Consistency + Simplicity = Excellence (The Weight That Comes Off Stays Off)
Consistency + Simplicity = Excellence
There’s nothing that brings success faster and makes it last longer than being consistent.
“It’s the little things, done repeatedly over a long period of time that add up to big results.” – Darrin Donnelly in Old School Grit.
It takes nothing more than a decision to show up each day, give your best, learn something, apply it and then show up the next day and do it again. It doesn’t matter whether you want to be the number one salesperson at your company, raise wonderful children, become a good guitarist, or lose weight and keep it off.
It’s a pretty simple idea and you’re probably thinking, “Well, there’s nothing earth shattering about that.”
But it’s the thing that trips up nearly everyone.
I hear the frustration when a client only drops a pound in a week but it’s actually great because doing it each week results in a loss of 52 pounds by the end of the year. That’s an amount they’ve only dreamed of losing.
But you have to do it every week for an entire year.
Then you have to maintain it for as long as you want to stay there.
And that’s consistency.
Consistency over time results in excellence. Perfection is its enemy. You’ll never be perfect but you can certainly become excellent. Work hard and don’t get hung up on it because it won’t happen and that’s okay.
It’s a busy world. There’s always “something to do” instead of going to the gym (a convenient and often used excuse). Even a healthy diet made up of delicious whole foods – including dessert and restaurants – is a challenge. If you believe what you see on TV, you can’t have friends or a happy life unless you go out all the time and eat and drink mass quantities of the things that will destroy your progress. Get plenty of sleep? Forget about it. The days of three or four television channels that go off the air at midnight are long gone. Now we have 24/7 TV on hundreds of channels and we don’t even have to wait until something is aired. We can watch it at our convenience on any of the various streaming platforms. Oh, there’s also that thing called the internet.
Even though it’s not complicated, it’s difficult.
But showing up every day and putting in the work will get you anywhere you want to go. Anything that’s worthwhile requires it. No, it won’t always be easy and there will be things you’d much rather do but that’s true of anything that requires work. You’ll make mistakes and think there’s no point going on when, in fact, it’s a learning opportunity that will only make you better, more consistent and, in the long run, more successful.
A single workout, no matter how intense, won’t make you jacked. You won’t wake up ten pounds lighter after a single day of dieting. The twelve hours of sleep you got last night won’t make up for the four hours of sleep you get all the others.
We want this to be as simple as possible, give us the best results we can imagine and make progress the automatic outcome of our everyday lifestyle. Most importantly, we need to be able to enjoy life with friends, family, restaurants, vacations and holidays, and it all needs to fit into our busy schedule.
As the GOAT, Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself said, “I’d say 90 percent — and probably more — of being healthy and fit comes from doing the basics.”
If we can get 90% of the way by concentrating on nothing more than the basics – and doing it consistently – then we don’t need to worry about anything else.
Our goal is to build a healthy lifestyle that’s part of a normal day. It should be seamless. We feel strange if we don’t hit the gym a few times a week and get some exercise. The foods we enjoy each day are made up (mostly) of choices that support our health and weight goals. Hitting the rack around the same time each night and getting plenty of shuteye is nothing more than ordinary.
Health and fitness is like a three-legged stool. We need to prioritize workouts, nutrition and sleep. If we take care of those, consistently, we’ve got it covered. (Yes, stress management and environment are important as the last two members of the fabled 5 Pillars of Fitness but we can get most of the way there with the first three.)
You might have read that a 5-day workout split will give you the best results and allows you to cover each of the muscle groups thoroughly with both compound and isolation moves. And if you can do it regularly, it will.
However, in the real world, sometimes a 5-day split is unrealistic with busy work schedules, the non-stop rush of family events and the distractions that surround us on a normal day. An aggressive workout schedule can be challenging to keep and, when you start missing workouts, it’s psychologically frustrating and throwing in the towel is often the result.
A simpler 3-day split with a schedule that’s much easier to keep is often a better choice. When you’re able to consistently show up to the gym, the psychology does a 180 and starts propelling you forward instead of dragging you down, especially when you see the results start rolling in.
Let’s look at it a different way.
If you have a 5-day gym schedule that’s a struggle to get to more than once a week you’ll workout, best case, 52 times a year. (Assuming you don’t give up and quit because you’re frustrated you’re missing 80% of the scheduled workouts each week.)
If you opt for a more reasonable 3-day workout week you can do 80% of the time, you end up logging roughly 125 workouts per year. It gives you some leeway when things pop up, there’s room to move workouts around and you end up getting in about 2.4 workouts per week. That’s more than double the “perfect” 5-day split.
Which do you think will provide better results and more positive reinforcement?
Simple is consistent and consistent is excellent, every single time.
Proper diet. It’s the biggest struggle and the number one reason we go off the rails and give up. Food should be delicious, always. Eating is a big deal and it should be an incredible experience, every time. You can’t expect to go through life not enjoying the cultural and social aspects of eating and drinking. You’re missing out on one of the most important – and fun – parts of our entire existence.
