How to get in shape in 2026

I was watching football the other day and heard the broadcasters discussing how the winning team was “taking advantage of the opportunities” that presented themselves during the game. Sports and life is about taking advantage of what is in front of you and if there isn’t anything in front of you that’s obvious, you may need to push through or create the opportunity.

We’re heading into a new year. There’s a lot of momentum being built up in our lives going into the new year. Perhaps you’re feeling ambitious, confident, trying to create momentum, trying to change your life somehow? Good. A lot of people are experiencing some motivation to change their exercise and lifestyle habits somehow. Regardless if you’re starting, restarting, or recalibrating it’s important to define the ideal outcome and develop the habits to get yourself there. 

I believe one of the best ways to frame this sort of habit change is to borrow from TJ Kostecky’s 5 P’s for this. In his Vision Training for Life Curriculum in the book “Eyes Up” TJ defines the 5 P’s as follows:

Perceive, Process, Plan, Perform, and Persist. 

We can apply the 5 P’s to the exercise and lifestyle change as follows:

Perceive: Paying attention to how your body and how it’s feeling. Perhaps there’s some external information such as blood work, visual appearance, how you feeling doing things, etc that you’re starting to observe. You’re taking in information about yourself and your body’s state of being.

Process: Take all of that information in and try to understand it. Is something your doctor found or told you important to change? Do I feel less steady, less strong? Is that injury better, worse, or the same? Is there family medical issue that just reared its head or has you uneasy? Whatever the information is, we need to make sense of it so you can go on to P number 3. 

Plan: This can be iterative or fluid. What do you need to do? Get a coach? Walk more? Track your workouts? Cook more meals at home? Adjust your coffee order? Mix in a water? Planning can overwhelming, the point is it’s important to find something meaningful and actionable that you could AND would do. Saying I’ll run a marathon if you don’t run seems aggressive. Consider a 5K or around your town. 

Perform: Whatever you plan to do, just do it. You’ll find things that do and don’t work for you. You also don’t need to go crazy with adding a lot of new things. The new shoes can wait, unless they have no tread because you should replace those. You can get new clothes later. The fitness tracker isn’t mandatory. New supplements and crazy dietary changes aren’t required. The only requirement is you actually getting active.

Persist: Another self-evident one. Just keep going. If you continue to keep showing up and training, you will make way more progress over a long period of time than you realize. Doing 5 days/week really intensely for 1 month then flaming out isn’t the same as 2 workouts/week all year. Like in investing, compounding interest will be your friend. We aren’t training to win the game, we’re training to keep playing the game.

I can tell you from my own experience I’m more upset with myself for the times I was less consistent training than I am from workouts that were ‘bad.’ I’ve started to value the ‘check the box’ workouts a lot more as the years have gone on. I don’t phone it in, but I do value the act of just showing up and working. If you can just do that, you will make progress. Have fun out there.