My most memorable conversation about this topic was with a man who was about to turn 40 years old.
He told me he does much better when he goes “all-in.”
He loses weight fast, hits his goals, and feels great.
When asked, “What happens after that?” he didn’t look as confident.
He pointed out that he stops frequently because he is busy at work.
However, he considered losing 20 lbs. five times in five years to be a positive.
He had effectively lost 100 lbs. in 5 years, but still weighed more than he did 5 years ago due to the 100 lbs of weight gain between those five years. losses.
He would lose 15-30 lbs, then gain 20-40.
Seeing where this was headed, I tried to talk him out of coming 7 days per week. I drew the line when he requested to come multiple times daily.
He attended sessions daily for the next 2 weeks.
He was pumped, he lost 10lbs.
After week two we never saw him again.
He let us know he won’t be continuing because he’s getting busy.
It is common for someone to reach a breaking point and make drastic changes.
It’s almost clockwork that the outcome is short-term.
They get motivated, want results fast, and decide they are finally going to go all in. So they start exercising a lot, push the volume high, push the intensity high, and try to change everything at once.
At first, that feels exciting. Then it starts to feel foreign, exhausting, and hard to fit into real life.
That is where the problem begins. You start to believe that this new, aggressive level of exercise is the required dose to succeed, so when life gets busy, your energy drops, or your motivation dips, anything less starts to feel like failure.
And once it feels like failure, doing nothing starts to feel easier than doing less.
That is the classic all-or-nothing loop.
To avoid that, the better question is not:
What can I do when I’m at my most motivated?
The better question is:
What can I do consistently for the rest of my life?
That answer is almost always less than people think, but it leads to much more exercise over time.
For example, over the course of a year:
7 days per week for 10 weeks is 70 total workouts.
But 3 days per week for all 52 weeks is 156 total workouts.
That is more than double the amount of exercise, and it is far more sustainable.
That is the point.
The best plan is not the one that looks hardest on paper. It is the one that keeps you in the game long enough to matter.
Takeaways:
1. Falling off track often happens because the plan was too aggressive to sustain.
2. The all-or-nothing mindset makes people quit when they cannot keep up the highest level of effort.
3. A smaller plan you can stick to beats an extreme plan you abandon.
4. Long-term consistency creates far more total exercise than short bursts of perfection.
– James Pratt