“Honestly, I’m just looking to get fitter and stronger.”

Imagine this scenario: a lifter at your gym has convinced their friend—Jeff—to sign up for personal training. After getting to know Jeff a bit, you ask him what he wants from working with you, and he replies:

“Honestly, I’m just looking to get fitter and stronger.”

This is a classic fuzzy goal, right up there with getting more toned and working on my health. According to much of the pop coaching literature, this won’t cut it.

Whenever we hear milquetoast intentions like this, we are to give them a backbone and:

• Explain the importance of goal-setting.
• Pick a metric that seems relevant.
• Use our coaching experience to set a reasonable SMART goal for that metric.
• Build a plan for them to get there.

But first, let’s take a step back and ask the hanging question: Why do we push these kinds of goals? The intuitive answer is that the client needs a goal to stay motivated.

Without something to strive for, they’ll quit when the workouts become challenging.

That may be true of committed trainees, but is it appropriate for Jeff?

Stages of Change

According to one popular approach—the Transtheoretical Model of behavior change— people pass through distinct stages to make significant changes like quitting smoking or adopting a new diet.

SMART goals and sophisticated programming strategies are most effective for those in the later stages—action and maintenance. When these lifters come to you, they know what they want and have already tried other alternatives in the past. They need specific strategies, practices, and accountability to help achieve their goals.

Other lifters are in the early stages, either not considering a change at all or just starting to reflect on the possibility. Coaches may help these lifters become ready through conversation and by making training a fun experience, but not always.

Lifters like Jeff are in the middle, what the Transtheoretical Model calls the preparation stage.

• They may know what they don’t want.
• They have likely failed at some point.
• They aren’t sure how to solve their problems.

People in this stage are ready to do something, but not to commit to significant steps just yet.

Jeff may not be motivated by a number on a bar, scale, or stopwatch. Until Jeff can deadlift 285 pounds, he doesn’t have a context for what an accomplishment it is to put 405 pounds on the bar for the first time, and he doesn’t yet know if getting stronger will solve his problem.

Setting targets at this stage is a challenge. Motivating goals have a goldilocks quality:

• The goals can’t seem entirely out of reach, nor can they be too easy.
• If we assign Jeff an arbitrary target based on a level chart or our coaching experience, odds are, he’ll blow through one or more of these goals in the course of training.
• Alternatively, the goals may take too long to reach, and he’ll lose interest in them since they held no real meaning for him in the first place.

And we as coaches know this—we see it all the time— which brings me back to the question: “Why do we force it?” I think there are two reasons we push goals so early:

1. The first reason is that our own experience and the goal-driven success stories we hear, give us a false picture of how people change, as Dr. Prochaska—one of the developers of the Transtheoretical Model— explained in a 1992 paper.
   In treating cigarette and alcohol addiction, experts designed an action-oriented change program based on what worked for the most successful subjects. When broadly applied, though, these programs were mostly failures due to high dropout rates and poor buy-in. This was because—on average—only 10-20% of the subjects were ready to act at the start.
   Successful programs moved participants closer to action, and it was the subject’s commitment—combined with practical strategies—that led to success.
2. The second reason we push these goals is personal: it relieves our anxiety. We’re not comfortable handling ambivalence, and we’re insecure that the client might leave, so we fall on old habits.
   We repackage their needs into a case study format, set SMART goals, then pull out our #2 pencils to come up with an A-quality answer. Knowing we said the right thing gives us confidence that we’re doing our jobs and the security that they will continue to be our clients.

But lifters aren’t multiple-choice tests, and forcing complex action too early fails to meet them where they are. By trying to prove our competence, we drive them away.

Effectively Move Forward

“The preparation stage is a planning phase in which clients are beginning to actively carry out their plans… Thus, the primary focus should be on whatever is needed to sustain a commitment to future action.”

– Dr. Clifton Mitchell, Effective Techniques for Dealing with Highly Resistant Clients

When someone comes to us not-quite-ready for committed action, efforts to push them are likely to fail. We’re out of sync, we’ll get resistance, and if we’re not careful, we’ll blame the lifter for being non-compliant.

When faced with lifters like Jeff, consider that they don’t need fixing. Instead, they need a clear set of next steps, evidence that you can help them resolve their problem, and trust in you as a coach.

Clear Action Steps

As Chip and Dan Heath suggest in their book Switch, “What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.”

Lifters in the preparation stage are looking for solutions and preparing to take action but aren’t ready for sweeping life changes.

For action steps to be effective, they need to be clear and small enough that the lifter can do them easily, especially when combined with support and accountability from the coach.

One example of an action step might be to schedule a first introduction and trial session. The decision to train is an immediate action. The lifter knows what h to do, and the coach handles the complicated part—designing a productive first session.

An ineffective action step might be answering a client’s question about diet with: “For now, just try to reduce your intake of processed foods and sugary drinks.”

This advice may seem clear and straightforward to a coach—it’s vastly easier than trying to explain the details of digestion and metabolism. Still, the lifter now needs to:

1. Decide what counts as processed food
2. Overhaul their eating environment
3. Change their habits.

These three steps are too-far, too-fast.

Evidence of Change

Although lifters like Jeff often come in without a clear sense of where they’re going, they almost always have a problem they want to solve. That’s what motivated them enough to ask around, find you, and come to your gym willing to pay your training prices. Work with them to clarify what the problem is and to find a way for them to see how progress looks.

• The first half—identifying the real problem to solve—is often more complicated than it sounds. You may have to keep asking why, approach the question from different angles and deepen your understanding of their struggle over the coming weeks and months.
• The second half—finding a meaningful metric—seems to contradict the earlier statement that Jeff probably doesn’t need goals. In this case, the metric serves to guide programming changes and show if the training is effective, not to set targets for them to aim for a specific goal. The process is similar to mindful breathing exercises, where the goal is to become aware of the breath without trying to change it. And just like in meditation, it takes discipline and patience to resist the urge to turn metrics into goals.

If we can clarify the lifter’s real needs and show them the benefits of the training process, we encourage their sustained commitment and put them in a good position to adopt goal-oriented strategies that work if those become appropriate later.

Build Trust

Finally, focus on building trust and connection.

This process never ends, but especially in the first few months, get to know them as lifters. Within bounds, bring your whole self— your personality, passions, and projects— to the gym with you to express integrity between your life mission and your work as a coach. Care about their progress and get excited when they reach new firsts and milestones.

Be professional in what you say and how you touch and hold clear, consistent, and reasonable boundaries about your scope of practice— both what you will and won’t do. Deliver what you promise on time, and apologize when you’re wrong.

It’s beyond the scope of this article—it could be the mission of a lifetime—to explain how best to develop trust. Instead, simply respect the value that trust brings to the coaching process.

Time spent building rapport, connection, developing side projects, tightening business processes, and celebrating with your lifters is beneficial to you both even if it’s not tied to a tangible goal.

These side tasks may be the most important thing you do.

How to Help Jeff

You may not work with someone like Jeff. You might choose to work exclusively with groups who are— for the most part— past that stage. Or, you may specialize in lifters who are even less ready for change than Jeff, as seen in some rehab and mandated employee programs.

Still, in my experience working both as a barbell and CrossFit coach, most new lifters are in the preparation stage, and I suspect that is true in much of the commercial coaching space.

And whoever you work with, their readiness for change will flow in and out. Your client may relapse into old behaviors and lose confidence or find themselves preparing for a goal or lifestyle shift that takes them out of the familiar.

Knowing how to handle that transition—getting them back into effective routines and moving towards their new goal—can be the difference between being a good coach and being the kind of coach who keeps a lifter happy and thriving for years.

The post Are You a Lifter With Fuzzy Goals? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

“I can’t wait for the gym to open so I can get off my computer and back to real coaching.”

If this is you, I can relate. This pandemic has been a massive nail in the road, blowing out the tire of our routines and forcing a detour from the route we’d mapped to a successful career.

“I can’t wait for the gym to open so I can get off my computer and back to real coaching.”

If this is you, I can relate. This pandemic has been a massive nail in the road, blowing out the tire of our routines and forcing a detour from the route we’d mapped to a successful career.

Your makeshift online practice is like the donut you install to keep your car rolling long enough to fix it and get back on the road with a real tire. When your gym reopens, you might be thinking about putting that online practice back in the trunk, forgotten until needed again.

I invite you to reconsider. The best coaches will keep at least some of their practice online, not as a side hustle or a business gimmick, but because an effective online practice makes you a better coach.

The Facts Of Online Coaching

You’ve heard the big pitch elsewhere for making the switch to online or hybrid coaching:

1. It allows flexible hours from anywhere in the world, be that your home, a coffee shop, or Fiji.
2. With it, you can reach wider— even global— audiences, and with templates and smart systems in place, you can scale as big as your creativity and industry allow.

And everyone knows the costs:

1. Remote work requires a different discipline to fight distraction.
2. The primary advertising channels are overwhelmed with FitPros, most of them spouting nonsense, and broadcasting your signal through the noise is a full-time job.
3. It’s harder to make a personal connection, to assess and correct movement in real-time, and coaching across states, provinces, and countries pose unique logistical challenges.

What you likely haven’t heard is how online coaching can improve your coaching skills on the platform, the field, and the gym.

I’ve been coaching online since 2016, programming, and providing video reviews of working sets for every lifter I train. As part of a team, we help each other with video reviews and collaborating on projects.

I’ve reviewed hundreds of lifters, thousands of workouts, over ten thousand videos, and these practices have improved my platform coaching skill in ways I never anticipated.

You’re Not a Wizard, Harry

In The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli shares the impact of a banal truth: “Extreme performances are interspersed with less extreme ones.” In other words, when things are bad, or average, they get better. When things are great, or average, they get worse. This reality, called regression to the mean, deceives coaches every day in every set.

Every rep you observe lies on the lifter’s bell curve of performance. Some new lifters will have great reps by chance, and even masterful athletes occasionally slip in complex movements.

Over time, with proper coaching and focus, this curve shifts right and tight—the average improves, and performances become more consistent until true bungles become vanishingly rare.

When you coach movement in real-time, you see bad movement, cue it, and the next rep looks better. Pat yourself on the back—you fixed them. At least that’s how I felt after fixing people through seminars, workshops, CrossFit classes, and personal sessions. Online coaching broke me of this delusion.

I’m a pretty dense rock, so the lesson took time. I’d review a lifter’s video, see an error, and reach out to start typing only to have the error disappear in the third rep and never return.

Sometimes they’d set up incorrectly, and I’d try to reach through the screen to prevent the inevitable error that often never came. Perhaps they self-corrected. Perhaps it was random— a below-average rep for their bell curve— and the next rep was better simply by chance.

Online coaching taught me to watch for trends over single reps. To develop the lifter’s sense of themselves on the platform, then step out of the way. To leave them with an intention for the next session rather than a list of cues to implement long after their bodies forgot the feeling of their last lifts.

Most importantly, it taught me humility. In a class of 20 people, I could bark cues and fix errors like a manic poodle playing whack-a-mole, but the credit for change belonged to chance, time, and the lifter, not me.

The Screen Demands Results

The environment and friendships of the class and the energy and personality of a coach often define the small-gym experience. That experience is part of the value—for some lifters, the most important part— but when it predominates, accurate feedback on your performance gets clouded.

