How good can you be at the things you’re bad at?
Where is the low hanging fruit in your health, fitness, and physique efforts?
We all like to do the things that we are good at, and try to avoid the things we aren't good at.
It’s why I read books about fitness, behavioral economics, and human motivation and it’s why I pay someone else to do my accounting, bookkeeping, and taxes.
When it comes to health, fitness, and physique change efforts, we see most guys excited about the training for this same reason.
They’ve got some training experience, like how training makes them feel, and have even seen some results before. More of the good stuff makes sense. It’s why so many guys look for new workouts, different strategies, and engaging methods only to reach a point of diminishing returns after an initial up turn in progress.
The theory of diminishing returns in economics is essentially the point where it would cost you $100 to make $99 leading to diminishing returns on your investment (ROI).
DIMINISHING RETURNS IN TRAINING AND NUTRITION
In health and fitness pursuits, we can think of this in a few layers.
When we zoom out and consider training and diet, there will eventually be a point where you can’t train harder, longer, or better using your current nutritional strategies. Contrary to popular rhetoric, many guys CAN actually out-train a bad diet…up until a point.
Eventually however, more training will be impossible within the lifestyle constraints (if you have a job, kids, and responsibilities you will eventually run out of time for more). At which point more training effort costs more for less results.
It instead pays to apply less resources in other areas such as sleep and nutrition, which will have a higher ROI.
Stimulus to Fatigue Ratio (SFR)
When we zoom into training, we call this same principle, the stimulus to fatigue ratio (SFR). Stimulus is what signals muscles to grow. Fatigue is the cost we pay for that stimulus. If we perform an exercise with a disproportionate amount of fatigue for the amount of stimulus it provides for the desired goal (deadlifts for fat loss for example) then we pay too high of a cost because we either can’t provide enough stimulus to grow due to rapid fatigue accumulation or provide so much stimulus that we accumulate enormous fatigue and can’t recover in time to keep training frequent/specific/progressive.
In this scenario, we must adjust training variables such as exercise selection, sets/reps/load, exercise order, and rest:work ratio to lower the fatigue, increase the stimulus, or both.
When we zoom in to nutrition, lots of guys focus on things like meal timing (fasting for example) and supplements (pre-workout etc). These 2 components make up less than 10% of the nutrition picture. Focusing resources and effort here provides diminishing returns. Instead, it pays to focus on the diet priorities of caloric constraint (total daily energy balance) and macronutrient amounts first (how much protein, carbohydrate, and fat you eat per day) as they make up some 75% of the nutrition and diet picture.
The area with the biggest ROI is to get even a tiny bit better at the stuff that's holding you back.
You don’t have to be as great at it or find it as engaging as the training stuff, but you can get exponential growth out of getting even a little bit better at the stuff you’re bad at.
Are you getting diminishing returns in your health, fitness, and physique efforts and ignoring the low hanging fruit because you aren’t sure how to make progress or where to start? Chances are your performance in the kitchen, at night time, and how you’re managing your stress that’s holding you back and we can help.
We specialize in helping busy guys integrate the highest ROI training and diet methods into their lives so that they can get the results they want and a body they’re confident in and proud of.
Interested in working with us? Apply for one of our limited monthly coaching spots below.
