If you don’t have a plan;

1. It’s easy to react with how we are feeling in the moment. 

2. It’s harder to understand why we are feeling a certain way.

3. It’s impossible to make accurate adjustments to a plan if you don’t have one.

4. Every day is a scattergun approach where you have to start the process again.

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”.

Make and use a plan

1. Direction; Have a general direction you want to go in. You don’t need a super specific outcome, though having one is also fine obviously. Having a direction you want to head in allows you to reverse engineer more accurate steps to get there and helps you prioritize where you’ll put your effort. If every day you start fresh, you’ll end up walking in circles.

2. Flexible; Be willing to make adjustments to that plan when things get hectic. I said adjustments, not U turns. Adjustments can be more calibrated if you know where you’re going. If you don’t have a destination in mind, then any action will take you there. Course corrections for the holidays, fluxes in work, travel etc. can be made accurately and without detriment to your goal acquisition or mental state more easily when you have a plan.

3. Recognize; Appreciate why you feel the way you do. If you are smoked after 6 of 12 planned training days and breaking down, appreciate you might have overshot it, and be willing to pull back in the short term for the sake of the long term adherence and results. If you are feeling great after 1 of 12 training days, appreciate that it’ll get tougher soon enough, and don’t go full send in week 1 day 1.

4. Respond; Without a plan, it becomes easy to react to how we are feeling on any given day. Having any kind of structure allows us to look at the plan, understand and appreciate why we might be feeling that way, and then decide if we want to respond with a change or with persistence rather than only having your feelings/emotions to go on each day. Reacting to our feelings and emotions tends to send us to more extreme actions (fatigue tends to lead to overeating and inactivity, and excitement tends to lead us to overactivity and inflexible restriction).

Don’t be that person

I know plenty of people who have cunning plans and don’t use them, I know plenty of people who don’t make a plan because it gives them an out and reason they don’t have to try and risk failing, and I know plenty of people who make plans far outside of their reach, go full send on day 1 and only make it 2 weeks into a 16 week block before starting again.

Expectations;

Realistic expectations are too often overlooked and what gets people in the most trouble. My professional advice is to start small and frequent. Practice consistency on a simple task before increasing the number of tasks or complexity therein. This builds a framework for practice, self efficacy, and provides evidence of success.

Thanks!

If you want a simple and effective health and fitness plan, today is the last day to join the 21 Day Rebuild Blueprint Challenge which starts tomorrow Monday 12 December. It’s free to join, for everyone and anyone, is built around daily practices in training, nutrition, and recovery, and has a $5000 coaching and $100 cash prize!

Reply to this email with the word “REBUILD” to join before 5pm today.