When I’d ask a client whether their training was working for them, the inevitable answer was almost always, yes. Unless the client knows their past and present performance, clearly defines their goals, and routinely considers the costs and benefits of training, they’re not ready to give me a clear answer.

I wanted to improve my coaching skills. But I was asking: “Do you still feel good about coming to the gym?”

Every coach has to get results to succeed. An informed client can find thousands of diets, programs, and forums to get form checks online for free. If we don’t demonstrate value and develop a personal connection, the client will leave.

Online, there’s no gym culture to hide behind. Every day is an opportunity for your client to log in, see their progress displayed onscreen, and decide if it’s worth the cost. That accountability refines coaching skills in a way that constant variance and high-energy classes can’t.

The Internet Never Forgets

Movement coaching, especially in multi-event sports like CrossFit, suffers from memory gaps. At the start of each session, we have two vivid recollections for the lifter’s movement—how we remember them when they first trained with us and how they’re moving right now.

Inevitably, they improve through the session as the result of the warmup, practice, and (hopefully) our coaching.

So by the end of the session, you can honestly tell the frustrated lifter, “I know it’s hard, but you’re getting better.” But are they? Do you remember the quality of their movement over the past several sessions, especially when they’re spaced over weeks?

Reviewing videos exposed my amnesia. One lifter felt stuck getting to their first pull up, and I went back and made a montage of their videos to show their real progress in an encouraging way.

Another lifter was frustrated with his power clean, but I knew he’d improved. His first video was certainly a mess, so I went digging for newer posts to show the chain of progress.

Unfortunately, he was right. His elbows hadn’t gotten any faster for weeks, and I was responsible for stepping up my game to provide tools and drills he could use to solve that problem.

Online video allows for concrete displays of progress that can overcome the doubt of almost any lifter as to whether they’re improving. It also starkly displays reality when the movement hasn’t changed.

I’ve started videoing my in-person lifters occasionally, building up a sample of videos of their movement over time, because that feedback—easy to collect on the web— just wasn’t available while coaching.

Same Road, Better Tires

In Oceanside, California, where I live, state and county officials are already reopening restaurants, public services, and fitness centers. Coaches will have to overcome the inevitable hiccups, but many of you are already starting to think of life post-shutdown.

The long wait is over—the mechanics have finally got the new tire installed—and you’re eager to get back on the road to helping people get stronger, fitter, happier.

You may have seen online coaching as a way to make ends meet and provide some continued value despite the loss. If that’s you, you may feel ready to toss the video conferencing, online coaching platforms, and email check-ins into your mental box of shutdown hassles in which, I’m just glad to be done.

Before you do, I invite you to consider this:

• As coaches, we learn best when we expose ourselves to different perspectives and challenges.
• Solving tough problems in unfamiliar ways not only demonstrates our coaching range, but it broadens our perspective, deepening our understanding of the strategies we’re already using.

Online coaching did that for me. So even though the interaction and community of coaching on the platform, teaching a live workshop, or leading a CrossFit class are at the heart of what I do, I’ll keep coaching online, pandemic or not, and I invite you to do the same. You might just become a better coach for it.

The post How Online Coaching Made Me Better appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Examine your setup and consider the proportions of your body to find the best technique for you.

The perfect program, the perfect lifting technique, the perfect anything, is the one that’s specifically designed for you. You are unique, like a snowflake. You are, however, still a snowflake like the rest of us, made of the same ice and following the same laws of physics.

Many of us fall into the trap of obsessing over our individual differences, hiding behind imagined distinctions to avoid fixing our own gaps in performance. These perceived roadblocks come in the form of excuses like, “I’m just a hard gainer,” or “My body wasn’t designed to move that way.”

When it comes to technique, sometimes, you have to respect the snowflake and sometimes you have to admit you’re just ice. Either way, it’s important to know how you should look when you lift, when you should switch to a different exercise, and when you are blaming your genes for something that’s really just bad movement.

When you take these individual differences into account, you can adjust your technique accordingly to set yourself on the best path toward achieving your performance goals.

No Two Lifters Are Alike

Presses, pulls, throws, and squats are universal, gross-movement patterns that most athletes tend to execute close to the same way. There are common points of performance associated with each lift, but every athlete has a bit of wiggle room within these guidelines.

Two people can look dramatically different doing the same lift and both be absolutely correct. So, if your technique looks vastly different than the person lifting next to you, how do you know whether you’re different or just plain wrong?

Let’s take a closer look at five elements that play a significant role in the way you move:

Limb Lengths. The length of your body segments will inevitably change the look of a correctly executed lift. Here are a few guidelines for making adjustments on the fly:

• Examine your setup and consider the proportions of your body. If you have short arms and/or long femurs, your setup in the deadlift is going to be pretty horizontal. However, if your shoulders are just forward of the bar in your setup, the bar is over your mid-foot, and your back is flat, you may not have the most graceful, upright stance, but you’re still correct. When you try to mimic other lifters without a fixed reference point, you’re almost always guaranteed to be wrong.
• If you have wonky proportions but can’t quite picture how they impact a lift, imagine that disproportion wildly exaggerated. If your forearm was twice as long as your upper arm, how would your front rack look?

Bony Structures. Your skeleton is a limiting factor for how you perform a lift. Some people have an ideal hip and femur arrangement or a flat acromion process, which results in a naturally more comfortable approach to the squat and press. Don’t try to force yourself into an ass-to-grass squat with a narrow stance if your body was not built for such range of motion.

Injury History and Restrictions. Sometimes you can work around injuries and sometimes you can’t. With a minor technique adjustment or a close variant, many injuries will still allow you to train without a major shift. When dealing with an injury, assess the range of motion that causes you pain and finds exercise variants that allow you to continue training without causing further damage.

Body Mass and Body Fat. Lifters with a lot of body mass (muscle or fat) will look different under the bar than someone who carries less weight. A significant belly or a great deal of fat distributed in the hips and legs will change your walking gait and lead to some funky-looking angles, especially for lightweight warm-ups and novice lifters.

Competition Goals. If you’re training for overall strength, health, and athleticism, you should generally choose a technique that safely allows you to lift the heaviest weight over the longest range of motion. If lifting is your sport, though, you may compromise one of these elements to put more points on the board. For example, a super-wide grip bench press is less useful in training and more likely to tear a pectoral muscle, but that exact technique won Shao Chu a world record. Her lift looked goofy, but do you think she cares what you think about her grip width?

If you want to be your best, find your faults and learn to address them.

Looking Different Doesn’t Mean You’re Special

One of the biggest mistakes an athlete can make is not respecting their individual situation. If you have shoulder restrictions and can’t low-bar back squat or snatch, do high-bar squats and Russian swings instead.

However, this doesn’t mean that you should give up too easily and switch exercises just because something doesn’t look quite right. Instead, take a moment to examine why your movement is different. What if you’re not a unique snowflake and you just have bad form?

Before ditching the movement altogether, find the fault and fix it first. You’ll become a better lifter in the process. If you switch from deadlifting with a barbell to a trap bar because your back is constantly rounding, you might miss out on the opportunity to train yourself how to keep a rigid back under a heavy load.

There are, of course, times when you do have to abandon one exercise for another. Sometimes, you legitimately can’t fix a problem, or maybe you don’t have the time/skill/experience to correct the form fault that day. Whatever the case, before you dig into your arsenal of exercise variants searching for the technique that is designed perfectly for you, ask yourself this: “Am I using this technique for a reason, or am I trying one exercise after another until I find the one that looks “good enough” without much effort?”

Find Your Lifting Groove

Individual differences in technique can be a tough nut to crack. Just as no two snowflakes are alike, your best performance will come from tweaking your form to your unique situation. But in reality, you’re not that special.

If you want to be your best, skip the easy route. Seek guidance from an experienced coach who can help identify if your deviations from “normal” are standing in the way of your goals or are in fact putting you on a path to success.

More on Finding Your Potential:

• Unlock Power and Performance With a Golf Ball
• Talent Doesn’t Lift Weights, You Do: Own Your Practice
• Don’t Let the Fitness Industry Tell You What to Do

The post Embrace Individuality: Find Your Best Lifting Technique appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

There are a whole lot of people who struggle with anxiety about stepping on the scale. It could come as a bit of dread or panic at a doctor’s visit or for the weigh-in for a meet. These principles don’t just apply to weight loss, either, and they’re useful for anyone who experiences anxiety around their measures of fitness success. But this article comes with some terms and conditions:

• If you want to stop stressing out over the tools that help you get to your goals, read on.
• If, as you read this, you feel the urge to skip your next meal, stop reading.
• If you feel sudden awareness of and shame over your body shape, whatever it is, stop reading.
• If you feel the sudden urge to go out and dramatically change your diet and behavior, to ‘fix yourself,’ stop reading.

Eating disorders are serious, and they go well beyond the scope of this article. If you feel compelled to binge eat, purge, starve, or otherwise hurt yourself for any reason, I urge you to call the National Eating Disorders Helpline at 1-800-931-2237 or see a professional.

The Demon in the Bathroom

Let’s face it: scales suck. And not just because they bring you unwelcome news.

Common household scales aren’t that accurate, often showing pounds of difference from one scale to another. Even when they’re accurate, they measure one precise thing: the amount of mass gravity is pulling down onto the scale’s surface. Even fancy bioimpedance scales are pretty terrible.

On top of that, our culture has loaded the scale with destructive messages. Cartoons show bloated caricatures breaking the scale with cautious steps. Fitness magazines show models standing triumphantly on their scales, measuring tape loosely draped around their obviously-lean waist. If that number doesn’t read what it should (whatever that is), our social messages push you to change:

“You’re not okay. You don’t measure up. You need to be the way we want you, or you’re a failure. Buy my pill to ‘fix’ you.”

This messaging is killing people. Anorexics are almost five times as likely to die in a given time frame than the general population, and bulimics have a 70% greater risk, not counting the variety of other disorders. Although it’s not the only cause, negative self-image and stigma plays a part in causing these disorders. And for many people, the scale features prominently in their history of attempts—and failures—at weight loss.

Just Break It

Can we get rid of the scale altogether? Should we? There was a brief explosion of national attention toward “Smash the Scale” events in 2013, and some health professionals have made careers out of demonizing the scale and diets in general, so people are definitely asking the question.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Although it is a complex issue, obesity is still harmful in the long term. Fad diets are harmful, certainly, and there is good evidence that fad diets and constant weight shifting are worse than obesity, but it is possible to change your eating habits in a healthy way. With rare exceptions, you are not doomed to your current body.

I have nothing against scale-smashing parties since for many, they aren’t really about the scale. It’s symbolic of the internal work the smasher has put in trying to break down their own feelings of low self-worth and anxiety. However, after the scale is annihilated in a shower of springs and twisted plastic, cold, objective reality is still waiting. We’re still the same weight. We still see ourselves in the mirror and in the eyes of those around us. We’re still at a higher risk for a variety of diseases and early death, and many us still want to do something about it.

What if we could build a healthy relationship with the tools that inform us of the facts of life, instead of ignore those facts? What would that relationship look like?

None of these steps say “panic.”

4DX: Common Sense, Uncommon Execution

For perspective, the scale is not the only measure of performance we stress out over. It could be the weight on the barbell, our race time, or quarterly sales figures. Any measure of success could be a useful tool to drive effective decisions—or the path to becoming an anxious wreck.