The fastest way to guarantee you’re consistent with your diet is to make sure you include foods you enjoy eating as well as restaurants and eating out.
Sure, you’ll have some work to do and lessons to learn along the way. It’s important to know how much food to eat each day and the ratio of protein to carbs to fat. You’ll have to figure out how to pick up something on the way home from work or soccer practice and how to enjoy going out to restaurants. Making it simple so you can both enjoy it and look forward to it will give you the best chance of learning how to do it. Once you do, you’ll become consistent and it will contribute to your efforts. That will guarantee the best results.
Going on a draconian diet that excludes entire food groups, promising you’ll starve yourself or thinking you’ll forever go without dessert, restaurants or enjoying holidays is a recipe for disaster. You won’t last long and you’ll join the ranks of the many of us that have experienced the mother of all falling off of the wagons.
Let’s give up the idea that you can be 100% compliant with any diet, especially one that’s unreasonably restrictive, because it won’t happen. It darned sure won’t if you have one that excludes fun and the foods you enjoy. But if the lovely and talented Cindy Crawford can operate on the idea that she’s on target 80% of the time with some leeway the other 20%, then I think that will work just fine for us.
Being a little looser with the targets allows you to have fun and enjoy evenings out. You’ll have the room you need to learn how to stay on track but still enjoy the foods you eat. You’ll be able to have some dessert, explore restaurants and look forward to the holidays instead of dreading them because you can’t control yourself. You have to be consistent but it’s easy to see how anyone would make that trade especially if it promises you’ll have better results and they’ll last.
Just like we saw with our workouts, a diet that ignores real life is almost impossible to maintain. It has a negative psychological impact that encourages you to give up so you can eat the foods you like. A slightly looser approach that embraces the way the world actually works gives us positive feedback, makes consistency much easier and it produces lasting results.
Be consistent. Work at it each and every day, shrug off and learn from your mistakes and remember you have to do it over time. Incredible results will “magically” appear as soon as you do.
Success begets more success and, once you realize you can lose weight while enjoying food, the pounds will really start to melt off.
The last leg of our stool is sleep. It’s the cheapest and easiest way to improve your health. You’ll be shocked at how good you feel when you get a good night’s sleep on a regular basis. It will supercharge everything you do and it’s going to amplify the results of the first two legs.
Lack of sleep is directly related to health issues including increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, reduced immunity and cognitive decline. When it comes to fitness, it leads to increases in cortisol levels and decreases in dopamine. Both of those hormones are directly correlated to fat loss along with stress and happiness. When you’re happier and less stressed, life is a lot more fun. We make better decisions concerning food (and everything else) and our gym performance is enhanced. This always leads to better results.
Studies have shown that 7-8 hours of sleep per night is the sweet spot – with 7 hours being the minimum – for providing excellent health benefits. I’m sure you already have a wake-up time in order to take the kids to school or get to work so it just comes down to setting a regular bedtime and working to hit the sack around then.
If we stick to the old 80% rule, that means we can stay up past our bedtime once or twice and get by with five or six hours of sleep a couple of times a week. (When you start getting plenty of sleep on a regular basis you won’t want to stay up too late anyway.) No fancy ring or watch required. It’s not unreasonable and you’re probably close to that already. It’s easy, old school and provides optimal benefits with minimal fuss.
There’s a reason our moms told us things would look better after a good night’s sleep and that’s because everything looks better after a good night’s sleep.
The whole point of this has been to encourage you to keep working no matter what happens. Understand that, while you can’t achieve perfection, being consistent will make you excellent and that’s what champions are made of.
Life pops up at the most inopportune times. It will here as well. We all have stories about things that went sideways with work, family, school and on all sorts of other occasions. Your health and fitness won’t be any different but since you didn’t quit your job or disown your kids in those instances, there’s no need to throw in the towel in this one either.
Raising kids take years of hard work, building a career or a business is the same. You did those things and enjoyed life, complete with its ups and downs, along the way. This should be the same. If you’re consistent and stick with it, it will make all the difference.
“You’re never a loser until you quit trying.” – Mike Ditka
It all starts with the decision that you’re not going to be deterred and you’ll show up each and every day no matter what happens. Your mistakes will serve as stepping stones along the way and you’ll cement your daily activities into something that provides healthy results automatically.
Does it get any simpler than that?
One perfect workout, a single day of hitting your nutrition targets and a good night’s sleep does nothing unless you use it to set the stage for more of the same.
There's no shortcut to anything worthwhile and that certainly counts when it comes to health. If you want to be good at anything, it requires consistent practice and good, old-fashioned hard work, just like all the other awesome things you’ve accomplished in life. This isn’t any different.
A lifetime of health is made up of a lifetime of healthy habits.
Is there any better definition of consistency?
Regards,
Henry
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