Please take a second and answer this question for me…
What’s the thing that’s most likely to derail your progress over the next few days?
Is it some afterschool play about turkeys that’s scheduled for when you’d usually be training?
Maybe it’s the gigantic dinner most of us are about to eat in three days (or the ensuing two weeks of leftovers).
If you’re like most people, something is going to come up in the next 5-6 weeks of the “holiday season” that will force you to alter your plans.
So this is just an honest check-in.
What’s most likely to throw you off your game in the near future?
By simply taking a second and considering the answer to that question seriously, you’re already light-years ahead of most people.
Here’s how most people approach this whole fitness thing:
- Find a plan (either from a coach, ChatGPT, or making one up)
- Start strong and follow it perfectly… until life happens
- Get thrown off by some stressor or trigger (usually the same one that threw them off last time)
- Feel guilty for “messing up”
- Swear to start again Monday (or next month… or next year…)
- Repeat
That’s the pattern for most people.
That was the pattern for me.
Until I decided to start preventing the things most likely to set me off track instead of constantly doing damage control.
In order to do this, we first need to be a little more proactive in our thinking.
Instead of waiting for something to come along and screw up our progress, we should start looking ahead as to what might throw us off track in the first place.
Every week we should ask “What’s most likely to derail me this week… and what can I do to prevent it?”
Let’s say you tend to miss your strength training every other week because your Thursday meeting often goes long and you aren’t able to fit a trip to the gym between work and picking up your kids.
I mean, first question I would ask would be… can you just tell your co-workers that this meeting doesn’t need to last that long?
I know.
Probably not.
Yet it’s possible everybody else hates it as much as you do and nobody’s done anything about it just because everyone’s so accustomed to the Thursday meeting going long that they just continue to let it go long.
It always surprises me the amount of dumb shit we continue to do just because “that’s the way we do it.”
You could be the savior of the office who stops this nonsense and gets everybody to go home on time.
But let’s assume your boss is kind of a dick and you’re unable to speak up without getting fired.
Can you move the gym to a different day of the week?
Can you buy some equipment for your house so you can lift a bit later?
Can your kids join you at the gym?
There are probably 5-10 simple things you could try in order to get around your Thursday meeting problem.
You just have to start thinking preventatively.
And here’s the thing…
If you do the prevention thing and manage to string together 4 weeks of good strength training, then that’s something to celebrate.
Most people only celebrate the big, dramatic milestones – like fastest times or longest distances.
But the real progress happens on all of the “normal” days – the days when simply nothing goes wrong.
Days where you stayed consistent.
Days where you didn’t spiral.
Days where you followed through.
All of those are wins.
The people who tend to hit their goals are just the people who stay consistent long enough to make the goals all-but inevitable.
So here’s a challenge for today:
- Identify the thing most likely to screw up your progress this week.
- Ask yourself “How can I prevent that from derailing me?”
- Celebrate every day where nothing goes wrong.
That’s how you really start to create progress, one small preventative decision at a time.
If you happen to be in the US, I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving.
And if you’re interested in having some help with your training, let me know.
Unlike seemingly everybody else on the internet, I refuse to participate in black Friday, but I do have some openings for coaching and would be more than happy to speak with you.