To achieve your fitness goals, show up in the gym and the kitchen
Q What is the most important variable for achieving my fitness, strength and body goals?
A All of them. Achieving your goals is underpinned by the careful interplay of a host of factors, including nutrition, training, rest, genetics, mental wellbeing, individual hormone profiles, your age, gender — yes, for this question it matters — and various lifestyle factors such as the nature of your job, home life, alcohol, smoking and much more.
These all matter. If you want to be stronger but spend all your time on the treadmill you’ll be disappointed. If you train with high intensity and do many of the right things but eat everything you see, you’ll be disappointed. A 64-year old man is not going to respond to exercise and nutrition like a 24-year-old man or a 64-year-old woman.
You won’t achieve your goals and will most likely fall off the wagon if you allow stress and anxiety to affect your mental wellbeing. Does your body metabolise sugar properly? Do you even know? What about sabotaging your best efforts by drinking too much alcohol and playing havoc with your hormones and visceral fat?
What if you go to the gym and do the same thing on the same days, with the same intensity and resistance, for the whole year? You’ll be fitter and stronger than 99% of people reading this, but will you have achieved your goals? If you understand periodisation and progressive overload, you’ll achieve far more.
On the other hand, the overzealous fanatic who jumps into the deep end, squeezing exercise intensity and calorie restriction to the limits from day one, will run out of runway sooner rather than later.
If you’ve never been taught to move properly, such as knowing how (and why) to hinge properly, or squat, or lunge, you risk injuring yourself or perpetuating body imbalances that will find a way to sabotage your progress with debilitating pain just as you start building momentum. A proper coach is worth more than his or her weight in gold
The physiological, biochemical and biomechanical tapestry of achieving strength, fitness and body goals is complex, made apparent by the thousands and thousands of peer-reviewed studies on the same, or similar, things. It is both fascinating and terrifying.
However, that doesn’t mean that striving to achieve your goals will send you into a perpetual cycle of analysis paralysis. Yes, it is complicated and there are dozens of different protocols and training styles, but it’s harder to get it wrong than it is to get it right.
While that may seem counterintuitive, just consider that no-one who didn’t show up ever achieved their goals. If I look back over my own training life, the times when I was the leanest, the strongest, the fittest and the happiest all coincided with the resilience to show up. Even when I didn’t want to.
Yes, I had the trainer. Yes, he took the time to find my imbalances and weaknesses and built a programme aimed at addressing them. He carefully built a plan over many months that took into account the need for periodisation, progressive overload and a focus on improving my movement patterns. We worked across all energy systems and I ate a clean, deliberate and planned diet.
However, none of that would have meant anything had I not shown up, in the gym and the kitchen. At other times, without a coach, and with a more liberal approach to programming, when I consistently stuck to my plan — whatever it was — I got the results. A perfect plan with no consistency is near worthless. An average plan, adhered to through good times, bad times, heatwaves and cold fronts, will yield far superior results than a perfectly designed plan and an ambivalent attitude.
Make that your new year’s fitness resolution: commit to showing up. Keep your big goals, invest in one-on-one training if you can, try different training modalities, but promise yourself that you’ll put in at least 30 minutes on the days you’d rather curl up in a ball and wish away life’s woes, and that you’ll show up in the kitchen and limit your detours through the drivethrough after work.