Exercise with Coach Anna Veale - Habits, Motivation & Group Training

We had the pleasure of talking to Anna Veale, owner of Fresh Coaching. Anna comes with 20 years experience in the fitness, health and wellness industry and has worked with a huge range of people. From investment bankers to farmers, professional sportsmen to lawyers. She has deep expertise across personal development, training, mindfulness, recovery and one on one coaching. English born, Anna currently lives in New Zealand, helping men focus on developing beneficial habits around fitness and wellbeing that will drive positive change in their lives. She’s recently been working on her new book ‘Only Human’ and were lucky enough to dig into her chapter on exercise. Our 4 key takeaways were:

• Time is not the problem often mindset is the issue
• 100 little steps lead to a lot of ground covered
• Habits are key - motivation is fleeting and has no staying power
• Find yourself a Roy - drive accountability and enjoyment with a training buddy

Check out the full discussion below - we hope you find this as informative and thought provoking as we did! 

Anna, thanks for being here, I’m so excited to talk to you today. Let’s start with an easy one. Do we really need to exercise?

That is an easy one… Of course!!!  Humans were born to move. And if you want to elevate your life then you’re going to have to push exercise up the order of your priorities. It’s interesting, I saw a recent instagram post from Killian Jornet, one of the top athletes in the Ultra running world, outline how the shape of the human heart is starting to evolve away from our historic endurance capability due to our sedentary lifestyles. This is so sad!  

It’s clinically proven that exercise can improve productivity, boost energy increase creativity, lower stress, and enhance concentration. When the body is strong, balanced, and fit, our mental constitution can’t help but positively change. 

I hope most people agree ‘exercise is good for me’! You work with a lot of different people, particularly men who want to change their current lifestyle. What do you find is the main barrier to exercise?

What I hear the most is time. ‘I don’t have enough time in my day to exercise’. It’s interesting when I work with my clients and start to unpick this answer. What we usually find is that time isn’t the problem. It’s our perception of time AND our expectation to be able to do everything in equal measure. This comes from our ‘all or nothing’ thinking. All or nothing thinking can land us in a lot of trouble when it comes to finding time.

I was working with someone recently who knew that exercising was going to make him feel better.  Then when I asked him what he was going to do, he said he was going to run 4x per week and try to fit in one or two of the on demand pilates classes I run as well.

Whilst his intentions were great, this was a guy that hadn’t made time for himself in a couple of years, was flat out with work and parenting duties and, knowing his hardcore personality would blow himself out during the first week of training.

We talked about the reality of his situation and how important it was to introduce new habits slowly. To make them so easy that he couldn’t fail. 

So instead of loading him with unrealistic weekly tasks, we started with two weeks of setting the alarm ten minutes earlier than usual and getting up to do 10-minutes of stretching. He also committed to taking his allocated lunch break instead of eating at his desk. We then built up his incremental fitness. As time progressed we continued to up the load.

To this day, he puts his exercise routine first. Because of the slow and steady approach instead of ‘go hard or go home’. He was able to build exercise in to a consistent, habitual routine.

My point? Time is not the problem, often mindset is the issue. Instead, take a step back, start small and build incrementally to form long lasting habits.

You mentioned habits there, how can you build good habits around exercise?

Habits are a big topic. Creating new habits feels like an effort at the start, because it is! You must consciously take new actions repetitively and consistently to rewire the brain until it becomes ‘normal’. The brain is incredible! Once you create these new neural connections, habits start to become unconscious and it often becomes harder to not do it then complete the task.

We need to take this habit forming approach with exercise! When I work with my clients, we start small defining easy changes that they won’t fail at to develop these new habits. Once embedded we expand, 100 little steps lead to a lot of ground covered. My recommendation would be to make sure your target is achievable and before you know it it’ll become part of your subconscious day to day.

Really interesting, I often hear of people being really motivated to exercise and achieve a specific goal. How does motivation fit into all of this?

A few words on motivation - you can’t rely on it! So many of us rely on feeling motivated before we start a project or wellness journey. You might have experienced it yourself, you join a gym challenge, get yourself in the zone, inspired by all the before and after shots of previous winners, head to the health food shop for your quinoa and kale. Motivation is high, alarm is set for 4:30am Monday morning, you’re out of bed and into it by 5:00am. You maintain your motivation for a week, maybe even two. The lack of calories in your salad and smoothie, aching body and no change in the scales despite your efforts slowly wearing you down, by the third week your motivation has slipped, you start pressing snooze, slipping a flat white and pastry back into your morning and by week four, you’ve tapped out.

Motivation is fleeting and has no staying power. It also leads you down the go hard or go home track, which doesn’t bode well for long term change.  In contrast, plenty of us stay stuck in our comfort zone waiting to feel motivated before we take the first step. In my experience, people spend years waiting to feel like it, only to say ‘I wish I had done that when I was younger’.

The message here is to put feelings aside and develop a mechanism to support your exercise regime that relates back to your personal values to help build strong habits.

Take me for example, one of my core values is connection. I love having meaningful conversations, laughing until my belly hurts, helping others, and feeling connected to the people I’m around. Personally, when I don’t exercise, my confidence drops. When I'm not feeling fit, I’m less engaged with the world. So, it’s important for me to exercise as it brings me closer to my values of connection. By moving my body daily, I increase the likelihood of connection with those around me. There are days when I really don’t feel like training, but because I have disciplined myself to act regardless of what I feel like, I still put the effort in and naturally, feel better as a result. I’d recommend all your readers take a moment to reflect on their core values and think about how the benefits of exercise will help them individually. 

I love Ghandi’s quote, ‘The future depends on what we do in the present’. The reality is that tomorrow is your today. Creating a solid discipline will secure your roadmap towards living a healthy lifestyle. Within a matter of months, new habits will be formed, and it will feel odd if you don’t exercise, and what a great day that will be for your body, and your mind. 

Interesting, motivation is definitely the force behind some of our past race sign ups. How I’ve performed on the days does come back to the training habits I built ahead of the race! 

This has been great, before you go is there anything else you’d like to share with us before we finish up? 

One thing to leave you with - Find yourself a Roy.

Around a year into my personal training career, I met a guy called Roy. He was an ex-rugby pro and a machine. When I met with him to discuss his training requirements, he said he wanted me to push him hard in our sessions. After 10-gruelling weeks of boxing, running, rowing and calisthenics he had inspired me so much that I asked him if we could become training buddies. For the years that followed, I had never been fitter. He was 10 years my senior so what I lacked in physical strength, I made up for in youth. We would pick each other up when we were down, sense each other’s mood, sometimes before the other one would. Some days, we left it all out on the gym floor, others we knew to take easier so we could rest and come back strong. We developed a friendship over sweat, dedication, and commitment to each other. There were days when one of us couldn’t be bothered, but we showed up anyway.  During those years, I felt so supported and I know he did too. For over a decade we trained together two to three times a week and still meet up now when I head back to my hometown in England.

If you can find yourself a Roy, your relationship to exercise will change so do yourself a favour. Find a Roy.

Not convinced? Evidence suggests that when you train with someone else, you are far more likely to maintain consistency and discipline. You are also less likely to experience negative self-talk, and self-sabotage. If you want to experience a higher work rate and create a more accountability, then finding a training partner, especially in the early stages of establishing your exercise routine and trying to form new habits.

The thing with exercise is that most people want to do more, yet don’t make the time for it. So, if you can be the one to take the initiative to set something up then you’re doing others a favour too. Time with others AND movement! Happy days.

Thanks so much Anna for your time, some great insights here. We’re looking forward to getting a copy of your new book which you can pre-order here