a training routine around life

When building a routine to help you go to the gym more, you must be honest with yourself and what you can do. It's all well and good trying to go to the gym every day after work, make changes to your nutrition, move more, and stay well hydrated.  

But you may have children, dependents, work shifts, or run a business on the side. Building that routine will more than likely lead you nowhere. I am not saying it is impossible because I have encountered people who do it well. Still, the key to achieving this routine is consistency with what you struggle with the most.

Making smaller steps will lead to the more significant changes that you want. If you can only muster up the availability to attend the gym 1x per week for an hour, then do week in, week out. As you start to see progress from this, you will naturally begin to figure out ways to increase the number of times you can go to the gym. 

If you are consistent with the gym but want to build a better routine around your eating habits, then you can follow this same concept of smaller steps. Have a piece of fruit as a snack and your other daily choices. Again, this is nothing drastic but a starting point from which you can progress. You can add more vegetables by ensuring you have vegetables each time you have lunch or dinner, ideally working to have vegetables with both meals.

The consistency process will be much easier once you know what to commit to.

Ways to measure consistency 

You are encouraged to track your training, as it allows you to see if you are progressing or plateauing. You are encouraged to track your nutrition, as it will let you know if you are consuming the correct amount of calories for your goal and good-quality nutritional food. The same is true for tracking your consistency. 

Having a consistency tracker can help keep you accountable for achieving your goal. You can set yourself 3 to 5 things to accomplish during the day; remember to keep these as simple as possible to ensure you can achieve them. 

You can tick off your achievements and see your consistency over time. Lucky for you, I have attached my consistency tracker to this article for you to use!

Remember, the key to helping you stay consistent is keeping tasks realistic and achievable. When they are realistic, each time you achieve the target, you will be more motivated to stick with it, ultimately making it a consistent habit.

Overcoming obstacles

It's all well and good to discuss the benefits of forming a consistent routine, but what most tend to forget about are the unavoidable obstacles that come with it.

These can be anything: vacation, illness, injury, moving, etc. The list can be endless. Just like injuries are a natural counterpart to training, obstacles and setbacks are a natural part of having a consistent routine.

When an obstacle or setback occurs, you tend to get frustrated because you were doing well with your consistency up to that moment. It is a natural reaction. However, it would be best to accept that it has occurred and do what you can to get back into your routine as soon as possible, whether the next day or two. Ideally, one day, but we have to be realistic at the same time.

Supportive Environment To Help Consistency 

Prevention is better than cure. Obstacles and setbacks will occur, but they do not have to occur frequently. Another way to build your ability to stay consistent, which I employ with my online coaching clients, is to remove potential things that you know will cause disruptions or create a supportive environment. 

One way to build consistency around nutrition while keeping the focus on health and fitness is to eat a piece of fruit daily. To help support this, you could remove/significantly reduce the number of sugary snacks you can access and put fruit in more visible places. Removing sugary snacks leaves you only relying on fruit to curb your hunger cravings.

Start Small, Then Build For Ease Of Consistency

Your start makes a big difference to what you can achieve. Most people struggle to build consistency because they try to do it with multiple things beyond their current capabilities. You wouldn't learn to squat then decide next session you are going to go for a PR (Personal record)

You would keep working on the squat, becoming skilled at the movement, and, over time, add other elements, such as tempos, eccentric focus, chains, bands, etc. But the foundation skill needs to be there first. 

This is the same with building consistency; start with doing something you know you can stick to; as this becomes an unconscious aspect in your life, you can look to add more elements to it. 

Example:

You want to be able to go to the gym three times a week, but currently, it's not possible due to a busy work and life schedule. Instead, you can set a minimum of one session or class a week. 

You should do this consistently weekly for at least 2-3 months. By this time, you will likely see some improvements in strength and physique, which will increase your motivation to do more. With this new fuel, you can adjust your life calendar and add another session. 

Nothing changes in terms of the process. You follow the same guidelines, be consistent for 2-3 months, see the changes and improvements, and then see where you can add in the third session, understanding that setbacks can occur and are temporary.

Sian Intrinsic Motivation 

I worked with Sian back when I lived in London, England, in corporate health and wellness. She was getting older, and she wanted to work on her physique and improve her strength, which I was more than happy to help with. We had our first session, and it was challenging. I left feeling worked but accomplished. 

Sian's job involved a lot of travel and meetings, which meant we could only train on a weekly or biweekly basis. Even though it was not the ideal amount of consistency, it was not an issue because she could still get a good session and see improvements when she attended. 

I was impressed by her dedication to training and told her that. She told me that the main reason she likes to come to the gym is that it helps her feel more confident, not just with herself but within the gym space. She had a lot of anxiety about training in a gym. This feeling of comfort and confidence secretly pushed her to keep coming to the sessions and putting in the effort. This is known as intrinsic motivation. 

Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation for building consistency 

Source : Simple Psychology

Intrinsic motivation is the best form of motivation. When discussing goals with my online clients, I always push them to make their goals more personal. Improving your strength, mobility, and physique are all good goals. Let's not be mistaken. However, progress does not follow a linear pattern. There will be times when you see significant improvement and times when there are few, if any, noticeable changes. 

When change is hard to see, your dedication to training starts to waiver, and you will find it easier to talk yourself out of getting your sessions in. When setting a goal, you want to build an emotional connection with it. It has been shown that goals with an emotional/intrinsic link lead to greater goal retention than those relying solely on extrinsic measures.

Extrinsic motivation involves using external factors such as images, scale weight, and bar numbers to help keep you going with your training and nutrition. The issue with extrinsic factors is that they are not linear. Things could be going well one week, and the next, there may be fluctuations you can't explain. You know this is just a temporary decline. Still, it can be demotivating and result in a lapse in your consistency. 

It is helpful to have an extrinsic motivator, as it makes you feel great. Still, most of your motivation should be intrinsic, which will help you stick with the process when you don't want to.

Conclusion: Sustaining Consistency

From my experience with online and in-person coaching clients, they have an all-or-nothing approach. Either they are fully committed and consistent, or they lose their consistency, abandoning their training and nutrition. 

I strive to remind them that a day when they do not hit their step goal, nutrition goal, or go to the gym is not the defying factor of their ability to stay consistent. The real test is how quickly they can get back on track. Having an adaptable mindset shows true comprehension of what consistency actually is and eases the stress you place on yourself.

If you found this helpful, feel free to follow me on Instagram and Threads, where I share more coaching tips and information to make the journey easier for you!