The ‘wrong’ way is a trap that’s easy to fall into. Picture this: you’re assigned a goal and given a deadline to achieve it. In the case of losing body fat, maybe it’s your next doctor’s visit. You do something, you put in effort, but you get caught up in the whirlwind of life, and halfway to the deadline, you step on the scale. No change. Now you’re sweating a little bit. You start measuring every week, then every day, thinking that by keeping it in your attention, you’ll remember to do “the right things,” but the act of keeping it in your attention feels like staring down an oncoming train, and you begin to dread stepping on the scale each day. Your habits falter, your stress rises, and you’re nowhere closer to your goal. Bad juju.

In The Four Disciplines of Execution (4DX), a highly successful program for solving the question of ‘how to get shit done,’ the authors describe this as a ‘lag measure’ problem. ‘Lag measures’ are measures of things as they are: scale weight, a waist measurement, a body fat percentage, you name it. The problem is that while you’re taking the measurement, there’s nothing you can do about it. The behaviors and circumstances that got you there are already in the past.

A more positive approach involves a change of mindset. Instead of looking for what the scale says about you, start thinking about the scale as the answer to certain questions:

• Is your plan working?
• Do you need to change that plan?
• How quickly are you getting to your goal?

You: The Science Experiment

Every time you try to change your habits, you’re essentially making a bet:

• “If I do X, I bet Y will happen.”
• “If I only eat only ‘clean’ foods, my WOD times will improve.”
• “If I cut 15g of carbohydrate and 5g of fat per day, I will continue to lose 1lb a week.”
• “If I cut my soda intake from 10 to 3 and go for a 1 mile walk a day, my waist will get smaller.”

Change, then, is like a science experiment. You mix several chemicals together and check the result. Each weigh-in is that check, and as long as you actually followed through on the bet and stuck to the plan, any result, ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ is useful! Even if you don’t lose weight, you now know that change didn’t work. When you really buy in to this approach, the scale isn’t even measuring you at all. It’s a given that it it tells you nothing about your beauty, value, or success, but I’d argue that it’s not even really about your weight. The scale measures the success of a changed variable, a change you chose to make, and that process can be discarded or replaced in favor of a newer, better process that will bring you closer to your goals.

Indirectly, it can even provide useful information if you don’t stick to the plan. Between ‘big’ measurements (usually 1 week for the scale), life sometimes gets in the way and you break from the plan. Shit happens, everyone moves on. However, if you take multiple measurements in a row and something always gets in the way, life is trying to tell you something: the plan is not appropriate right now. And that’s okay. You’re not pinned down to a specific diet, and no plan will be successful if you can’t do it. Look at the available options, reassess your resources (including knowledge, time, and social support), and either adjust the program or ditch it for a plan that’s right for you.

Moving Forward: The Lead Measure

In 4DX, the authors push the importance of shifting your day-to-day thoughts from outcomes (‘lag’ measures) to processes (‘lead’ measures). If the lag measure is the Y in our bet above, the lead is the X: “What do I need to do in order to make Y happen?” From there, each decision begins to make sense:

If you didn’t follow the plan and it worked, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but don’t get cocky either. For an example, let’s say you started tracking macros and didn’t hit your targets, yet you measure 1 pound lighter the following week. Maybe the act of measuring itself inspired small changes in what you ate. Maybe you were retaining less water. Maybe Mercury was in retrograde. Who knows? Not you, and that’s the problem. Following the plan more closely will give you a useful metric to compare.

If you followed the plan and it worked, keep doing it. You might make small tweaks or adjustments to keep things moving along or to make the plan easier to follow in the next cycle, but don’t overcomplicate things. If it works, it works.

If you didn’t follow the plan and you don’t see results, first decide if you can follow the plan. The question here is not whether or not you could follow the plan under different circumstances. The question is whether we can do the plan right now. It doesn’t have to be sustainable forever: sometimes, the ‘hard routine’ is required for a while before we can settle into a sustainable ‘maintenance’ routine. All that matters is that we consistently have the available resources to get it done for as long as we need to. If you can’t follow the plan, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Can the plan be adjusted or scaled down until it’s more doable? Do you need to switch plans entirely? This is where a coach or advisor might help in making an effective switch.

This same problem occurs when you follow the plan diligently and it still doesn’t work. I usually recommend holding on for two measuring cycles (often two weeks, for a diet) to establish a trend, but if metrics don’t move in the right way after two cycles, you have to make a change to see success, and picking the right ‘new bet’ may take outside help. Still, you’ve made great forward steps:

• You developed habits toward following a diet and committing to your health.
• You now have information about what you eat and what hasn’t worked.
• You have a starting template you might choose to branch out from, instead of having to start from scratch.

It’s About the Trend

The third point of our healthy mindset is that the individual day’s measurement is irrelevant: only the trend counts. This is especially true in measuring tools like the scale, which have a pretty wide margin of error.

This is a graph of measurements for a three-month diet, a month of maintenance, and slow (intentional) regain I went through in 2016. Note the occasionally daily drops and peaks of 4+ pounds. This is not uncommon in my trainees, and these changes can be even greater for some. There are many reasons for this.

• Eat a salty or very carb-heavy meal at night and you’ll retain more water during a morning reading.
• Food sitting in the digestive system makes night measurements heavier than day measurements.
• A full trip to the bathroom can drop half a pound.
• Some medications and supplements cause greater water retention and scale-weight gain.
• Sometimes, magical things happen in the gut and you’re just heavier one day than the next.

In other words, don’t sweat it. Putting too much emphasis on today’s measurement can be an emotional rollercoaster, especially when we’ve falsely tied our self-worth into the numbers on the scale. If possible, the solution here is to focus on the trend:

• If you can, take multiple measurements a week and graph them out. Most diet apps make this possible, or just a spreadsheet. This will allow you to see trends and get perspective.
• If you take the above approach, make diet decisions based off the same point each week.
• Include a set point before a change ‘counts.’ This frees you from the highs of lows of constantly ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ in the face of random variation. In my own cutting phase, I didn’t mentally ‘count’ a new weight until every measurement for 5 days was under that value. It was still moving the way I wanted, but by the time I ‘accepted’ it, the new weight was no big deal since I’d been there for a week or more.

Beware the Red Squares

A healthy scale relationship is about decisions, so I used the decision tree above to show it. But if you read it, you probably noticed a few red squares. These are points where things can often go sideways, bringing on stress, anxiety, and worse.

First, if you are trying to change weight and have no plan, stop measuring until you do. If you don’t have a plan that you can apply those scale measurements to in order to make future decisions, no good comes from measuring. There is an addictive quality to the scale. When it reads closer to what we want, we get a little positive-feelz hit of success. When it reads worse, it validates our toxic model of ourselves as failures. Either way, we feed an emotional need. Unfortunately, like a parched desert traveler stumbling on a well, we may not realize the water is poisoned until it’s too late.

Second, it is possible to poison this well from the very start. What does it mean for the plan to ‘work?’ Why did we select the goal we did? The answers here aren’t always good. Sometimes, we can get to them through reflection and inner work. Sometimes we need professional help to get to the heart of it. Either way, a critical look at our motives is essential.

Finally, one thing I think we’ve all dealt with is the endless struggle. Every week, something comes up and the dieter can’t follow their program, and they stress over it. But they’ll get it next week, they promise! Another variation of this is the diet-hopper, switching from one diet to another and another until they find one that ‘works.’ Both approaches are rarely effective. Why keep up the pretense and stress of dieting without any sign of success after months and years of hammering our heads into the wall?

This may be the sign of a medical condition that needs treatment, but often, it’s a case of chasing two rabbits. We want the moral satisfaction and reward of trying, but we either lack the resources to actually make the change, or have conflicting desires, some of them unconscious, over our current body and lifestyle. If you’ve been dieting for months on end with no result, it may be time to get those outside resources—admit you need help to win the war—or look into whether it’s worth it to you to make the change. It may not be. And that’s okay.

Failure Is Just a Data Point

Whenever we start talking about scale anxiety, disordered eating, or anything in that hairy space, you can always expect some internet troll to come out, chin held high, “Why don’t you just do it? Do more, eat less, right? The scale’s just a fact. You can’t be afraid of reality!”

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. If you can’t understand, I can almost guarantee you’ve faced a similar situation in your past. For me, it was the Physical Strength Test (PST), an introductory test for those who want to be US Navy SEALs. It includes a swim, run, pull ups, push ups, and sit ups. I trained hard for it. I was a great runner, fit, and a decent swimmer, but decent was not good enough to get selected. Between my swim time and my strength deficit (I was 160 pounds at the time and struggled with ruck work, among other things), I wasn’t selected, and I had to fight the uphill battle for a lateral transfer from the fleet.

I did a PST every month, and although my scores were getting better, every attempt felt like a defeat. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t working hard enough. Late hours on ship and a busy family life meant I couldn’t train and would never get better, or so I worried. Occasionally I’d swim five seconds slower than the previous month, and the whole month prior would feel like a waste. I started dreading the PST and every training session in the pool. I started finding reasons to substitute swim days for runs or the obstacle course, things I was good at. One day, I had to sit with the realization that I’d failed. I had the resources, the skill, and the talent to get the work done, and I’d sabotaged myself.

It’s easy to look in hindsight and see it now, just as it can be easy to look at someone else who’s suffering through it and fail to understand why they can’t see the ‘obvious.’ No one has the right to judge anyone in this game, and even if you did somehow have perfect mastery of your feelings and goals, your judgment won’t help anyone. Respect everyone, wherever they are on their journey, and strive to do your best to develop a healthy relationship with the tools you need to win. It’s the best any of us can do.

You might also like:

• How I Faced My Fears And Overcame My Eating Disorder
• From Diet To Disorder: When Food Control Goes Too Far

The post Don’t Sweat the Demon Scale appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

They’re fauxtivation, flashy and shallow, and they rightfully get criticized in the fitness press.  If these gimmicks were enough to drive behavior change and get people to train hard through the weekly grind, we would have a nation of Ironmen, World’s Strongest Women, and World Cup champions.

However, motivation is undeniably essential to our success. If you’ve played sports or the iron game for any serious length of time, you’ve almost certainly had the experience of being tired and sore, your body begging you to do anything else but hit the day’s scheduled light workout (It’s a light day. It doesn’t really matter if you miss it…). On occasion, a pep song or motivational quote might get you going, but more often, it’s a quiet voice in the back of your brain: “You know you’re going to do it. Just get up and get it over with.” And somehow, some way, you do.

Some have argued that this isn’t motivation, but discipline. If you have the discipline to get to the gym and put in the hours, it doesn’t really matter if you like it or are motivated. Just make it a habit and suffer through. There are mounds of research to support the idea that the ability to delay gratification and adopt habits are keys to success. It’s fairly obvious, in fact. Still, I don’t think it’s the whole picture.

Why is it that one person gives up on the piano as a child and later becomes a chess grandmaster, committing tens of thousands of hours to the play and practice needed to master the skill? How does a collegiate athlete have the discipline to suffer through early morning practices, tense competition, and competing time requirements, only to “go to seed” after graduation? Did they lose their ability to exercise their willpower? Is discipline task-specific, and if so, why?

