If Your Fitness Plan Only Works When Life Is Perfect, It Doesn’t Work

It’s Wednesday afternoon and your day has completely gotten away from you.

One of the kids is sick. Something came up at work. The workout you planned isn’t going to happen, and dinner isn’t going to look anything like what you had planned at the beginning of the week.

For a lot of folks, this is where one bad day turns into five.

Maybe you think Thursday will be better. Maybe by Friday, you’re like, “I’ll just start Monday and just have a fresh start then.”

This is something I’ve seen play out over and over over the years.

Realistically, life is going to do life things no matter what you do. The problem occurs when you decide that missing one day means the rest of that week, or that month, or that season is a wash.

If your goal is to stay healthy and fit for the next several decades, here are some thoughts for you…

Your Life Shouldn’t Revolve Around Fitness

If you spend time on social media, you’ll think that everybody gets up at 4 am, they never miss a workout, they meal prep everything, they get their steps in, they do cardio and do all this stuff even on vacation, and they’re perfect at it.

It goes without saying that there are exceptions to the rule, but those are the exceptions, and yes, those are the ones you see and hear about.

Most of the people I coach have careers, spouses, kids, practices, games, school events, vacations, work, travel, and a houseful of things that need their attention because the house is going to fall apart at some point. Telling someone that “we have all the same 24 hours” really ignores the reality of the situation:

Their 24 hours and our 24 hours have very different responsibilities.

My goal in working with someone is not to make their responsibilities harder. It’s the opposite. I want things to get a little bit easier as a byproduct of being a little healthier, a little stronger, and a little fitter. I’m not looking to create anxiety around going to a restaurant with your family or trying to control every ingredient in each meal.

There is no doubt that fitness and training should challenge you. Not only does that make you fitter, but that is what makes you more resilient and robust. Not to mention, making meaningful changes to your health requires effort. It requires being uncomfortable.

But ultimately, fitness should support your life, not compete with it.

What Should Fitness Give You?

If you’re busy, whether you’re a parent or not, I think one of the best measures of fitness is how often your body allows you to say yes to whatever it is:

• You want to go on a bike ride after dinner? Do it.
• Your kids ask you to play soccer in the backyard? You go do it.
• You go for a walk with your friends, your spouse, your family, and can relax and have a conversation rather than wondering when it’s going to be done? You go do it.

If we’re being real, you’re never going to match the energy of a 7-year-old. They seemingly have infinite energy. You do not.

But improving your fitness is going to give you more options, and that’s really what you want.

I don’t want your kids or my kids, for that matter, remembering that mom or dad never did anything active with them because they were too tired or physically incapable of doing it.

And the opposite side of that coin is that I don’t want to remember that Mom and Dad were always too busy because they were at the gym, or they were eating a separate dinner, or unable to enjoy a vacation because everything had to stay perfectly to plan.

There’s a middle ground, and that’s where I think sustainable fitness lives.

Consistency and Perfection Are Not the Same Thing

You want to be consistent. You don’t need to aim for perfect.

If you’re doing a nutrition challenge or you have a very specific event or vacation or trip coming up, I could see going with perfect for 30 days or 45 days, but that’s not a plan for the rest of your life.If you’re aiming for perfect, you need to aim for a finite period of time.

Where I see things go awry when it comes to a nutrition challenge or something like that is that, when life interrupts or you get done with the challenge, the question becomes: what happens after?

This is where the concept of consistency is far more useful than perfection.

I often talk to clients about an 80/20 approach or a 90/10 approach. That’s not to say that there’s some magical threshold where 80% adherence guarantees mind-blowing, breathtaking results, but it’s simply a useful way to think about things in the big-picture — real life.

You’re simply looking for most of your decisions to support your goals, but it doesn’t have to be 100%.

If you work out consistently, if you move throughout the day and eat reasonably well and sleep as well as your life allows, then missing an occasional meal or workout, or changing things for a short-term vacation, just happens, and that’s okay.

You are the sum of what you repeatedly do. Not what happened last Wednesday.

Stop Waiting for Monday

When your week blows up, and it’s going to happen… my advice is pretty simple: get back to what you were doing the very next day.

There’s no need to punish yourself for what happened. You don’t need to try to make up three missed workouts in two days, and you don’t declare the rest of the week a complete loss. Go off the deep end and come back to it Monday.

In terms of the weight everything carries: the weight of missing a day and getting back to it the next day weighs a whole lot less than the “I’ll start again Monday” trap.

The main reason this is an issue: once you’ve decided that you’re going to start it for Monday, the rest of the week (however many days it is), the decisions you make are a complete wash, probably in the wrong direction, and make it harder to get back into consistency the next week.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), behavior change is not a linear process. Lapses happen, and it ebbs and flows. A skill you can develop for long-term success is learning how to respond to them without turning a small disruption into completely blowing up the system.

While it might be prudent to say, “Sometimes the best thing you can do is act the next day as though nothing happened,” I actually think most of the time the best thing you can do is act like nothing happened.

A Good Program Has to Fit the Person

This is a place where coaching matters, and it matters a lot.

If you fall off the program, the answer isn’t “more discipline.”

Good coaching is problem-solving. A lot of people want to talk about the small details first, like supplements, fasting, meal timing, or some tiny adjustment to their workout.

I think of these as pebbles and sand questions.

Before we spend time there, I want to deal with the boulders. I want to deal with the things that make the biggest impact for you that we can change and alter to support you and your goals.

It seems that people avoid this stuff because it constitutes making a big lifestyle change that maybe they don’t want to make.It turns out, though, that those answers usually matter much more and carry a lot more weight than another supplement.

Five Years From Now, I Want YOU TO FEEL THIS

Here’s what I want for you, in 5 years, when someone looks at you:

“Yeah, they take care of themselves.”

Maybe they look at you and they say that you exercise and you’re active and you make good food decisions most of the time, and the list goes on.

Or maybe they simply say that, “You just know how to keep going, no matter what.”

In other words, your health and fitness has stopped being another project and has simply become part of your life.

If you’re looking for some help with that problem-solving, creating the structure that allows you to hit your goals but still live your life, email me at [email protected].