WHY KNOWING WHAT TO DO ISN’T ENOUGH

Another phrase I’ve heard countless times over the nearly two decades of training people:
“I know what to do. I’m just not doing it.”

And inevitably, when someone says this, the first question that pops into my head is pretty simple:
Why not?

Maybe you do know what to do.
Maybe you don’t know quite as much as you think you do.
Regardless, knowing and doing are two very different things.

I am confident you know the big picture. You know you need to be physically active, and you should:

• Do some cardiovascular work
• Strength train
• Make reasonably good food choices
• Get enough sleep
• Manage your stress
• Drink less alcohol
• Generally move more

And to top it off, we also have more access to health and fitness information than we’ve ever had before.Googling used to be the big thing. Now you can walk over to ChatGPT and have a conversation and say, “Build me this. Answer this question” and move on with your day.

It’s not particularly difficult to find information. And yet, people still come to us and say, “I know what to do. I’m just not doing it.”

Perhaps the easier part is finding the information. The harder part is: what do you do when you have jobs, kids, relationships, responsibilities, stress, a changing schedule, and all the things that compete for your time and attention?

YOU PROBABLY KNOW THE BIG THINGS

If you walked through our doors, my guess is you’re not starting from zero.

You probably know that exercise is good for you and that eating a little better would probably help. You probably know that getting more than 4-5 hours of sleep is a great goal to have.

Where things can probably get fuzzy for you are the details:

• How you should exercise?
• How much do you actually need?
• How much strength training or cardio or CrossFit do you need to fit in?
• What does eating better look like for you?
• What happens when your schedule changes?
• What should you prioritize first?

Your information isn’t wrong. It’s just that your information doesn’t execute itself.

CHANGE HAS A COST

One way I kind of think about behavior changes is like a teeter-totter or like that two-pan scale that you’ll see illustrated in our justice system.

One side is your dissatisfaction with where you currently are. On the other side, your perceived cost of changing.

Maybe you don’t like how you feel, but the thought of getting up earlier is just hard.

Maybe you’re frustrated with your weight, but you’re using the excuse that you just don’t have time.

Or maybe you don’t have the energy that you used to have, but you really don’t want to change what you eat.

On one side is your dissatisfaction with where you are.

A lot of times, you can dislike where you are physically and with regard to your health, but changing still feels heavier than that.

So what happens? You stay right where you are.

Then something happens that changes the balance. Sometimes it’s a gradual thing. Sometimes it’s a doctor’s appointment or a picture or something, but eventually staying the same feels more costly than doing something different.

For me, though, I don’t think you need to wait for something scary to happen before making that change, but I do think it’s worth recognizing that change has a cost and that pretending it doesn’t isn’t particularly helpful.

So then the next natural question is:
How can we make the change easier to start and easier to continue?

MAKE THE THING YOU WANT TO DO EASIER

One of my favorite ways to think about improving follow-through is to reduce the amount of friction between you and the behavior you want.

I call it start energy.
I think I stole the term from somewhere…

If your workout clothes are already sitting out when your alarm goes off, that’s one less decision you have to make at 5:00 in the morning, and you just get up, change, and go.

If you have a gym that’s five minutes away from your house, that’s way easier to get to than if it’s 35 minutes away.

If there’s food in the refrigerator that you can quickly heat up and eat, making a reasonable food choice becomes easier than if every meal requires starting from scratch.

It’s not exciting. It’s not the next amazing thing that social media influencers are telling you to do.

It’s boring.

It’s consistent, and it’s based on the idea that you want to make the stuff you want to do as easy as possible and the stuff you don’t want to do more challenging.

Your environment doesn’t guarantee what you’ll do, but you can alter it to bias toward human nature.

And when you’re trying to build something that lasts, easier matters.

MOTIVATION GETS YOU STARTED. WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THAT?

It’s a lie to think that motivation is not a thing.

We signed up for a gym, and you’re excited. You buy new shoes, you clean out your pantry, and you schedule all your workouts, and you’re good to go.

Use it!

The mistake is wrapped around the idea that you built your plan based on the idea that you’re always going to feel this way.

But you’re not.

Take myself, for instance. After almost 27 years of some sort of structured training program, there are weeks I’m excited to go do the thing, and there are weeks where I just don’t want to do any of it.