To help fit the pieces together, I have to tell you about a friend of mine and his love for pizza.

Jim’s Flossing Problem

My friend (let’s call him “Jim”) received a clean bill of health at his annual physical every year, with one exception. The dental exam. He’d fume at the “moderate risk for periodontal disease” comment and go on a tear, putting up reminder notes on his bathroom mirror and marking happy faces on his calendar when he hit his target of brushing and flossing twice a day.

After a few weeks, though, he’d get busy and skip it “just this once” or promise himself he’d make it up after lunch. He wouldn’t, so one day would be a miss. He’d get back on the wagon for a few days, then it would happen again. Then one day became two, two become five, the reminders would disappear from the mirror, and the whole thing would be buried again until next year. Does that sound like your last New Year’s resolution?

Then, something changed. I caught up with him for lunch after not seeing him for a few years, and while waiting for his girlfriend to arrive, he excused himself and stepped out to the bathroom with a small baggie of travel-sized toiletries: floss, toothpaste, mouthwash, the whole shebang. Our dates arrived, we caught up, and before he left, he mentioned he’d been going through that routine, sometimes several times a day, for months. Why?

“My girlfriend has celiac disease, and I might make her sick if I kiss her after eating food with gluten. I like pizza, and I like her. It seemed like the only way.”

After years of habit tricks, reminders, and failures, what made Jim change?

“Real” Motivation

Fauxtivation may be useful for a period or just plain fun, but as a long-term approach, it has the solution almost completely backwards. Obsessing over your hype song or getting warm fuzzies about your Instagram ‘loves’ starts with a basic assumption: “I need to feel good to train.” These strategies are all designed to get you those good feelings, but we simply can’t feel good on command. Even worse, failure is itself a bad feeling. Eventually, you will slip, and like Jim, you will start feeling bad about your slip. Then you start feeling bad about feeling bad, because feeling bad means you can’t train because you’re operating on bad assumptions. Eventually, you’d rather drop the whole thing rather than live in the failure spiral.

This is not to say that motivation is meaningless. In a summary of available research on expertise, Dr. Anders Ericsson pointed out that there appears to be a timeline for motivation as children develop into masters. When children are introduced to a new activity, it’s usually as a form of play. The plastic golf club isn’t for anything. It’s just a toy. Eventually, they discover that the toy is part of something bigger, and their initial positive associations carry them through into getting started. Under instruction, they begin to improve, they notice that improvement, and the process of mastery becomes, in part, its own reward.

Finally, the once-beginner starts competing and winning, investing greater and greater time in the sport until:

“…the motivation to practice becomes so closely connected to the goal of becoming an expert performer and so integrated with the individual’s daily life that motivation to practice, per se, cannot be easily assessed.” – Dr. Anders Ericcson

Mastery and You

If you’ve worked at developing mastery at anything for more than a few years, you’ve gone through this process. Maybe you started lifting weights because your doctor told you to, it was part of your sport, or you just wanted to look better. You start hitting PRs, you see a physical change, and you notice the effect of improved strength in the rest of your life. You start building friendships in the gym that reach into your normal life. Your diet changes, your values adjust slightly, and the sport becomes part of your identity. You’re now a “lifter,” your family’s “go-to fitness guru,” or even a “coach.” When someone asks why, your answer has layers deeper than even you know.

Getting Motivated

When I mention motivation, I’m not talking about posters and gym selfies. Motivation is the purpose that makes practice a priority. Jim made a major life change because the behavior now carried a purpose: enabling romance and demonstrating to his new girlfriend that he cared about her and she could feel safe with him. I am not trying to be glib. There can be many internal obstacles to change, and I’m not suggesting everyone will have a rock bottom or eureka moment and march, unwavering, on the path to lose 100 pounds. Obviously, it’s more complicated than that.

The question is how we move down the path to true motivation. If you’re reading this, you’re probably not a kid playing with a toy golf club, but you can still hop on the motivation train Dr. Erickson outlines and build your reason over time.

• Start with something you enjoy or, more likely, make what you need to do fun. Fauxtivation may come in handy here—play music you like, litter the wall with posters, lift with your friends, whatever works, but fight to avoid needing these to get to the gym.
• Build a habit and a discipline to carry you through long enough to get past the initial stages and see success. Accountability partners and coaches can help here.
• Identity your reason and make it actionable. Ask yourself: what is important enough to me that I’d skip a beer or some Netflix to go to the gym? As time goes on, expect this reason to change and embrace that change.
• Pay attention to your success. Be mindful in the gym. Notice your technique and celebrate improvements. Track your weight or your pictures in the mirror and celebrate when it moves the way you want. Don’t just check your brain at the door. Soak in the specifics. Be your own coach.
• Occasionally, take moments to reflect on your progress and what you get out of your training.

Once these are in place, you won’t need other people to tell you how to get motivated. You’re already there, and anything else on top of that—the hype songs, the Facebook Live attention, the posters—won’t derail you or distract you from your purpose: your true motivation.

Reference:

1. Ericsson, K. Anders, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer. “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.” Psychological review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363.

The post Motivation: Worthless? Or Indispensable appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

For many, though, the search for a diet that works is mind-boggling. There are so many options to choose from. Nutrition coaches seem fit into one of two camps: “Follow my diet because it will work,” and “It depends; just do whatever works for you.” The problem for the new dieter is that they have no idea whether the first group is right or not, and the second group seems to provide no answer at all. After all, if they knew what worked for them, or could just eat healthier, they likely wouldn’t be trying to change weight in the first place.

What a Diet Should Do

As complicated as it may seem, diet isn’t necessarily complicated if you don’t have a medical condition (in which case, I highly recommend seeing a dietician). At its most basic, a good diet will:

1. Meet biological minimums required for health
2. Correctly direct calorie balance
3. Improve performance and subjective well-being
4. Be sustainable for as long as necessary

In short, a good diet covers the basics, is scale/waistline friendly, feels good, and you can actually do it. These general rules are a lot more useful than some of the common catchphrases like “eat less, move more,” and “eat clean,” and when you look at them carefully, you come to realize that there is a wide range of possible effective diets. 

When selecting the diet that works for you, then, you don’t just have to do “whatever works for you.” You can look at how diets are structured and pick from among the four major diet types to get to the diet that will work best for you.

The Four Diet Types

There are a million diets with a million names, and when faced with a vast array of choices, we are less likely to make a choice. Lucky for us, the overwhelming variety of the diet universe, like the brand variety in your local grocery store, is mostly an illusion. By understanding the greater categories and their pros and cons, it becomes much easier to pick one you can actually use.

IIFYM

Examples: Avatar Nutrition, Renaissance Periodization (book).

“If It Fits Your Macros,” also called “flexible dieting” and “macro tracking, is the practice of recording and counting your daily intake of carbohydrate, protein, fat, and by extension calories, with the intention of meeting a set numeric goal. The ratios of these macros are determined by the athlete’s goals, the total caloric intake needed to gain, lose, or maintain weight as desired, and likelihood of personal compliance.

Pros:

Flexible dieting allows you to precisely control the rate of weight gain or loss, which is very useful for weight-class athletes, and they are easy to adjust for peri-workout nutrition or other meal timing strategies. By consistently recording food intake, dieters grow an awareness of what they eat, and can better identify what works and doesn’t work for performance.

In their most basic form, flexible diets are just that: flexible. If you take in too many carbs in one meal, you can likely still cut carbs in a later meal without breaking the diet.

These diets can greatly encourage personal autonomy. There are no clean foods or dirty foods, just intelligent choices. Sure, you can have those Pop Tarts, but if you only have 200 grams of carbs in your day’s allotment, that will mean you’ve blown half them in one barely palatable, non-satiating snack.

Cons (and some workarounds):

Although it becomes easier with experience, it still takes work, and even the more experienced IIFYMers put in extra time and effort to make it happen.

For greatest accuracy and consistency, it helps to stick to a diet of staple foods and prepare food in advance. This can be made relatively simple by making staple shopping a habit, or going to the same stable of restaurants. Technically, it’s possible to eat a wide variety of foods at whim, but most people find the staple approach to be a big key to success, and a staple diet can get boring.

The macro selection is a ‘running guess’ that is adjusted up and down based on the results of the diet at regular check-ins. A week off-plan not only sets the diet back directly, but it can make it difficult to effectively select the right adjustment for the following week. There’s no workaround for this, as consistency is the key to any diet, but if you find yourself taking off weeks once a month, you may need to switch to an approach that is easier to start.

The freedom of flexible dieting can be abused. It is theoretically possible to get your macros from donuts, lard, and protein powder, and eventually, the lack of micronutrients and healthy fats will break good diet rules #1 and #3. This is incredibly rare, but if you listen to the haters, you’d think this is how all IIFYM diets are done. This can be prevented by common sense, an intelligent staple food selection, or by adding one more target to try and meet: “fiber from real food.” This tends to self-correct a diet as it requires adding whole grains, vegetables, and fruit.

Also, a weird virus seems to infect flexible dieters that requires them to post daily shirtless photos and cheat-meal shots on Instagram. Scientists are hard at work looking for a cure.

Proxy Macro Plan

Examples: Precision Nutrition, Renaissance Periodization (templates), Zone, USDA MyPlate.

In a proxy macro plan, meals are planned using guideline measures to meet a particular goal. Precision Nutrition, for instance, breaks the diet into fist, palm, and finger-sized portions of vegetables, starches, lean meats, fats, etc. to hit the target goal.

Pros:

Proxy plans are essentially relaxed macro-counting plans. A fist of starch, or two carb blocks on Zone, approximates a certain amount of carbohydrates (with some fluff for possible inherent protein and fat). As such, rate of weight gain or loss can still be somewhat controlled, especially if food selection is consistent.

The initial barrier to entry is lower than macro plans, as it is much easier to guesstimate two “palms” of steak than 40g of protein.

Food quality is usually addressed in the prescription. Vegetables, fruits, and high-fiber starches are usually encouraged at every meal or in regular portions and quality is usually described and encouraged in the instructions for the diet, reducing the possibility of overdoing the #donutsfitmymacros approach.

Cons (and some workarounds):

Proxy plans essentially exchange some forms of flexibility with others. You no longer have to track every bite you eat or weigh it in a scale and input it into an app, but if you miss a meal or blow it on one meal, it’s harder to work out the path to your daily end-goal. For many plans, the answer is to simply ignore the miss and allow time and an otherwise consistent execution to average it out. Other plans will blend the IIFYM approach and the proxy approach, providing handy conversion guidelines between the two to provide more flexibility.

No macro-tracking or proxy plan will be perfectly accurate: they just have to be consistent over time and increase or decrease intake appropriately, relative to where you’re at. That being said, proxy macro guidelines are hard to follow at restaurants, where even seemingly ‘healthy’ restaurants habitually sneak in gobs of extra fat and carbohydrates (mostly sugar) in dressings, oils, and sauces. On a proxy plan, you can either restrict restaurant outings, knowing their inaccuracy, or use their nutrition facts with a conversion chart to stay close to plan.

Heuristic (Mental Shortcut) Plans

Examples: Paleo, Atkins, ketogenic, intermittent fasting, kosher/halal, vegan/vegetarian.

