How The 2-Day Rule Changed My Life
By: Medha Kulkarni
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Hacking, Self Help, Fitnessmotivation, Productivity

How The 2-Day Rule Changed My Life

And how it can change yours

Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash

If you’re anything like me then growing up you hated rules. No TV until you finish your homework, 30 minutes of reading before bedtime. I hated the rules. I saw them as an assault to my free will, and I vowed that when I grew up I would do things differently. I was pretty certain my life would look like a lot like Almost Famous, but as it turns out, maybe our parents were right.

There’s one rule in particular that I can credit to being the most influential in my own life. It helped me to start working out and it’s empowered me to create a consistent fitness habit for the first time in my life. A decision which according to researchers, has extended my life expectancy by at least 3.5 years

Our brains are good at thinking but terrible at remembering. This is why it is easy to get excited about building a new habit and just as easy, to completely forget about it the next day. You know what I’m talking about, right? Have you ever had a brilliant idea after getting into bed and decided not to write it down? You felt the pain of waking up the next morning scrambling through your brain trying to find the file with the idea on it. But it’s gone. It was an idea that was so brilliant it would’ve changed the world, and you just…forgot. You didn’t write it down.

Our brains possess amazing computing powers and split-second decision times but we’re biologically programmed to get distracted. We all struggle with degrees of addiction. From social media to caffeine, to television or food, left to our own devices we will pretty much do anything but the right thing, despite our best intentions. Why? Because it’s easier and provides an immediate and instant reward.

If we never set rules for ourselves we are simply letting our current feelings, desires, move our path out of alignment.

If we decide to take control of our lives, if we focus on what we value most and create a set of rules to live by they can be a powerful way to regain control of both our personal and professional lives in a way that we could never imagine. No one who has ever achieved success as an author, filmmaker, artist, has gotten there without setting some kind of rule or system for their lives. To make it as a pro, to write a book, or even to overcome a bad habit or addiction, requires what Stephen Pressfield calls The resistance. In his book, The War of Art Stephen writes ‘Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.’ Resistance shows up in many forms, procrastination, doubt, the voice in the back of your head asking ‘who do you think you are to do this?’

The only antidote is consistency. Showing up day after day and putting in the work. Make no mistake, it is a war.

Throughout high school and my entire twenties, no matter how much I tried I found it impossible to build a habit of working out or doing any exercise consistently. All the noise around working out in popular culture and media is centered around weight loss. My weight was never an issue and maybe that’s why I didn’t think I ‘needed’ to work out. I joined gyms, made accountability pacts with friends for running, but no matter how much I tried something always got in the way. Classes, hangovers, the new season of my favorite show, something else was always more important. But then I turned 30. A hangover which would last a few hours, now lasted two days. I slept poorly and was always exhausted. I knew I had to make a change.

I took a good, hard look at myself and admitted that what I called ‘valid reasons’ for not working out, were just excuses. And were complete bullshit. If out of 24 hours, I couldn’t even commit to 1 hour of exercise a day, I was the problem. This was about my life, my health, and my future. After 10 years of trying to work out, and trying to get fit, I finally implemented the 2-day rule.

So, what is the two-day rule?

It's simple, I would not allow myself to take off more than one day in a row for some kind of workout. Be it yoga, a hike, or 20 pushups on my bedroom floor. I had to do some kind of physical activity at least every other day. This allowed me to take days off as I needed it, often multiple days a week, but it kept me committed to my goal and most importantly it prevented me from falling into a slump and neglecting my health for weeks, or even months at a time. It’s so easy to take a break, saying ‘just this one time’ but then that snowballs into 3 days, a week, a month, and so on.

The 2-day rule is realistic.

If I didn’t stick to this then it meant that I just didn’t want to work out. Allowing myself time off meant that I could no longer use Netflix, chores, or a crazy workday as an excuse. Even just 10 minutes of cardio in the park counted as progress. It meant I’d followed through the commitment to myself.

I hated gyms, I hated running, so I decided on Yoga. Living in Berlin meant that I had loads of options, near my home and my work. My cue was getting out of work. I’d head to the nearest studio for a 1-hour class. I was still home with enough time for making dinner, cleaning up, and reading. Within 4 months, I noticed that I was bending deeper, able to hold poses longer, and was slowly beginning to see some definition in my arms. This was more progress than I’d ever seen in the last 10 years. I now reached a stage where I found it more difficult to skip a day of yoga than to not.

It’s been about a year now I’ve added calisthenics to my routine. I don’t know why I ever said working out at home was impossible. I still have bad days, days when I’m unmotivated, or sick, or suffering from awful menstrual cramps. It’s just part of life, even elite athletes have these days, and even they take breaks. It could be more than 2 days now but implementing this rule right in the beginning, helped me to cement the habit and stay committed 80% of the time. Following through with just this one rule has had an immediate ripple effect. I sleep better, I find it easier to focus and interestingly I find it easier to eat healthily most of the time now. This one single habit has transformed my body and my life.

Changing how you think about rules is the key here.

Rules do not limit your life, instead, setting the right rules based on what you value in your life can help you to live the life you always imagined.