Fitness is one of the most important things in life for overall health and wellness – and maintaining a regular fitness routine has all sorts of potential benefits, ranging from better medical outcomes, to improved mood, and an enhanced sense of discipline that can help you to successfully pursue and achieve all other goals in your life.

But, there are always certain obstacles that stand in the way of us achieving our fitness goals and dreams. For one thing, there's the issue of motivation and consistency that always crops up whenever we set out to pursue a fitness plan. But, that's not the only factor at play.

In some cases, you might be deeply interested and invested in starting up a fitness routine, and training yourself up to the highest possible level – but are held back by an unusually negative state; whether that means some form of chronic illness, or just an extremely low level of baseline fitness.

It's important to realise, though, that most obstacles can be overcome, and that our fitness goals really can be achieved – no matter how unlikely that seems.

Here are some tips for improving your physical fitness, when you're starting from a pretty bad place.

• Consider starting off by looking into physiotherapy, or other rehabilitative techniques

It's always going to be difficult to follow a fitness plan, and get the most out of it, when you are limited by chronic physical pain, mobility issues, severe muscular imbalances, and health and postural issues that hold you back somehow.

If you find yourself in this kind of situation, the best place to start on your fitness journey will often be to sign yourself up for physiotherapy, and to take that as the beginning of your fitness journey itself – not just as a hurdle you're trying to cross on the way to achieving your fitness goals.

Physiotherapy takes various different forms, and can be useful for all sorts of people, ranging from those who have been involved in workplace accidents, to amputees, to the elderly, to people with exceptionally poor posture.

Any good physiotherapist worth their salt will be able to help to tailor a specific rehabilitation and mobility-enhancing plan to your particular circumstances.

And as you proceed with your physiotherapy, it's almost inevitable that you will find your mobility and capacity for more strenuous forms of exercise growing by leaps and bounds along the way.

• Start as small as you can – ridiculously small, in fact – and focus on developing a fitness habit first

Often, we fail to properly pursue and achieve our fitness goals, in large part because we aim too high at the outset, and end up crashing, burning out, injuring ourselves, and losing motivation as a result.

There's no point in doing the most intense workout in the world, once. Instead, the true path to achieving your fitness goals is to be consistent, day in and day out, and not just to break yourself to pieces every so often in the gym or on the track. You don't have to start big by buying equipment, you can start with smaller fitness gear, click here for the best wrist wrap.

Experts in the art of habit management often tout the benefits of starting a new habit as small as possible. The point here isn't so much to benefit from the habit itself – at least not initially. Rather, the point is to ingrain the habit, and to begin aligning our assorted psychological and emotional systems so as to make it far more likely that we will actually stick with the habit over time.

This is the principal you should apply to your fitness routine, particularly if you're starting from a bad place.

Keep in mind that the aim here really is to start as ridiculously small as possible. That doesn't mean 20-minutes of light jogging a day. It means more like putting on your running shoes, stepping outside of the front door, walking five paces forward, and then going back inside.

After you've kept up the habit for a while, increase the difficulty incrementally. Before long, you'll be doing it for real.

• Strive for balance in all things

If you want to get fit, you have to honour the idea of balance and harmony in all things. In other words, you simply can't expect to knock out a tough, high-intensity training session every day, while eating at a major caloric deficit (and eating junk food to boot.)

Your body is a system that craves balance – balance between strenuous work, and rest and recovery. Balance between burning off energy, and consuming it.

If you want to become the kind of person who can exercise regularly, hard, and effectively, it's essential that you get your rest, recovery, nutrition, and sleep routines in check, too.