Consistency Wins
Consistency wins again. Always.
This is Kristine. She is nothing if not consistent. She works out regularly, does extra skill work, sets goals, and follows through on the work required to get there.
A few months ago, she told me that she had a goal of getting a strict, clean, deadhang chin-up before the end of 2026. We talked quite a bit about what she was doing and how it was working, and then decided that once each month, we would meet for 90 minutes and go through a fairly intense upper body strength session. In between those sessions, she would go to the Y, where she has a membership, once each week and train what we worked on together. I said I had 16 weeks that I thought would help her make a whole lot of progress.
We met for a fifth session at the beginning of her 17th training week, she got warmed up, and then she hopped on the bar, and did one strict, clean, deadhang chin-up. The first of her life. And it was amazing!
And I’d love to say that I am such a brilliant programmer that I came up with a super secret amazing series of workout that got her a chin-up where everything else failed. But it wasn’t all that fancy: upper body pulling movements mixed with upper body pushing movements; main lifts and assistance work; progressive overload. Simple stuff. Really, the secret was what the secret always is: Kristine is consistent.
We set out a plan for her to do 16 workouts: 4 with me and 12 on her own. And then she did them. Roughly once a week.
The thing you do always beats the thing you don’t do. And Kristine put in the work. She showed up consistently. She trusted the process consistently. She followed the plan consistently. And now she can do chin-ups!
I’m not saying here that you too are only 16 weeks away from a chin-up. That’s not the point. Everyone is different. The point is that consistently putting in work is how amazing things happen. It doesn’t have to be flashy. It doesn’t have to be sexy. All it has to be is consistent.
