Whether the goal is to get stronger, faster, or even just a little bit healthier, most people are taking the wrong approach entirely.
They’re obsessed with beating their best.
Their best session. Their best race prep. Their best training cycle.
They’re constantly trying to recreate the magic that led to this “perfect” time.
While that’s understandable, here’s what that actually tends to look like in real life.
Life happened and they missed a Friday training session. Even “worse” (heavy sarcasm on worse), they weren’t going to be able to do their entire long run on Saturday, so they just say “screw it” and take the whole weekend off.
Then Sunday night comes around, they feel bad and go into damage control mode.
They wake up extra early on Monday and do their long run… in addition to the evening gym session they had scheduled. They also run a double on Tuesday in order to pay penance for the missed Friday session. Come the end of the week, they’re a bit behind on work from all the extra training and they miss their Friday session again, which leads to the entire cycle repeating itself.
After a few weeks of this, they say something like, “I don’t know how people do this. I guess I’m just too busy for this right now.”
Then they give up entirely.
This is the exhausting cycle that keeps people stuck for years.
Try to follow some restrictive training plan.
Pay unnecessary penance.
Mess up again as a result of penance.
Try to pay penance again.
Get defeated.
Quit.
It’s exhausting.
What if instead of constantly trying to beat your best, you just started trying to beat your worst?
What if instead of trying to recreate that perfect training cycle from that different time in your life, you just tried to keep beating your worst training days?
That feels a lot more doable.
At our worst we say things like, “I don’t have time for a 12-mile run, so I’m not going to run at all.”
Let’s replace that with, “I don’t have time for a 12-mile run, so I’m going to run 8.”
At our worst we say things like, “I’m too busy to train for a marathon, so I’m just going to sit on the couch and cancel my gym membership.”
Let’s replace that with, “I’m too busy to train for a marathon, so I’m going to train for a 5k and focus on lifting.” Or try tennis. Or go mountain biking. Or buy a set of dumbbells so I can do some strength work at home.
So many of our failures could be avoided if we just stopped aiming for perfect and started aiming for better.
And here’s the great thing: the more you beat your worst, the more your “bad” days start looking pretty damn good.
The floor rises.
And when the floor rises, that’s when you actually develop a consistent training strategy.
That’s how you get results.
Not a constant quest for perfection, but a consistently rising baseline.
Give that a shot this week when things start to go south.