Hi there!
Hope your weekend is going well.
I’ve had a bit of an off-week. Maybe it is just that my brain’s stalled a bit and needs a bit of a break. I keep thinking about a few problems and I am not able to get a handle on them. Sometimes, distancing helps.
Smart people say the art of thinking by not thinking. I don’t know what it means but it sounds smart. Let’s see if rambling about it helps :)
Anyway, on to the 3 things for today.
setting unrealistic goals (or) here’s a few better goals for you.
training is not isolated from life but a part of life.
everything is right. but apparently, everything is also wrong.
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when I lose these 10 kilos, everything will be fine
Setting arbitrary goals based on what someone else’s result was without understanding the work they put in, their personal situation, their body, your personal situation, your body - it just leads to bad things.
I want to lose 10 kilos in 3 months
I want to put on only 5 kilos of muscle
I want to deadlift triple bodyweight
I want to enter the CrossFit games
To be clear, it is not that you cannot do any of these. Well, maybe except for the CrossFit games one. But by setting arbitrary goals, even arbitrary timelines, and worst of all, stupid ways of trying to get there, we shoot ourselves in the foot.
Is this goal something you really want? Something that will change things about you? Or is it just something that you hear all around you and so you assume that's what you want.
That’s an important distinction we need to understand.
It almost happens because one day the fog lifts and we see that we’ve been blind to our health and fitness. So, while it comes from a good place, it does not automatically make the thought process or goal-setting good.
You are a sum of your habits. Or as Coach Dan John says, you are what you ate.
You didn't move enough. You ate too much junk and not enough real food. And slowly but steadily, it has led you here. If you think rationally and sensibly, you will realise that to undo it is to get to mostly healthy habits, and not a drastic change overnight. You know that you need to do things over the long-term.
But you are not being rational.
You want quick results. You want to move on from where you are, and you want to do that RIGHT NOW.
So, you do a crazy diet. But 8 weeks later, you are definitely closer to your goal. But you are crankier and you cannot wait for this to stop. So, you stop. You've been thinking about eating that special thing you like to eat, or all the beer you've missed. And all this dieting and exercising has taken some time off from work, and you spend more time working. In 3 months time, you are back where you were before the diet!
I've seen this happen too many times.
Here’s my recommendation.
We cannot go from zero activity to daily. We cannot go from 20 beers a week to 0 (should we ever go to zero and other philosophical questions can be ignored for now). Okay, let me rephrase. We CAN totally do this. We should not.
Timeline. Set yourself a longer timeline. An arbitrary one is to give yourself 10% of the time taken to bring yourself into this situation. For me, I wanted to get fit at 26, after having never been fit and actively worked on making myself unfit for 7 years. So, that means anywhere from 8 months to 2.5 years.
Milestones. While I wanted to run 21k, my running group saved me here. Every week, I ran 1 mile more than the previous week. Small, steady wins.
Consistency over maximum. Do not aim for 100/100, whatever that means. Instead, aim for 80/100 for 25 days of the month.
Let's get a bit more practical and specific with this, shall we. Answer the following 4 questions.
How many cups of vegetables are you eating today?
How many portions of protein are you eating today?
How many hours of sleep are you getting daily?
How many days a week do you get 45 minutes of activity?
And specifically for activity, because that’s where a lot of us start, here’s 4 milestones. Like some maps say “not drawn to scale”, these are not perfectly split milestones i.e. some are much harder than the other. The jump between 3 and 4 is particularly large, FYI.
15 minutes of walking daily
an hour of walking 3 days a week
an hour of walking 6 days a week
3 days of strength training + 3 days of walking, every week
If you’d like to read the full post, here you go.
training is not isolated from life
When I was younger, I looked forward to daily and weekly progress at the gym. And it would happen. Because I was in my 20s and I was just starting off. There was just so much time and passion and motivation around then. Sleep was never an issue. My goals were singular - kick ass at the gym. But as I got older, I realised that training is not isolated from life. I still forget this sometimes, and this was a good reminder. For both me and Neil, it was a light-bulb moment.
