Even though I feel like I’ve always been active in my fitness routine, through this whole process of building Arcana I’ve come to realize that being active is not the same as being consistent.
There’s really only one way to get results, and at the core of it, it’s consistency. But what that really means is continuing to show up for yourself even when it’s hard, when you don’t see results right away, or even when you do start to feel better and give yourself a little too much leniency because you feel the progress already.
I’ve gone through this cycle what feels like hundreds of times.
I’ve been reflecting on this a lot recently, especially as we enter September, my birthday month, and I enter a new decade (!). In my reflections on this next chapter, one thing I keep coming back to is that, for probably the first time in my life, I don’t just feel like someone who works out a lot. I feel like I’ve actually built consistency into my fitness.
It started with a spreadsheet
When we started Arcana earlier this year, it was simply an idea. Before we built anything, we knew we needed to do more research.
We’ve both been in the fitness world for years, but it wouldn’t have been right to pretend we understood the inner workings of every studio without actually going to them. So we made a spreadsheet of every studio we wanted to try.
Every Sunday night, we would go through the list and plan out our week, and then we visited every single studio we were considering for Arcana.
What happened naturally through that process was that we built a consistent practice around movement. We had classes on the calendar, we planned for the week, and we showed up.
The only problem was that managing all of it was a nightmare.
When working out becomes an admin job
We each had our Mindbody accounts, accounts directly with studios, and separate apps that certain studios required us to download. We were sometimes booking multiple studios in a day, and I accidentally double-booked myself more than once. I even completely missed a class because the studio didn’t send a reminder email, which is how I learned that those are absolutely necessary.
Every night, we’d check different apps before going to sleep to figure out what we had booked the next day, what time we needed to be in the city, and what neighborhood we needed to plan our day around.
Managing the workouts started to make the workouts themselves less enjoyable, if that even makes sense.
Removing the friction
Cole and I were the first two people on Arcana before we opened it up to anyone else, and we’ve now been using it for just over three months.
Having all of my classes in one place has honestly been a huge enabler of consistency.
I can book across different studios from one app, immediately add the class to my Google calendar, and get an email reminder the day before class. When I open Arcana, the first thing I see is my next class, and I can see my entire schedule in one click.
It sounds simple, but that’s kind of the point.
Consistency is already hard enough. There’s no reason for the systems around your fitness routine to make it harder.
Make showing up the only hard part
There’s another huge piece of this for me, which is how much variety has changed my relationship with fitness, but I’m saving that for another post because I think it deserves its own shine.
For now, the biggest thing I’ve learned is that being active isn’t the same as being consistent. And consistency isn’t just about finding more discipline. Sometimes it’s about taking away the unnecessary friction that makes showing up harder than it needs to be.
You still have to do the work once you get there.
We just don’t think the process of booking your workout should be part of it.