Small habits aren’t sexy. I get it. We want results and we want them now.

That said, we’ve all seen the data. An estimated 90% of fitness New Years resolutions don’t make it through the year, and 65% don’t make it to April 1.

In my professional experience this is because the skills we are trying to perform are too advanced for our current status.

The analogy “you can’t fire a canon from a kayak” helps frame what I am saying.

People launch into CBUMs Mr Olympia chest workout even though they've not been to the gym for 12 months. Or they go from not thinking about their food for a decade, to attempting to shop, prep, and stick to a 4x per day eating schedule immediately.

These are fine skills. Yet they let people down when mismatched with a persons ability to perform them.

If you want to fire a cannon (achieve a specific fitness result), then you’ll have to spend time building up and trading out your kayak for a dingy, then a pontoon boat, then a motor boat, then a sailboat, before you are stable enough to fire your cannon from your yacht (yachts have cannons right?).

I’m not a boat guy, but you get what I am saying. To achieve a specific result, build up a base of skills, experience, confidence, and evidence that supports its pursuit.

If you don’t, you’re going to capsize and spend all your time trying to get back into your kayak from the water and bailing water out of it instead.