A heuristic plan establishes a rule or set of rules and mental shortcuts for dietary decision-making. “If your Paleolithic answers didn’t eat it, don’t eat it.” “If it has carbs, minimize or eliminate it.” “If it came from an animal, don’t eat it.” Even if the heuristic itself is on shaky scientific grounds, the diet may itself be incredibly effective for reaching your goals by indirectly addressing the four key diet concerns. For some people, these diets certainly get the job done.

Pros:

Some people claim rules-based plans are too hard to follow, but for many, they’re quite easy. Although the diet may require preparation and advanced planning or a narrower restaurant selection, the rule solves the challenge of making decisions. It doesn’t fit the rule? Don’t eat it. Very few dieters will be effective in this ‘mindless’ phase forever, but it’s often an easy way to get started if paralysis by analysis is your problem.

Many of these diets have a near-rabid following and a support infrastructure to tap into. Looking for a paleo recipe? There’s a blog for that. Dealing with carb-restricted hunger? There’s a Facebook group.

For non-specific weight loss, virtually every decent rules-based diet that’s not an outright crock (and even some that are—I’m looking at you, “alkaline diet”) will almost certainly be better than the standard Western diet.

Cons (and some workarounds):

As is the case with any rules-based system, the value is in the spirit of the law, not its letter. A diet of ‘paleo-approved’ pancakes, donuts, and candy is still a pancake-donut-candy diet, and it won’t work any better than any other pancake-donut-candy diet.

Removing whole food groups and broad swaths of options can leave you open to nutrient deficiencies if you’re not smart about it. The more exclusive the restriction here, the greater the risk, and the more attention will be required.

Dieters whose weight loss has stalled or who have high-end athletic goals will eventually have to learn the fundamentals of calorie control to progress. Your Paleolithic ancestor wasn’t a world-class powerlifter, so if that’s your goal, following their diet may require a few adjustments.

As is the case with anything seen as being highly restrictive, there is a natural tendency to make a religion out of the practice to mentally justify the sacrifice that goes into it. Not only does this make for militant and obnoxious dinner companions, but it can lead to terrible results when the diet itself becomes the end, and the original intent of the diet (health, appearance, or performance) is forgotten in the quest for righteous compliance.

Many of these diets can be made to work for a variety of goals, but you need to keep track of objective measures that matter to you to identify whether your version of that diet is working for you. If you assume the diet must be working because you’re following it to a T but the scale isn’t moving, gym performance is suffering, and you’re getting sick all the time, you need to take a step back and re-evaluate.

Habit-Based Plans

Examples: Mindful eating, slow eating, eat-this-not-that, see-food, “What I’ve always ate”

For many people with smaller goals or starting with a long way to go, huge initial improvements can be made by simple adjustments. Habit-based approaches are essentially informed bets: “I bet that if I change these few behaviors, I’ll get to my goal.” Within this sphere of diets are regional/cultural diets (Mediterranean, etc.) and people who practice no formal diet. Your friend who doesn’t seem to think about their diet at all but is lean, fit, healthy, and killing it on the WOD, is able to do so because their life habits have made a good diet their normal.

Pros:

These diets help cut through to the real challenge of most behavior change: execution. Knowing the perfect diet is irrelevant if it involves 30 different rules, four different tracking systems, and you can’t follow it. When I was in high school, a friend of mine managed to lose over 20 pounds by dramatically reducing his daily soda intake and adding in a 2-mile walk every day. Was his new diet ideal? Of course not, but by mapping the critical moves and not getting caught up in the minutiae, he reached his goal.

Diet is more than just how much, what, and when. Oftentimes, we eat badly because of the why, how, and with whom. Habit-based diets can indirectly address the four diet rules by addressing the behaviors we build around food, teaching us awareness of ourselves in the process.

Cons (and some workarounds):

You have to pick the right behavior. Sometimes it can be obvious, but sometimes the limiting factor is not apparent, and you’ll need help from an outside observer.

You have to monitor progress. Just like heuristic diets, there’s a tendency here to fall in love with the plan, and you may find yourself hitting your sodium numbers on MyFitnessPal like a champ, without losing any weight.

Habit-based approaches tend to make for great ‘starter’ diets, but are rarely enough to drive higher-level athletic goals.

Pick Your Poison

If your diet isn’t working for you, it’s probably not because you’re a hard gainer, or just can’t lose weight. Certain medications and medical conditions may indeed make weight loss difficult, but for 99.999% of dieters (approximately), the issue isn’t your physiology, but your psychology. Ask yourself:

• Have you prioritized the diet enough to comply with it?
• Have you chosen a diet that you can follow with the time, knowledge, and energy that you have?
• Have you chosen a diet that is right for your goals?

If what you’re doing isn’t working, you don’t have to give up. You are not doomed to fail. There are options, and there is almost certainly an option that is right for you.

The post Get Past Diet Dogma and Pick What’s Right For You appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The real answer to The Big Question isn’t that simple. The world’s elite performers spend years working at specific, focused practice that isn’t all that fun. They’re consistent with their training and have a work ethic that keeps them going when others settle for less. They develop habits for self-talk and emotional control to keep them focused at critical moments. In athletics, their success is in part tied into nutrition, supplementation, general physical preparation, recovery, and the ugly duckling no one wants to talk about, luck.

The world’s great stars are all, to a certain degree, lucky. For one, they had the luck of drawing the parents they did. Talent is often overrated, but in sports where limb lengths, explosiveness, and height can all play significant roles in success, genetics can’t be overlooked.

The parental luck-of-the-draw can also play out in the support and encouragement they provide during the star’s formative years. In champions’ autobiographies, you read about chance meetings with mentors and friends who were critical to their development.

Their demographics and geography play a part: Wayne Gretzky would not have been a world-champion hockey player if he’d grown up in the Mojave. At the very least, stars have the good fortune of not being unlucky in tragic ways: born in a war-torn country, hit by a car, suffering a fluke injury at a critical moment, or being duty-bound to leave their passion to take care of a sick family member before they hit their stride.

Many experts overcome incredible misfortune to earn their accolades. I’m not trying to downplay their achievements, but instead outlining how complex The Big Question really is. Imagine if someone came up and asked you: “What made you what you are today?” Could you fit it into a soundbite? An interview? Could you explain it at all?

Star athletes can rarely explain the big picture of their success, and it’s unfair to expect them to. This may seem counterintuitive, but executing a physical skill and understanding it are two completely different things, and most of the world’s best athletes don’t have the time to carefully evaluate, study, and question the physiology and psychology of their development while they’re busy becoming the greatest in the world at their sport.

Layer on top of that all the things that lead to wins that are outside the athlete’s control: team dynamics, coaches, game schedules, opponents getting banned for drug use, deflated footballs, and we come to the conclusion that a star athlete is probably no more qualified to answer The Big Question than you would be.

The Celebrity Halo

If we accept that The Big Question is difficult to answer, a complex stew of talent, practice, effort, and luck, why do we hang on celebrities’ every word? More importantly, why do we fall into the trap of associating our own ideas with the newest, hottest celebrity as though that star knows the answer?

Let’s pick on Tom Brady for a second. I choose him not because he’s particularly bad about it, but because he’s the most recent famous example. After the Super Bowl, a host of websites latched onto his statements about his diet to explain his success in the NFL at the ripe old age of 39. It’s very strict, rejecting any foods he considers inflammatory or bloating, and is based on extensive rules for timing and quality.

• CrossFit’s Facebook page shared it because Tom avoids sugar and white flour.
• Some in the paleo world shared an article about his diet because Brady emphasizes food quality extensively, and his diet has “plenty of all-natural and whole foods and exclud[es] foods like tomatoes and peppers”
• Type “Tom Brady Fitness” into a search engine and you’ll find scores of others shouting: “See? I told you so!”

What makes us think that Tom Brady’s diet is the key to his success? Maybe it is. Maybe it’s his sleep hygiene routine. Maybe it’s the intense focus and determination he puts into his training and preparation. Maybe it was an off-loading of responsibilities to hired staff like his personal chef and soft tissue guru. Maybe it involved the quality of his coaching or smarter plays on the field. Maybe it has to do with the team dynamic of the Patriots? Maybe it’s all of these things, maybe it’s none. Most likely, it’s a little bit of all of it, a few things I didn’t mention, and a splash of luck.

If we assume that Tom Brady is the expert on what made him successful, rather than cherry pick which intervention “did the trick,” why not follow all of his advice?

The Big Question Trap

Business Insider says what everyone who shares Tom Brady’s training tips is thinking:

“He isn’t built like a Greek God. But his longevity and health can’t be argued with, so clearly Brady is onto something.”

By latching onto every word Tom Brady says when it matches our own biases, we grant him credibility. After all, he’s the expert.

But is he? If that’s the case, then perhaps CrossFitters should give up on lifting heavy weights because they teach our muscles to “stay contracted” and cause imbalances and inhibitions that interfere with ‘muscle pliability.’ Pliable muscles are apparently “softer, longer, and more resilient,” and “promote the circulation of blood and lymph to promote healing.” Muscles can be made pliable by TB12 body coaches through “proprietary manual tissue work techniques” and lifestyle change. This is, at best, imprecise and on shaky scientific ground, but clearly he must be onto something.

Brady’s diet also includes grains, so perhaps the paleo crowd needs to reevaluate their idea of what constitutes a healthy diet. After all, he must be onto something, and if he was eating something inflammatory or counter to his evolutionary heritage, he wouldn’t be the best in the world, would he?

Brady is a business partner with Alex Guerrero, who was penalized in 2005 for falsely representing his supplement, Supreme Greens, as a cancer cure. In 2015, Guerrero was given notice for false advertising again after marketing a concussion recovery product called “Neurosafe.” The FTC found he “did not have any studies regarding the actual NeuroSafe product and provided no competent and reliable scientific evidence claiming that the supplement ‘Neurosafe’ would help in concussion recovery.” Tom Brady directly advertised for Neurosafe, and when asked about it in an interview, gave a tortured defense involving a condemnation of all of “western medicine.” But shouldn’t we all be using it? After all, he must be onto something.

Brady has endorsed seasonal eating, taking in ‘hot property’ foods like red meat during winter and ‘cold property’ foods like raw vegetables in the summer. He has championed the acid-alkaline theory of diet and disease, claiming to eat 80% alkaline/20% acid “to maintain balance and harmony through my metabolic system.” Neither of these have much evidence behind them or are even plausible, but then again, he’s won 5 Super Bowls, so he must be onto something.

You get the picture.

Stop the Madness

When a celebrity agrees with us, the temptation to cite them can be nearly overwhelming. It validates us and raises our own status in the eyes of our peers, friends, and lifters. “See? I’ve been saying this all along! The greatest quarterback in the world agrees with me!”

It can be a dangerous game putting people on a pedestal, because once they’re there, they’re free to speak and influence your audience. I’m sure Tom Brady’s diet is a significant part of his success, if for no other reason than because it’s high in vegetables and quality foods and provides him the energy he needs. That doesn’t mean we need to endorse the whole thing, or endorse the celebrity as a source of fitness wisdom. Tom Brady is a virtuoso quarterback and deserves every bit of the praise he’s received for his incredible performance and dedication to his craft, but if you endorse him as a fitness and nutrition expert, how do you answer someone who’s worried that you don’t focus enough on ‘muscle pliability’ or have an alkaline water dispenser at your gym?

