Why First Impressions Matter - In Relationships And In Fitness

Jul 16

first-impression-feedback-loop-fitness-health-success

Takeaway Points:

First impressions seem like they shouldn’t matter very much, but are in reality a crucial make-it-or-break-it moment for developing an interpersonal relationship.
Likewise, initial experiences when taking up a new habit, learning a new skill, or deciding to get into shape, will have larger-than-expected effects in terms of your long term success.
Learning to manage your first steps is an incredibly important skill to learn. Initial successes set you up for more success, and initial failures set you up for more failure.

When I was a kid, I was never into exercising. I was always the kid who wanted to read a ton of books and play a ton of video games, not the kid who wanted to throw baskets or pass footballs. In school gym classes, I’d struggle to do one pushup or one pullup while the other boys in class mocked me. Sheepish, I took the easy way out - doing slow, lazy laps around the gym while the other boys showed off what they could do. I decided I wasn’t any good at that stuff, and I quit.

Nowadays, I wouldn’t hesitate to argue that I can probably do more pullups or pushups than everybody I went to school with.

When my dad started developing blood pressure issues, he decided to start working out a lot more consistently - and that meant that he would often try to take me along. He played racquetball at the local YMCA, and tried to get me interested in it as well - he enrolled me in a league in which I promptly lost every single match. I never played racquetball again.

My dad also tried to take me running. We lived in a neighborhood of a suburb where all the main streets were 1 mile square, making it easy to know how far you were running. Our house was roughly on one point of that square, while the grocery store was at the next - so a run to the grocery store and back was a simple 2 miles. My father took me along on a run and back. By the time I got back I was drenched in sweat, half-dead from trying to keep up with my dad, and forced to walk a significant portion of the last half mile. The next day was the first time I ever remember being sore from exercise, and it sucked. Later my parents would push me to join the high school track and cross country teams, but, after a couple years of thoroughly mediocre at it, I gave up entirely.

It wasn’t until I dealt with depression and anxiety in my later high school years, and discovered my love for lifting weights, that I really came to actually experience a side of exercising that could be truly fun and exciting. Up until that point, I had spent most of my life thinking of exercising as something punishing and exhausting.

I think about this a lot, because it says a lot about the outsized effect of early experiences.

On the surface, first impressions shouldn’t matter much at all. After all, we’re all remarkably unique and interesting people in our own ways, and the sum total of a human being is worth a lot more than the words, facial expressions, body language, and so on that we use when first meeting another person. So why do we care so much about first impressions?

We care about first impressions, because very often we’ll never get a second one. On a first date, you may not feel comfortable or fully capable of expressing all the things about yourself that you want to share. We’re all made up of good bits and bad bits. But if I spent a first date talking entirely about all of the worst aspects of my personality, I’ll never get a second date. We use that first impression as a sort of general sample of a person’s appearance and personality - we assume that the rest must be somewhat more of the same. If that first impression is a bad one, my unlucky date will likely decide that I’m not worth the effort to learn more about, and I won’t get a second date.

So we all care a lot about first impressions, because while they may not actually be very representative of our personalities, we know that they have the crucial power to enable (or disable) the continuation of that personal relationship. We always try to put the best possible version of ourselves out there for that first impression, because we know that we may never get a chance to make a second one. In this way, first impressions are an important critical “make it or break it” moment.

I think a lot, also, about the concept of the feedback loop and how it applies to human behavior.

A feedback loop is any kind of system in which the input of that system is also the output of that same system, and the output is more than the input. In this way, the output can be fed back into the input, and the system can grow tremendously quickly. The most well-known example of the feedback loop occurs when you put a microphone next to the speaker, and any noise put into it quickly becomes a screeching mess. The input of the system (sound) is sent to the microphone, and the output of that system (the same sound, louder) is created by the speaker - when you put the microphone near the speaker, this means that any sound put into it will be put into this endless feedback loop where it increases the volume of the noise indefinitely (or at least as much as the speakers are capable of).

The point of a feedback loop is that it’s a kind of self-reinforcing amplification. Like a rolling snowball that gathers more snow and thus quickly grows larger and larger, it’s hard to stop.

Human behaviors function in a similar way, in the form of habits. We perform a behavior - if we like that behavior, then this reward makes us want to do this behavior more, and so it eventually becomes a habit. If we perform a behavior and we don’t like its outcomes, then, much like in the way that the first impression matters the most, we may simply decide to discard that behavior and never attempt it again.

