Ironman veteran Bevan James Eyles had an eye-opening moment when his colleague told him, despite all their efforts, the industry was failing because there were more people not moving and putting on weight.
The global fitness instructor realised so much of his work is with people who want to exercise, but what about the ones who don't?
That light bulb moment led to his latest book, I Will Make You Passionate About Exercise, aimed at people who don't share his ardor for fitness.
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Listen to the full interview here
People who love exercise tend to share an "infrastructure" which makes the practice habitual, Eyles tells Jesse Mulligan.
"They tend to prioritise it in their life, they tend to have a movement that they really enjoy, they tend to have a community around it, they tend to go on growth pathways.
Bevan James Eyles. Photo: Bevan James Eyles website
“Now people who don't exercise don’t have that infrastructure in place, and then when they try to bring exercise in, they kind of do everything wrong because they do it at levels that are way too hard, they're just lost and confused.
“One thing I often say is it's not that these people haven't tried to exercise, they've often tried and failed many times, and it's partly because our industry is not that great at giving them solutions."
The first step towards prioritising exercise in your life is to focus on what you can do rather than measuring physical results as a sign of success, he says.
“You need to choose a level of exercise which you guarantee you can do right now. So if it's a five-minute walk, that’s a win to me, that's a win because you're going to get out the door and do it.
“Whereas if you think five minutes is not going to get me physical results, that's going to push you away from doing it.
“What we're trying to teach you are what are the habits and behaviours you do before you actually even start exercising? And if we can remove that tension of being worried about the exercise or the time it's going to take in my day, we increase the chance of you doing it.”
The second lesson Eyles gives is you've got to find a movement you enjoy.
“If you can find a movement you love, there's a higher chance you're going to do it.
“When you're learning to find the movement you love, I've given you rules and strategies [in the book] which allow you to go in and gives you permission to see that you’re a beginner, you know, to make it easy for you to at least put your feet in the water and then to walk out trying that movement.”
Using forward thinking positively can also motivate you to get moving, he says.
"One of the strategies is instead of when you think about exercise, thinking of why it's going to be hard and horrible and push you away from it and feel resistance, is [to instead think] how am I going to feel afterwards?
“Generally speaking, if you've been guided well and you learn how to manage the part of your journey well, you never regret exercise, you always feel great.
“And if you think about that input in the forefront of your mind, you learn to actually move toward exercise and what we want to do is, as you have those experiences, we want to bank those experiences up.”
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When you have a bad day, don't make it bigger than it actually is, he says.
"What I learned with our [five kilometre running] groups, especially when we first started, is one bad day and people would quit.
“It made me realise that a lot of people who struggle with exercise have a history of failure … They have this story that they walk into exercise with and it's almost like at first, they're looking to prove the story, so if they have one bad day, this is evidence that I suck at exercise.
“So we've got to teach people who are on that beginner journey of how to deal with that day where it's going to suck 'cause it's going to happen.”