The same is true of Food Babe, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the never-ending stream of celebrities with opinions. “Well… they’re only right about the things I think they’re right about.” Good luck with that one. 

How are you managing what goes through your eyeballs?

Social Media and the Climate of Fitness

The post The Fitness Trap: Tom Brady and Food Babes appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

“Kids are taking creatine!”

Cue the scary music.

The paint was still fresh on the “Welcome to 2017” sign when several major news sources decided to kick off a fresh New Year with stale old news:

“Kids are taking creatine!”

Cue the scary music.

These articles are a response to a study published in the journal Pediatricswhich found that two-thirds of health store representatives (think GNC and Vitamin Shoppe) were recommending creatine to an adult male caller who claimed to be 15 years old.¹

The central claims are that creatine is not safe, parents are ignorant, and unscrupulous supplement salesmen lead unwitting teens to blindly consume this dangerous substance. These articles are perfect examples of both common misconceptions about creatine and poor media reporting on fitness issues, so let’s break down the claims.

“Creatine Is Labeled as Unsafe for Teens, but They’re Still Selling It!”

Despite every article’s insistence, there is no warning label on pure creatine products that forbid its use for teens. You can even check out Best Creatine list for a great option for teens. When faced with a striking claim, it’s important to remember how lucky we are to live in the modern era where, empowered by the internet and common sense, we can do our own fact-checking.

A quick Google search would verify that the top products on the list come without the dire warnings these authors suggest. One of the top three (MuscleTech Platinum Creatine) makes no mention of adolescents, while the other two contain only the general disclaimer to “check with a qualified health care professional… if you are under 18 years of age.”

“It’s Never Been Studied!”

This is also false, though there is a grain of truth to it. A quick look into PubMed reveals at least four studies on short-term creatine intake in athletic teens, showing modest performance increases with no reported side effects besides slight water-weight gain.^{2, 3, 4, 5} It has also been used as a long-term treatment (>4 months) or aid-to-treatment in adolescents with leukemia,⁶ post-tramautic-brain-injury headaches,⁷ and Duchennes muscular dystrophy,^{8, 9} again without side effects. This is certainly not enough to declare creatine universally safe for adolescents, but it’s certainly been studied and the results align with those found in adults.

Any time you’re faced with the line: “No one is talking about this,” or “No one has ever studied this,” ask yourself this question: “Is it likely…?” In this case, “is it likely that no one has investigated one of the most popular sports supplements on this planet and its effect on competitive teenage athletes?” If the answer is ‘no,’ then consider it skeptically.

“How Dare You Defy the Experts!”

This sentiment is expressed in every article, and the American Association of Pediatrics does recommend against performance-enhancing supplements for youth, including creatine. However, be wary any time someone shouts: “Experts agree!” Consider these recommendations in light of the bigger picture:

• Other experts like the International Society of Sports Nutrition have a more nuanced position, allowing that creatine could be useful for some teen athletes.¹⁰
• Creatine is naturally found in meat products and is produced within the body.
• The clinically reported side effects of correctly dosed creatine among healthy young adults (18-25) are rare and minor. The old myth that creatine ‘wrecks the kidneys’ is simply untrue, and most anecdotes can be explained as interactions with pre-existing conditions or false correlation. When there are true major incidents, they are so astronomically rare that each event makes news. The only common side effects are slight water-weight gain and stomach upset.
• 18 is not a magical number. It’s only used as a ballpark figure because most athletes have completed puberty by 18. Even if we take the stance that one should wait for maturity before eating anything processed in a lab (good luck with that one in today’s food market), athletes may reach physical maturity as early as 15 years old and recommendations can be safely individualized.
• There is no plausible mechanism that would cause a teen to be harmed by creatine in a way that an adult would not. Creatine is not a hormone or prohormone and does not appear to affect hormone production. It’s tolerated well by most people, and as mentioned above, the few times it’s been studied in adolescents, no negative effects were observed.

“Kids Are Using It Even More Nowadays!”

This idea comes from the NPR article on the topic and is both a scare tactic and an argument. It implies that creatine is a health epidemic waiting to happen, its horrors hidden by the fact that kids didn’t use it much in the past. Unfortunately, the article cites a study that doesn’t actually say that. The study took an unrepresentative sample: all drawn from 1 state, “almost 20% Asian youth,” and “largely of lower economic status.”¹¹ So any comparison to previous national studies is impossible. The study itself cites previous work which suggests steroid use among adolescents today is half of what it was at its peak in 2000-2002 (creatine use was not investigated in the cited comparison studies, which is another issue entirely).

I don’t necessarily blame the journalist here, who likely only read the study’s abstract, because the authors of the study misrepresented their results, saying this in their abstract:

“The use of muscle-enhancing behaviors is substantially higher than has been previously reported and is cause for concern.”

Weasel-wording of this caliber is unfortunately common in this field, since research often won’t get published if it’s not novel or interesting. There is only one response: if you can’t read the full content of the study or get a review from someone you trust, tune out the instant you read the phrase “a study says…”

“It Could be Adulterated With the Real Dangerous Stuff!”

Unfortunately, this does happen with some supplements. However, it is radically uncommon for creatine. Several investigations into powdered creatine monohydrate show minimal detectable organic contamination, and most of that is creatinine (creatine which has broken down and is not effective but is harmlessly processed by healthy kidneys).^{12, 13} Also, with over a quarter of college athletes using it (and relatively few drug test fails), it seems unlikely that adulteration is terribly common when sticking to reputable sources.

“Be careful, but you’re probably all right” doesn’t make for great clickbait, so news sites ‘spice up’ the potential risk. The CNN article gets a dishonorable mention for using this sort of scare tactic. A video at the top of the page opens up with this line:

“More Americans are taking dietary supplements, and according to a new study by federal health experts, many of them are ending up in the emergency department!”

Gasp! However, the video is completely unrelated to the article, discussing the results of an entirely different study measuring emergency room visits for all supplements. This included herbal supplements and diet pills, which account for the vast majority of supplement-related ER visits and which are notorious for adulteration and false content labeling. Dramatic? Yes. Relevant? Not really.

The only way to get around this is to be skeptical of generalities. If the author uses “supplement” instead of “creatine,” why aren’t they being specific? If they cite a study and don’t link it, what are they trying to hide?

Creatine and Teens

It is human nature to outweigh losses over gains, and to fixate on the uncommon anecdote over the banal statistic. It’s how people can be terrified of shark attacks yet fail to check their rearview mirror when changing lanes. Dr. Ruth Malanaik, the lead author of the study that inspired these articles, expresses this sentiment well: “There’s no need to rush the game of muscle mass, which can be added slowly and healthfully through clean living, a good diet, and exercise.”

Tell that to a 17-year old kid fighting for a college scholarship or a state championship. Tell them they shouldn’t take creatine because their goals of becoming a world-class athlete are ‘rushing,’ and they need to ‘take it slow’ despite the competition. Tell them that, even though there’s no evidence that creatine will harm them. Good luck.

A physically mature and active high school student is far more likely to suffer an ACL tear, broken bone, or concussion while playing their sport than to be hospitalized by creatine. The evidence shows that creatine provides a small reward with incredibly low risks. Instead of shoving our heads in the sand and giving an unconditional “No,” why not address the issue like mature adults and minimize what risk there is? If you have an athlete who comes to you asking about creatine, my recommendations lie close to the ISSN’s:

• Wait until the athlete is physically mature.
• Only recommend it with the consent and awareness of the athlete’s parents and team staff.
• Restrict use if the athlete has pre-existing kidney dysfunction.
• Recommend creatine only to those likely to see a positive effect: athletes in strength, sprint, and high-intensity team sports.
• Stick to the ‘slow load’ dose of 3-5 grams per day.
• Stick to powdered creatine monohydrate from a reputable source, rather than periworkout mixes that have creatine listed as an ingredient. These mixes are more often adulterated and often have an ineffective dose of creatine to begin with (usually just 1 gram or mixed in a ‘proprietary blend’ so that you don’t actually know how much you’re getting).
• Monitor intake as well as signs of dehydration and stomach upset, the most common side effects.
• Inform athletes how it works: creatine won’t feel like anything (there won’t be any ‘pumps’ or skin tingling). The effects accrue over time in conjunction with effective training. Most importantly, “more is not better.” In the long term, 20 grams a day won’t do more for you than 5.
• Use creatine as an incentive and reward: “Get your diet and sleep dialed in, put out in training, and earn it.” Since the big three (diet, training, and recovery) drive the biggest gains, they need to come first.

On The Media and Not Being Lied To

As for reading media reports on health, there are no easy answers. Studies can be biased, and even when study authors report their findings clearly and accurately, the telephone game virtually guarantees the final result will be a bungle.

Most mainstream health columnists are not informed science professionals but journalists and English majors who, though well-meaning and skilled at their craft, don’t have the time, background, or interest to present an informed challenge to their sources. Even having an M.D. as an author doesn’t guarantee the article will be nonsense-free (I’m looking at you, Forbes).

I’ve written before about sifting through media nonsense, but the more I read, the more I’m convinced that your best bet is to skip the major news sources entirely when it comes to health and fitness. Find reputable, informed professionals you can trust and sources that care about the facts. Get used to reading long-form articles rather than short summaries, which are often too short to contain the nuance and context a subject deserved. Above all else, be skeptical.

More reasons to ignore the media:

Nobody Is Doomed to be Fat

References

1. Herriman, Maguire, Laura Fletcher, Alexis Tchaconas, Andrew Adesman, and Ruth Milanaik. “Dietary supplements and young teens: misinformation and access provided by retailers.” Pediatrics (2017): e20161257.

2. Dawson, Brian, Vladich, Tood, Blanksby, Brian. “Effects of 4 weeks of creatine supplementation in junior swimmers on freestyle sprint and swim bench performance.” The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 16.4 (2002): 485-490.

3. Mero, Antti A., et al. “Combined creatine and sodium bicarbonate supplementation enhances interval swimming.” The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 18.2 (2004): 306-310.

4. Juhász, Imre, et al. “Creatine supplementation improves the anaerobic performance of elite junior fin swimmers.” Acta Physiologica Hungarica 96.3 (2009): 325-336.

5. Silva, A. J., et al. “Effect of creatine on swimming velocity, body composition and hydrodynamic variables.” Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness. 47.1 (2007): 58.

6. Bourgeois, Jacqueline M., et al. “Creatine monohydrate attenuates body fat accumulation in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia during maintenance chemotherapy.” Pediatric Blood & Cancer 51.2 (2008): 183-187.

7. Sakellaris, George, et al. “Prevention of traumatic headache, dizziness and fatigue with creatine administration. A pilot study.” Acta Paediatrica 97.1 (2008): 31-34.

8. Tarnopolsky, M. A., et al. “Creatine monohydrate enhances strength and body composition in Duchenne muscular dystrophy.” Neurology 62.10 (2004): 1771-1777.

9. Felber, Stephan, et al. “Oral creatine supplementation in Duchenne muscular dystrophy: a clinical and 31P magnetic resonance spectroscopy study.” Neurological Research 22.2 (2000): 145-150.

10. Buford, Thomas W., Richard B. Kreider, Jeffrey R. Stout, Mike Greenwood, Bill Campbell, Marie Spano, Tim Ziegenfuss, Hector Lopez, Jamie Landis, and Jose Antonio. “International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: creatine supplementation and exercise.” Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition 4, no. 1 (2007): 6.