My eyes were long ago opened to feedback loops and their importance in fitness success by Dick Talens, who opened my eyes by arguing that feedback loops, and not willpower, are actually the key to success. Likewise, I remember some throwaway bits in my personal trainer certification’s textbook, in which they listed the indicators of likely future success in a fitness program.

Among the most important is past success in a previous fitness program - if you succeeded in the past (and thus had a positive experience with meeting fitness goals) then you’re significantly more likely to succeed in the future. What I didn’t think of at the time is the corresponding opposite - that bad experiences, like bad first impressions, can put people off of something forever, or at least for a very long time.

I don’t think this applies just to taking up a health and fitness habit, either - as I’ve written before, fitness is a skill, and this means it shares a lot of similarities with the standard process of skill acquisition and mastery. If I have a very hard time when first trying to learn a new language, for example, I’m more likely to quit than to stick it out for the long term and see if it ever really clicks.

I think back to a lot of those “first impression” moments of my own relationship with fitness. I was often thrown into fitness situations where I wasn’t any good at the task I was given, and more importantly, no effort was made to tailor the challenge of that task to my actual skill level at the time. Many educational approaches are more of a “one size fits all”, and those who don’t succeed are simply labeled as failures for not having managed.

In my case at least, I wasn’t a failure - I simply hadn’t been given appropriately challenging tasks to enable me to see the fun in it, and it ended up taking me a long time to figure out, on my own, the kinds of activity that I liked, and to learn to adapt the difficulty to suit my skill level so that I could start from the beginning and focus on progressing from there.

I know plenty of clients who have had terribly negative experiences with health and fitness as well, and this has had a significant impact on their lives. It is well known that fat people are often shamed for their weight by their doctors, or given worse medical care because their health problems are automatically assumed to stem from their weight. I know of plenty of people, like myself, who had early experiences with fitness that wasn’t fun or appropriate - but in many cases, this meant that they absolutely never ended up finding fitness fun.

Certainly, being a fitness fanatic isn’t for everyone - but I can’t help but feel that gruff, one-size-fits-all approaches, like the bad impression you can give on a first date, have a larger impact on the adoption of healthy habits than we’d like to admit. Positive experiences follow positive ones, and negative experiences follow negative ones - so those who start off with positive, reasonably challenging fitness experiences, are far more likely to succeed in the long run. I think that if we had a lot more supportive attempts to reach people where they’re at, we’d probably have a much more active population than exists today.

To me, this also helps to explain the popularity of the often-maligned “30 day fitness challenges” which are so popular with the average exerciser, yet so mocked by fitness professionals. These 30 day challenges are often laughably bad, in terms of the actual structure of the program. They, too, are often more one-size-fits-all than is ideal, and the fact that they’re limited to 30 days means that they aren’t likely to help you build a sustainable, long-term habit.

But at the same time, these challenges are in many ways designed to be practiced by exercisers with little to no ability - couch to 5k, for example, is popular in part because it’s a short-term running program, with an achievable and realistic goal, which is directed specifically at people with zero experience whatsoever. One could equate it to the popularity of Starting Strength, a strength program intended for beginners - and it’s so popular (and ultimately limited in terms of progression) that I’d say that the majority of the strength-focused clients I’ve received have maxed out on it before seeking coaching and better guidance in order to figure out a long term strategy. Many of the other popular fitness programs circulating the internet are aimed at beginners, and are popular for just this reason.

This is also why many first time gym goers don’t last very long in the gym. They are given zero guidance whatsoever, get intimidated by the sheer amount of equipment and number of people who look like they know what they’re doing, and then ultimately either spend all their time on the treadmills or quit entirely.

Many new gym goers are set up to fail, and that means that their failure isn’t their responsibility, but rather a failure of the gym system.

As a coach, my duty is to help create positive initial experiences for clients, and to guide and empower them on the way to success. As an exerciser, a learner, or just someone trying to pick up a new skill, you should focus on trying to develop a strategy that enables you to make meaningful progress without finding your initial steps to be too challenging (as taking up any new skill will be). Managing that initial experience is key, in the exact same way that making a good first impression can go a long way towards establishing meaningful human relationships.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging for 5+ years, coaching for 6+ years, and lifting for 12+ years. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around powerlifting and bodybuilding.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cat or feeding his video game addiction.

Follow Adam on Facebook or Twitter, or subscribe to our mailing list, if you liked this post and want to say hello!

Enjoy this post? Share the gains!

Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter