I talked to someone this week who told me they’d lost 10 pounds. They were discouraged. They told me, “I’ve been at this for five weeks already! And I don’t need to lose 10lbs. I need to lose 80lbs!”
And I get that. It’s incredibly frustrating when you put in the work and the results don’t come like you want them to. 70lbs is still a long way to go. And if you’ve ever tried to do something hard for 35 days in a row, you know that five weeks can feel like an eternity.
But here’s the thing… it’s only five weeks. As I write this, three months short of my 42nd birthday, I am 2,177 weeks old. Five weeks is less than one-fourth of one percent (0.22%) of my life. It’s nothing.
But when we look at short time horizons like this five-week period, we don’t consider the context of where those weeks fit with the bigger picture.
Which leads to a great truth that many great coaches have observed: people radically overestimate what they can do in 5 weeks, and radically underestimate what they can do in 5 years.
If you have a weight loss goal of 80lbs and you lose 10lbs in five weeks, not many people are likely to notice. But 10lbs in 5 weeks is 2lbs per week. Extending that time horizon a little will reveal that if a person can sustain that pace with consistency, that’s 100lbs in a year.
And this doesn’t just happen with bodyfat. People are discouraged when they only add 5lbs to their deadlift after training it for a month. Even accounting for stalled progress, that training rate, with consistency, can easily add more than 100lbs to the deadlift over 5 years. Same with pull-up progressions. Same with mile-run times. Same with muscle mass.
I know patience is hard. I know we live in a world where if you touch your phone screen in the right places you can get almost literally anything you want either immediately, or within a day or two. It’s hard to wait for five years. But if you’re able to shift your time horizon from something measured in weeks to something measured in years or decades (easier said than done), it can shift a lot of other things too.
Because consistency over five years is the closest thing to real magic that I know of.