11. Eisenberg, Marla E., Melanie Wall, and Dianne Neumark-Sztainer. “Muscle-enhancing behaviors among adolescent girls and boys.” Pediatrics 130.6 (2012): 1019-1026.

12. Moret, Sabrina, Annalisa Prevarin, and Franco Tubaro. “Levels of creatine, organic contaminants and heavy metals in creatine dietary supplements.” Food Chemistry 126.3 (2011): 1232-1238.

13. Brudnak, Mark A. “Creatine: are the benefits worth the risk?” Toxicology Letters 150.1 (2004): 123-130.

The post Creatine Isn’t Going to Kill You appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It’s become fashionable, almost expected, to poke fun at the #fitspiration crowd. The messages are counterproductive, the status updates reek of insecurity, the list goes on. Even magazines with no business in fitness are getting into the act with headlines like these: “People who post their fitness routine to Facebook have psychological problems, study claims.”

There is some truth to these claims, but before jumping on the hater’s high horse, consider this: fitness has always been a social endeavor. Even before the first Olympic games more than 2500 years ago, health, fitness, and nutrition have been closely tied to status, competition, and even divinity. As the times have changed, our victory shout has become our status update and olive wreaths have become Facebook ‘likes,’ but human nature is the same.

The internet allows for new ways to share information and create relationships, and it is up to us to leverage these relationships in a productive way, just like the physical culture clubs of the early 2000s, the Persian zurkhaneh, and the Greek gymnasia have done in times past.

We share on social media for four reasons: a need for validation, self-expression, communication, and to share information. [Photo courtesy of Pixabay]

Social Media and Habit Change

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and 22-Pushup Challenge have taught us an important lesson: community has the power to get us to do things we would normally never do.

In his book Influence, Dr. Robert Cialdini outlines three mechanisms that explain how these systems work, and how we can use these to our advantage to help us generate our own change:

• The Written Word. There’s power in writing things down, and this power is multiplied by the public eye. The internet never forgets, and a written commitment to a clear goal cuts off your exit routes when things get difficult and you start thinking “I didn’t really mean I wanted a 1400 pound total… 1200 is more reasonable.”
• Social Commitment. By publicly committing to a task and surrounding yourself with friends and groups that share your goals, you hit yourself with a compliance double-whammy: you’re now under pressure to live up to your promise, and you’ve surrounded yourself with a tribe of people to emulate.
• Identity. As you do, so you become. It’s easy to think of your actions as arising from your ‘self,’ but often it’s the other way around. Even if you don’t see yourself as a ‘fit person,’ the more you “fake it ‘til you make it,” and the more people see and think of you as fit person, the more you become the type of person who adopts ‘fit’ habits, and change will begin to follow.

None of these is a substitute for personal interaction, and it is certainly possible to get it wrong. The wrong groups can reinforce ‘healthy’ behaviors that have no real positive effect, things like detoxes and coffee enemas.

Still, if you’re struggling to take the first step or facing a wall in your training, why not use every resource possible to help drive success?

Broaden Your Horizons

Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat get all the attention when people start arguing about the merits of #fitspo, but there are alternatives to your Facebook wall if you’re looking for information and community.

Find a subgroup of serious trainees with similar goals, and you’ll often find the exchange a lot more rewarding than getting another ‘like’ from your mom.

Groups like Renaissance Periodization and Barbell Medicine provide sub-communities within Facebook where lifters can ask each other questions and share concerns without the fear of addressing their non-training (‘muggle’) friends who won’t understand.

Personally, I’ve learned a great deal from following the training logs of some great lifters on several sites and keeping a log myself at Starting Strength.

#GWPL

For a great example of how social media can create positive change, look no farther than Ivy Knight, the founder of Girls Who Powerlift.

She is putting herself out there in words cemented in her commitment. The social support and encouragement of the community drove her to compete, and inspired a major life change.

The platform normalized an identity and created a supportive community for many women who hadn’t really considered the possibility of lifting heavy weights.

It’s possible to troll this approach, but why? If taking on an identity as a ‘girl who powerlifts’ and wearing #peachgang shirts helps someone get on the platform, get over body issues, or feel connected to a community of capable and powerful lifters, what’s the problem?

Assess Your Goals… And Don’t Hate

Why are you sharing? In general, we share on social media for four reasons: a need for validation, self-expression, communication, and to share information.

If you seriously look back at your posts, you may find a history of validation-seeking: perfectly posed/lighted/filtered Instagram selfies and post-Fran sweat-angels designed to collect likes.

If that’s the sum of your fitness interaction, you’re missing out on what social media can do to support your program.

Find a mentor or social group. Reach out and make a connection with an author you like to express your appreciation, ask a question, or challenge a point. Follow some credible experts in your sport and actually read what they have to put out.

On the other hand, before you get grumpy about your friend’s zillionth post-run “look at me” photo, consider this: they’re doing something.

Maybe they’re posting to get attention… or maybe becoming fit was a huge transformation for them, and now it’s become an integral part of their life. Maybe the social reward helps them hit it the next day and get past the fact that running sucks (an irrefutable, scientific fact).

Maybe you’re just grumpy because you haven’t been to the gym yourself for two weeks and don’t appreciate the reminder. Maybe we should spend less time studying how other people use social media and turn our lens inward to our own habits. Just maybe.

More on social media sharing:

Social Media and Fitness: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Social media and its effect on business:

5 Ways to Increase the Value of your Brand With Social Media

The post Social Media and the Climate of Fitness appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The New York Times is hardly alone. The last few years have seen a flood of videos and articles suggesting that body weight is largely or entirely out of your control. These come packaged with the message to accept everyone whatever their weight, avoid disordered eating, and fight discrimination. Although the aims are noble, the claims behind them aren’t, and the evidence simply isn’t on their side.

All Diets Fail, So Why Even Bother?

As Ms. Kolata and others are quick to point out, most diets fail. 97% of obese people in one survey claimed they had attempted to diet, often multiple times, and failed. This is consistent with most clinical studies which show that weight loss is difficult, and keeping the weight off is even harder.

It’s a stretch, however, to go from “most people fail” to “you have no control, just give up.” Let’s compare dieting to quitting tobacco. Successful quitters take an average of 8-14 attempts before they manage to quit for one whole year. However, if you count those who have not yet succeeded, the best estimate is that it takes a heavy smoker an average of 30 attempts or more to quit.¹

It would be deeply irresponsible to tell someone “nobody succeeds at quitting smoking, so let’s just focus on being healthy at a pack a day.” So why is it acceptable with obesity?

We know it can be done. I am awed by stories like that of Leah Lutzwho, with the help of her coach and community, went from 275 pounds to being a national champion Master’s powerlifter in the 72kg (158lb) weight class in less than five years. On a larger scale, the National Weight Control Registry tracks the progress and habits of over 10,000 people who have lost significant weight and managed to keep it off for over a year, and there are undoubtedly tens of thousands more success stories in the US alone.

All change is hard, and obesity, especially extreme obesity, is complex. It comes wrapped up with feelings of comfort, identity, community norms, habits, self-belief, and ambivalence. On top of that, there is a vast wealth of misinformation and well-marketed diet strategies seemingly designed to create short-term success and rebound weight gain. That doesn’t mean you’re doomed to fail.

It’s Not You, It’s Your Environment

The New York Times article concisely captures this sentiment and reflects the views of many on this issue:

“Researchers say obesity, which affects one-third of Americans, is caused by interactions between the environment and genetics and has little to do with sloth or gluttony.”

The problems with this statement are myriad. The first is the idea that this is the consensus of the scientific community. It’s not. This is the Center for Disease Control’s statement on the causes for obesity:

“Obesity results from a combination of causes and contributing factors, including individual factors such as behavior and genetics. Behaviors can include dietary patterns, physical activity, inactivity, medication use, and other exposures. Additional contributing factors in our society include the food and physical activity environment, education and skills, and food marketing and promotion.”

It’s clear that the CDC sees the importance of personal behaviors in maintaining a healthy weight, but the point at issue here is beyond that. “Lifestyle change doesn’t work” advocates paint us as passive and helpless, battered by our environments like trees in a hurricane. Our environments may be powerful, but they are not static, nor are they entirely outside of our control.

If your “food environment” isn’t great, you can still make smart choices between the available options, including the option to eat less total food (say, a handful of potato chips rather than a whole bag). If a Vietnam POW can train to do over 1000 pushups while recovering from torture, your “physical activity environment” is sufficient to get in a workout. If you’re reading this article, the education is available through the internet. Skill development is a process you choose, and there is nothing so compelling about any food marketing that you have to buy what it’s selling.

If the environment alone were responsible for our weight, you would expect that correcting the environment would fix the problem. The evidence suggests otherwise. Several studies have shown that placing full-service supermarkets in “food deserts” has little if any effect on BMI or fruit and vegetable consumption.^2,3,4,5 Nutritional labeling may better inform the consumer,⁶ but they rarely change the behaviors of those who are not already eating well.⁷ Interestingly enough, done incorrectly, they can even backfire, encouraging buyers to make worse choices.⁸

I will agree with Ms. Kolata on one point: the problem isn’t sloth or gluttony. Losing a lot of weight can be very difficult mentally, emotionally, and physically. The environment can make an already difficult change even harder. And that’s the real issue here.

For all their good intentions, the naysayers are part of the problem. By shouting from the rooftops that dieters are doomed to fail, they become part of that toxic change environment. They enable friends and family to sabotage their loved one’s efforts and engender a sense of hopelessness. They’re the enemies of healthy change.

Telling overweight people that there’s nothing they can do is both incorrect and unhelpful.

It’s Not You, It’s Your Genes

To be fair, their argument is not that simple. The NYT article states that it’s the interaction of our environment and our genes that makes obesity inevitable in some people, not the environment alone. The argument usually goes that we have evolved to seek salts, sugars, and fats, and modern designer foods (specifically crafted to taste salty, sweet, and fatty) interact with our genes to trigger addictive behaviors. On top of that, modern labor-saving devices and retail work mean we don’t have to move a lot to stay alive.

It makes sense that our genes haven’t kept up, and in this environment, of course we’re fat. Unfortunately, not everything that makes sense is correct. From the Harvard School of Public Health:

“What’s increasingly clear from these early findings is that genetic factors identified so far make only a small contribution to obesity risk—and that our genes are not our destiny: Many people who carry these so-called “obesity genes” do not become overweight, and healthy lifestyles can counteract these genetic effects.”

This shouldn’t really surprise anyone. A general “gene” answer to the problem is weak. How are our parents and grandparents less obese than we are despite living in the same environment? How do success stories exist if their genes and environment haven’t changed? Can genes overcome the basic laws of physics(calories in/calories out)?

There is some evidence that certain genes may make it more likely that one person may become obese than another given the same environment and habits, but they are certainly not our destiny.

Obesity Isn’t That Bad, After All…

Some will take a completely different approach. Instead of arguing that obesity is dangerous but inevitable, they will argue that obesity isn’t really a health risk at all. The argument usually goes that it’s activity level, not body weight, that matters for health. People who are destined to be obese just need to focus on being active and happy and health will naturally come with it.

