According to ex-boxing champ Mike Tyson, "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face". Personally, not having a day-to-day, hour-by-hour plan would see my world collapse into chaos pretty quickly, so I'm happy to risk it going tits up after a punch in the face (thanks Mike), and I'm picking that you'd agree.
So yes, I'm a planner, particularly when it comes to fitness. I ask my 12 Week Body Transformation members to carefully map out every detail of their lives to accommodate training, shopping and cooking, as I know it is vital for success. But sometimes the world seems plan-crazy, with endless planning meetings and people employed just to maintain our diaries and to plan meetings to arrange more planning meetings. So while I get the importance of careful planning, sometimes it comes at the expense of planning's little friend: action! Without action, planning becomes irrelevant. Those careful hours of preparation will then be unceremoniously flushed down the toilet of inactivity.
That is when I pull out my JFDI card. For the uninitiated, JFDI stands for "Just Do It" (flavoured with a colourful profanity that, I might add, is designed to express the urgency of the task at hand and a degree of frustration at its tardy execution). Like, for goodness sake: just get on with it! Stop procrastinating, making excuses, bitching and whingeing. Just. Freakin'. DO IT.
Exercise is the prime reason for whipping out the old JFDI card. If I hear one more, "I must get back to training" or "I must get fit so I can go to the gym" or "I must get flexible so I can get back to yoga", I'm going to stick something sharp in my eye.
Weirdly, the agonising over getting started is often worse than the task itself. We can find ourselves self-flagellating over not getting on with it sooner, and bask in the strange sense of fulfilment we get when we stand up from a long spell in front of the computer and are greeted by stiff and sore leg muscles.
And now is the time. In just 28 days, it will be spring.
Michelle's tip
Add a timeline to any plan you make – then stick to it!