Here are some things that you can alter to make sure that you continue to do the things that you said you wanted to do:

• Alter your environment to support your habits
• Create a structure, both for your program and for everything else
• Make sure your habits support your structure
• Make sure you have accountability built in with other people
• Make sure you have things as simple as possible
• Make sure there’s a community there to support you

When your motivation goes, and it will happen, these things give you something to fall back on.

Well, the expectation is not that you wake up every morning desperately excited about exercise. You do need to have something that lets you know that Tuesday at 5:30 is when you work out.

SOMETIMES YOU NEED TO CHANGE THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU

I had a mentor say this to me, and it was one of the more profound things that stuck with me:
You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.

This is not to say that you need to abandon every friend who orders a beer or file for divorce because your spouse doesn’t want a meal prep. But I’d be lying if I said that the people around you don’t affect what you actually want to accomplish.

Think about these differences…

• “Why aren’t you drinking?” vs “yeah, I don’t drink either”
• “Come on, just skip it” vs “see you at the gym tomorrow”
• “Missed you at the party last night” vs “missed you at the gym this morning”

The merits of eliminating an entire friend group are beyond the scope of anything that I know with regard to accomplishing a goal you have, but what I can tell you is that you are the sum of the five people closest to you.

And if those people want you to eat a certain way and drink a certain way and keep certain hours, and you have other goals, you might need to make a change.

This is why I think having a community of people who are also health and fitness conscious is such a powerful thing.

You’re changing your normal.

“I DON’T HAVE TIME”

I’ve talked to people who have incredibly demanding schedules and really have no time for anything else.

Sometimes a lack of time is legitimate, and other times, for most of the rest of us, it’s not really a question of “I don’t have time.” It’s a question of “I haven’t figured out how to allocate time for this yet” or “I haven’t decided if I want to allocate time to that yet.”

These are very obviously different.

If you were going to do a very honest time audit of what happens in your day-to-day and do that for a week, I’d be willing to bet you found some time in there to be active, to prep a little food, to take a walk.

What would you be replacing? Maybe mindlessly scrolling on your phone? Maybe streaming the next three episodes of your favorite show?

You don’t have to eliminate everything you enjoy, and I’m not saying you need to do that. What I am saying is that fitness is supposed to support your life, not consume it, but if something is important to you, it’s worth being honest about where your time is actually going.

How do you do a time audit?
List the things you do and the time of day you do it. You could do this hour by hour or every 30 minutes. It’s totally up to you.

But here’s what I need from you. I want you to be honest with what you’re doing and when you’re doing it, because I think you’ll find you have pockets of time to do the things that you know you want to do because they support your goals.

You’ll probably find one of two things:

1. You may find that you genuinely don’t have time in your schedule, and it is just, in fact, that packed
2. Or, and this is more likely, you may discover that you have 2 to 4 45-minute windows you didn’t realize you had that you could allocate to your goals

In either case, you have information that’s useful to you.

ACCOUNTABILITY ISN’T SOMEONE YELLING AT YOU

When you hire a coach or trainer, it’s not someone standing over you making sure that you behave. That’s not how it works.

It can be, but I don’t think most people would like that.

Good coaching or training or accountability isn’t “Hey, you screwed up again.” It is, “Okay, let’s talk about what happened.”

“You said you were going to train three times this week, and you trained once. Why is that?”

“You plan to bring lunch to work and ended up eating out four days this week. What happened?”

“You wanted to get to bed earlier, but you didn’t. What got in the way?”

Good coaching and accountability give us the opportunity to help you figure out how to solve the actual problem that’s holding you back.

YOU STILL HAVE TO DO IT

I can’t do your workouts for you. I might like to because I enjoy working out, but I can’t do it for you.

I’m also not going to follow you home and hit food out of your hand and tuck you into bed, hide your phone, and drag you into the gym every morning.

…I might end up in prison.

At some point, you still have to execute, and this is why I see coaching as a shared responsibility.

I can help you create structure and simplify things, bypass obstacles. We can measure and make adjustments. But you still have to make the decisions, and you still have to get up and do the work.

Here’s the best part: you, yes you, can do the work.

THERE ISN’T GOING TO BE A PERFECT TIME

This is maybe one of the bigger lessons I’ve learned watching people make changes over the years: there’s always a reason to wait.

Eventually, though, you realize that there is probably never going to be a stretch of your life where nothing gets in the way, so you just need to start anyway.

It’s not enough just to know. If it were, I probably wouldn’t have a gig.

This whole thing is about finding a way to turn the information either that you have or that your trainer has, and turning it into something you can actually do.

Want to help with that? Email me at [email protected].