The thing I wish I could impart to clients most urgently is that it is necessary to use different skills at different times in our health and fitness.

The skills we use to get started likely won't be the ones we use to keep going. Always using the same practices regularly serves to perpetuate the stop-start/yoyo nature of training, nutrition, and lifestyle improvements.

Using varying workout routines might be a really useful tool to use when we are getting started because it helps us stay engaged and stimulated with something new and challenging. But using varied or even random methods 6-12 months down the line hoping to continuously make progress is far less likely to work. As the goal changes (from getting started to keeping going) so too must the methods to be most effective.

Another example might be using stricter guidelines and boundaries around certain “trigger” foods when we first start out making nutritional changes. Yet using such restrictive methods 6-12 months down the line are less likely to work (restriction and abstinence are shown in countless studies to lead to greater/extreme rebounds when we break that inflexible boundary).

“I lost weight doing X diet/training so I am going to start that up again”

How many times have you said or heard the above quote from a friend? I’m betting at least once. Just because something worked in the past is not a guarantee of its future success. Especially if we lost weight doing something unsustainable (name a diet) that lead to us relapsing/rebounding. More on this from my friend Jeb here.

It is important that we all work to upgrade our thought process to one of evolution and trial and error, rather than one of absolutist thinking and fixed practices.

Getting to this place of flexibility and growth takes time and effort and is incredibly liberating when you get there.

I’d go as far as to say that this is the keystone thought process of the most successful people I have ever coached and worked with.