“Building fitness is like saving money. You need to make small, regular deposits”

I love this quote and have played it back to many people over the years. But what does it actually mean?

I take a number of things from it.

In the first instance simply that you need to be consistent over a period of time if you want to make progress. As you start to move more and train your body it makes many physiological adaptations but these do not happen over night. If you do something often however the body listens and adjusts to what’s now required of it and you get fitter and stronger.

Secondly, learning new skills takes time. If for example you have decided to play tennis you will not master a forehand over night. Similarly you will not pedal as efficiently as a pro-cyclist if you start cycling. Movement patterns take a while to be absorbed and memorised. One of the things I adore about sports is that they can offer a lifetime of learning. You will probably never play tennis to the level of Roger Federer or Serena Williams but relative mastery of something can be enormous satisfying both physically and mentally. There is always something to work on. As you practice these skills you continue to build fitness day by day, week by week.

Thirdly small amounts of practice are usually better than trying to do longer harder sessions. Not only do we practice more often and in a fresher state but It has been proven that we learn when we sleep offering further opportunities to ingrain movement patterns after each session. Indeed if you are a total nerd like me you can also practice visualisation techniques and pedal in the peloton with Chris Froome, run in the pack with Mo, or virtually rally with Rafa. Most top professional sports women and men practice visualisation.

Of course if you do something most days you need to take care not to over do it in terms of the duration or intensity of the exercise. I will tackle the question of how much exercise to do in a future blog post but I think it’s common sense to most that running 10K as hard as you can every day is likely to be counter productive for anyone. For the more serious athlete - getting their recovery right, particularly as they get older is one of the greatest barriers to success. For others just starting out, getting enough rest is probably not the main issue.If you can nail your exercise programme so that it offers regular, interesting, fun, play like activity you will find you have a wonderful companion for life. A fit, strong, flexible body that amazes you with what it can do and gives you more options to explore through life.