One of the best parts of my job is conversations with the people who train with me. Almost every time, it is a learning opportunity for me. Plus, the coaching advice I end up doling out is almost always relevant to me as well. Except it is much easier to see the truth when it is someone else.
At The Quad, we have a quarterly training cycle. We introduce new skills, accumulate volume, build a base for the first half. And then we intensify things for the second part of the cycle. The ultimate goal is to benchmark where we are towards the last week of the quarter. Then, take a week off. Repeat.
As part of the training session, I ask my students to share their training log with me at the end of the class. This is a great opportunity to continue the conversation, as well as developing the habit of writing down what you did.
One of my students, let's call them Neil (not his/her real name), sent me their numbers (training log) for the day and was comparing it to something from a few weeks back, remarking that it had taken them the past few weeks "to get back to square one".
Obviously, said with a tone of disappointment and self-reproach and all that.
except...
Except Neil had missed two of the press days (we press only once a week; most press programmes have you press 3 times a week) over the past few weeks.
Neil had been pulling a few all-nighters at work. In addition to managing a crazy transition over the past few months as most of us have, due to the pandemic.
In addition to doing all that one needs to do in life - pets, kids, family, friends and all that.
So, here's what I told Neil. And it is something I should be reading/following closely as well. Maybe you do too.
one piece
As Coach Dan John is fond of remarking, the body is one piece. If you are happily doing a seated press and I come in and poke your foot with a fork, you are not gonna be happy and will quickly realise what he means by the body is one piece.
Similarly, our training is not isolated from our lives. We cannot view the weights we lift or the distance we run or the times we set based on a random, misguided sense of "oh it needs to be better than last time".
Yes, you are putting in the effort. That's wonderful. You are showing up to the gym. That's definitely applause-worthy, at a time like this when work is nuts.
But look at the overall picture. Effort is not just what you do at the gym. Effort is how much sleep are you getting, how's your stress, how much fun are you having, is the crazy dialled down across the rest of your life?
We all want to kill it at the gym, whatever that means. That's missing the point. And that's setting us up for disappointment.
Expand. Look at the larger picture.
Your body is one piece.
Your life is one whole.
It will wave up and down. It matters what goals you set. It matters that you recalibrate the timelines based on what life throws at you.
You can read the full post over here.
Everything is right. But remember, everything is also wrong
If you read everything and don’t process it for your context and understand what context/baggage comes with what you are reading, being muddled is often the result. The world of fitness and nutrition is a good example, but this applies to life all-to-often.
Low-carb is the way to go. No, low-fat is the way to go.
Strength training is the best method to train. No, strength training gets you injured.
Zumba and Pilates are awesome. Zumba and Pilates suck.
Cardio is the best! Cardio is limited and one-dimensional.
Don't ever eat sugar again. Make sure you eat your favourite foods.
Right! Where does this leave you? And to make it worse, even life does not have a simple playbook.
There are times when you should act immediately. There are times when you do need to procrastinate and gather more information to play a waiting game.
There are times when you need to quit your job and do what you want to do. There are times when you need to grow up and do what you need to do, and not what you want to do.
If you keep listening to the world, to everyone's opinion, even if it is "real research", it will get confusing. Eventually, you have to figure it out for yourself. Not every right thing will work for you, for example. Strength training works for me, and it works for a lot of people that I work with. But there are also a lot of people who did not fall in love with it and don't work with me anymore. Running worked for me.
It is okay to do the wrong thing. Because it might get you to the right thing.
It might not be okay to do the wrong thing because it can hurt you.
There's no right or wrong. There's no either-or. Sometimes there is. Sometimes there is not.
We need to figure things out for ourselves. We need to listen to advice. We need to process it. We need to find clarity. We need to contextualise. Sheesh, this life thing is not easy eh!
If you’d like to read the full post, do head over here.
And that’s it from me. Thanks for reading/listening. You have a great day, and I’ll see you next weekend! Side note - on Sep 19, we are having The Quad’s Sports Day, an annual event with our community to celebrate the joy of fitness.
