I love a good framework. I like having boxes I can put ideas into that feel organized.
The one I’m working on now is one I’ve been thinking about and talking about for the past few months. And it’s about the journey toward health and wellness.
I feel like, for myself, I’m in a good place on that journey. And there are a handful of folks I know who are also in really good places on their own journeys. And when I say, “a good place,” what I mean is that they can answer all of the following questions with a “yes.”…
- Do you feel the way you want to feel (energy, strength, endurance, flexibility, performance, etc.) or are you headed in that direction?
- Are you and your doctor happy with your biomarkers (blood pressure, cholesterol, muscle mass, bone density, organ function, etc.)?
- Are you happy? (i.e. do you feel free instead of constrained?)
(You could arguably throw in one more before question 3, which is: do you look the way you want to look, or are you headed in that direction? Body composition – total body fat and total muscle mass – for me falls into the biomarkers in question 2. Aesthetics by themselves are probably not all that relevant to overall health and wellness except for how they can impact confidence, but for many, many people, the impact of confidence is huge, which means for many people, this is an important question too.)
And so here’s how the journey has gone for me and for the folks I mentioned. I’m sure it’s not the only way to think about it. But I’m laying it out here as one possible way to think about it in the hopes that it might be helpful.
Stage 1 – Do anything instead of nothing.
As you might guess, this is where so many people who we work with start, and it’s certainly where I started. Stage 1 is about finally taking action. It’s so easy to get caught up looking for the perfect program: the perfect exercise plan, the perfect diet, the perfect mobility routine, and to get so overwhelmed and/or discouraged that you end up doing nothing at all. The first stage on the journey is to let go of the idea that your plan has to be perfect and to just go do something, anything, to move the needle forward. Eat a vegetable. Walk around the block. Do a squat. It doesn’t have to be big, it just has to start the ball rolling. (Our Bare Minimum Monday blog series is all about this stage).
Stage 2 – Do something consistently.
There is great debate about the “best” health/fitness/wellness approach. The reality is that everything works. It just doesn’t all work for everyone. And none of it works if you try it once and stop. Walking around the block once is great, especially if you haven’t been doing any intentional physical activity at all. But much more effective is walking three days each week. Change takes time. But consistency is how you build momentum and how you build results that compound over months and years.
Stage 3 – Build a system.
Here’s where I think a lot of us imagine the most serious athletes are. This is where we really start to see consistency move into more defined structure and discipline. In this stage, I exercised five days per week without fail. I tracked every single food or drink I put into my body. I stretched for 8-12 minutes per day, every single day. It was four years before I took a break from training that was longer than 48 hours. This is the stage where you “never miss a Monday.”
There are some serious benefits to building a rigid system like this. The consistency is incredibly effective for physical results. If eating vegetables 3x/week is good, eating vegetables 7x/week is better. The discipline you gain carries over into tons of other areas in life. And most importantly, in this stage, you build trust with yourself – you trust that you can do the things you set out to do, even when they’re uncomfortable or you’re the only one in your household or social circle doing them. You trust that you can keep your promises to yourself. You trust that you are capable of doing hard things.
But there’s a dark side, which is that at this stage, although your system is robust, it’s very fragile. If you’re in the car all day and miss your stretching, you feel miserable. If you eat a piece of pizza after completely avoiding “junk food” for 2 years, your digestive system will riot. If you miss a workout, you agonize that you’ll lose all your progress overnight.
Stage 4 – Test the system.
Here’s where I might start to lose some people, because I suspect this next bit might get a little more controversial.
I think that to get out of that fragility, you have to build some resilience. That means your system has to be exposed to less-than-ideal-laboratory-conditions. It has to be stressed. And then it has to survive those stressors.
What does that look like?
At some point, you should skip your mobility. At some point, you should eat a piece of pizza. At some point, you should miss a workout. On purpose.
[NOTE: This is advanced stuff. If you’re in Stage 2, your system might not have taken shape yet, which means it probably won’t stand up to intentionally messing with it. If you’re regularly eating vegetables for the first time in your life, don’t read this and say, “The CrossFit guy told me to go eat pizza instead!”]
After you skip your workout, go back to normal. What you will almost certainly find is that you have lost absolutely no progress whatsoever. I mentioned that I was in Stage 3 for 4 years before I took a break that was longer than 48 hours. When I finally did, I took a full week off. When I came back, much to my surprise, instead of being weaker, I set new personal records on lifts 4 days in a row.
Eat a piece of pizza and notice that your body weight and muscle definition don’t appreciably change. Skip a day of mobility and notice that you haven’t really lost any range of motion; certainly nothing you can’t get back with literally 2 minutes of stretching.
Don’t go wild, but do start to deliberately go off-plan for a day or a week here or there and then come back to normal and examine what has actually happened. What you’ll find is that nearly always, things are still good, even when you’re not as rigid as you once were.
Stage 5 – Freedom.
This is the dream. At least for me. There might be a stage beyond this, but this is the one that I care about (at least right now). And this one, maybe even more than the other stages, is one that I think looks different for everyone.
This is the one where what feels normal to me is working out regularly, hitting specific daily nutrition goals, living life mostly pain-free, having good energy levels, sleeping well, and feeling like I have meaningful relationships, deep connections, and a lot of joy. Importantly here, I also eat foods that I enjoy every day, including foods that in Stage 3 felt absolutely forbidden. I have no fear around having a glass of wine with dinner because a friend dropped by. Or having a milkshake with the kids at the fair because it’s been a long, hot day. Or skipping a workout because we had family visit unexpectedly.
In Stage 5, you still have a system, and it’s a system you operate with high levels of consistency – let’s say 80-90% over the course of a year. But that 10-20% that’s not consistent with your system doesn’t come from “cheat days,” or from regular binges; it’s spontaneous. And because it’s spontaneous, it feels free. And because it feels free, there’s no need for “cheat days.”
Who cares?
If you made it this far (thanks!), this might have just seemed like the ramblings of a small-town fitness coach. But if I’m out in the woods, I always feel better with a map, even if it’s a crude one. So what I’m hoping, is that this might feel like a crude map for some of you.
And I put it together and I share it, because there were a lot of years, where if you had asked me those questions I laid out at the beginning – how do you feel, how are your biomarkers, how are your aesthetics, are you happy – I would have answered all four with “yes,” but I would have been lying about the last one.
But I got to a “yes” on that final question eventually. And it’s my hope that everyone we work with gets to a “yes” on that final question eventually. Because fitness is important. Health is important. Biomarkers and longevity and capacity and range of motion and bone density… all of that is important. But what does any of it matter if you’re miserable?
We do this stuff to make life better, not worse.