Before I continue, understand that this argument actually has a lot of truth to it. I’m looking to put it in context and not dismiss it, so I’ll start with what’s right about it.

Our definitions of ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ are an issue to begin with. One of the largest reviews to date found that those who were overweight or had mild obesity (BMI of 25-35) actually had slightly lower overall mortality than those of normal weight.⁹ Although there is always the possibility of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) skewing the data, it’s safe to say that being ‘overweight’ is not an automatic death sentence and being low-level obese (assuming other major risk factors like smoking are in check) may not be quite as terrible as we thought.

Also, greater physical activity and higher quality diets do improve health regardless of weight and total calories, and there will be people who remain overweight and show no signs of metabolic issues (“healthy obese”), at least for a while.¹⁰

Unfortunately, “healthy obese” is usually a temporary state. A large, 20-year cohort study came to a disheartening finding:

“After 20 years, approximately one-half of healthy obese adults were unhealthy obese, and only 10% were healthy nonobese. Healthy obese adults were nearly 8 times more likely to progress to an unhealthy obese state after 20 years than healthy nonobese adults… The natural course of healthy obesity is progression to metabolic deterioration.”¹¹

Once the metabolic deterioration starts, especially in those at higher levels obesity, the costs are significant. Obesity is directly correlated with higher mortality, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and numerous other conditions. The total costs attributed to obesity are estimated at $147 billion a year in the US alone, and obesity is rapidly becoming the single greatest source of ill health in the Western world.¹² In other words, it is a big deal.

The best guarantee for health is to lose the weight.

What About Bariatric Surgery?

The one major issue I haven’t addressed from the headline article is the question of bariatric surgery. Bariatric surgery works by reducing the size of the stomach, mechanically limiting how much we can eat. For reducing bodyweight and resolving both obesity and its secondary consequences, it has proven remarkably effective. Is it, as the New York Times would suggest, the best and only real option for the very-obese?

Bariatric surgery has improved a lot over the years, and the surgery itself is relatively safe, but there’s a risk any time you cut someone open, and those risks don’t stop with the surgery itself. 5-10% of people will experience serious short-term serious complications, and it must be carefully monitored in the long term.¹³ Because the diet itself is so dramatically reduced and the gut mechanics change, micronutrient deficiencies are common. In addition, due to the sudden loss in body mass and preexisting parathyroid issues common in extremely obese patients, there is a higher risk of osteoporosis. In short, a patient will likely have to manage their diet, supplementation, and medical status for the rest of their life.

What does this all mean? There are some people for whom bariatric surgery is appropriate, especially those with a BMI over 40 who have previously tried diet and exercise strategies and would otherwise simply continue on as before. Doctors should stay informed about the risks, rewards, and contraindications and be willing to discuss them with their patients or refer when appropriate.

Dieting and failing in cycles is painful and potentially harmful. If the options are disordered eating, early morbidity and disease, or bariatric surgery, talk to your doctor because it may be right for you. But ignore the naysayers who insist that outside of bariatric surgery, you’re doomed to fail (I’m looking at you, Gina Kolata).

Aren’t You Being a Little Harsh?

The Health at Every Size principles statement “rejects judgments about health and any discourse about individual responsibility around health.” They do this to prioritize self-esteem and promote empowerment: if you are not responsible for your health, you don’t have to be ashamed of yourself regardless of how you look or what medical condition you may have. From this starting position, you can then consider options to work towards well-being.

I sympathize with this approach, I really do, and all these articles and videos come down to this:

• No one should be shamed, mocked, or ridiculed for their weight or health. Shame is rarely a good motivator and often makes it harder to change.
• Everyone deserves informed autonomy; the choice to decide whether or not change is worth the cost.
• Everyone deserves respect and dignity, not bias and discrimination.
• No one has to meet an arbitrary beauty standard to be happy.
• Some people will be overweight or obese through circumstances entirely outside of their control or due to life challenges that would overwhelm most mere mortals.

All of these are true, but none of them can change the facts: we are responsible for our actions, and our actions have a great impact on our health. Although we are influenced by other factors, we are the masters of our fate. Our culture didn’t eat that donut. Our genetics didn’t force us to marathon The Walking Dead when we promised ourselves we would train.

If we don’t prioritize health, that is our choice and our right, but we are not “entitled to make up our own minds about what ‘health’ means.” A cell is insulin resistant or it is not. Your cancer is benign or it is not. Obesity (especially without serious muscle mass) saps our health and vitality.

But how do we take responsibility for our health without identifying with it? How do we get fitter without feeling ashamed about not being fit already? We accept where we are, move in the direction we commit to, live in each moment, and accept the process.

We would never judge a child learning to walk or mock someone learning a language for making a mistake, and we can apply this same principle to ourselves. By living in each moment, learning from our mistakes, and accepting where we are on the road to progress, we can retain our dignity without surrendering to fate.

How can you sort through all the conflicting science out there?

PubMed and Bro-Science: How to Use Evidence in Fitness

References:

The post All Diets Fail. Why Bother? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

From the same newspaper (and author, Gina Kolata) who told you exercise has no impact on bone health comes a new claim: obesity is the result of environment and genetics, your personal choices don’t matter, and the only effective treatment for extreme obesity is bariatric surgery.

The New York Times is hardly alone. The last few years have seen a flood of videos and articles suggesting that body weight is largely or entirely out of your control. These come packaged with the message to accept everyone whatever their weight, avoid disordered eating, and fight discrimination. Although the aims are noble, the claims behind them aren’t, and the evidence simply isn’t on their side.

All Diets Fail, So Why Even Bother?

As Ms. Kolata and others are quick to point out, most diets fail. 97% of obese people in one survey claimed they had attempted to diet, often multiple times, and failed. This is consistent with most clinical studies which show that weight loss is difficult, and keeping the weight off is even harder.

It’s a stretch, however, to go from “most people fail” to “you have no control, just give up.” Let’s compare dieting to quitting tobacco. Successful quitters take an average of 8-14 attempts before they manage to quit for one whole year. However, if you count those who have not yet succeeded, the best estimate is that it takes a heavy smoker an average of 30 attempts or more to quit.¹

It would be deeply irresponsible to tell someone “nobody succeeds at quitting smoking, so let’s just focus on being healthy at a pack a day.” So why is it acceptable with obesity?

We know it can be done. I am awed by stories like that of Leah Lutz who, with the help of her coach and community, went from 275 pounds to being a national champion Master’s powerlifter in the 72kg (158lb) weight class in less than five years. On a larger scale, the National Weight Control Registry tracks the progress and habits of over 10,000 people who have lost significant weight and managed to keep it off for over a year, and there are undoubtedly tens of thousands more success stories in the US alone.

All change is hard, and obesity, especially extreme obesity, is complex. It comes wrapped up with feelings of comfort, identity, community norms, habits, self-belief, and ambivalence. On top of that, there is a vast wealth of misinformation and well-marketed diet strategies seemingly designed to create short-term success and rebound weight gain. That doesn’t mean you’re doomed to fail.

It’s Not You, It’s Your Environment

The New York Times article concisely captures this sentiment and reflects the views of many on this issue:

“Researchers say obesity, which affects one-third of Americans, is caused by interactions between the environment and genetics and has little to do with sloth or gluttony.”

The problems with this statement are myriad. The first is the idea that this is the consensus of the scientific community. It’s not. This is the Center for Disease Control’s statement on the causes for obesity:

“Obesity results from a combination of causes and contributing factors, including individual factors such as behavior and genetics. Behaviors can include dietary patterns, physical activity, inactivity, medication use, and other exposures. Additional contributing factors in our society include the food and physical activity environment, education and skills, and food marketing and promotion.”

It’s clear that the CDC sees the importance of personal behaviors in maintaining a healthy weight, but the point at issue here is beyond that. “Lifestyle change doesn’t work” advocates paint us as passive and helpless, battered by our environments like trees in a hurricane. Our environments may be powerful, but they are not static, nor are they entirely outside of our control.

If your “food environment” isn’t great, you can still make smart choices between the available options, including the option to eat less total food (say, a handful of potato chips rather than a whole bag). If a Vietnam POW can train to do over 1000 pushups while recovering from torture, your “physical activity environment” is sufficient to get in a workout. If you’re reading this article, the education is available through the internet. Skill development is a process you choose, and there is nothing so compelling about any food marketing that you have to buy what it’s selling.

If the environment alone were responsible for our weight, you would expect that correcting the environment would fix the problem. The evidence suggests otherwise. Several studies have shown that placing full-service supermarkets in “food deserts” has little if any effect on BMI or fruit and vegetable consumption.^2,3,4,5 Nutritional labeling may better inform the consumer,⁶ but they rarely change the behaviors of those who are not already eating well.⁷ Interestingly enough, done incorrectly, they can even backfire, encouraging buyers to make worse choices.⁸

I will agree with Ms. Kolata on one point: the problem isn’t sloth or gluttony. Losing a lot of weight can be very difficult mentally, emotionally, and physically. The environment can make an already difficult change even harder. And that’s the real issue here.

For all their good intentions, the naysayers are part of the problem. By shouting from the rooftops that dieters are doomed to fail, they become part of that toxic change environment. They enable friends and family to sabotage their loved one’s efforts and engender a sense of hopelessness. They’re the enemies of healthy change.

Telling overweight people that there’s nothing they can do is both incorrect and unhelpful.

It’s Not You, It’s Your Genes

To be fair, their argument is not that simple. The NYT article states that it’s the interaction of our environment and our genes that makes obesity inevitable in some people, not the environment alone. The argument usually goes that we have evolved to seek salts, sugars, and fats, and modern designer foods (specifically crafted to taste salty, sweet, and fatty) interact with our genes to trigger addictive behaviors. On top of that, modern labor-saving devices and retail work mean we don’t have to move a lot to stay alive.

It makes sense that our genes haven’t kept up, and in this environment, of course we’re fat. Unfortunately, not everything that makes sense is correct. From the Harvard School of Public Health:

“What’s increasingly clear from these early findings is that genetic factors identified so far make only a small contribution to obesity risk—and that our genes are not our destiny: Many people who carry these so-called “obesity genes” do not become overweight, and healthy lifestyles can counteract these genetic effects.”

This shouldn’t really surprise anyone. A general “gene” answer to the problem is weak. How are our parents and grandparents less obese than we are despite living in the same environment? How do success stories exist if their genes and environment haven’t changed? Can genes overcome the basic laws of physics (calories in/calories out)?

There is some evidence that certain genes may make it more likely that one person may become obese than another given the same environment and habits, but they are certainly not our destiny.

Obesity Isn’t That Bad, After All…

Some will take a completely different approach. Instead of arguing that obesity is dangerous but inevitable, they will argue that obesity isn’t really a health risk at all. The argument usually goes that it’s activity level, not body weight, that matters for health. People who are destined to be obese just need to focus on being active and happy and health will naturally come with it.

Before I continue, understand that this argument actually has a lot of truth to it. I’m looking to put it in context and not dismiss it, so I’ll start with what’s right about it.

Our definitions of ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ are an issue to begin with. One of the largest reviews to date found that those who were overweight or had mild obesity (BMI of 25-35) actually had slightly lower overall mortality than those of normal weight.⁹ Although there is always the possibility of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) skewing the data, it’s safe to say that being ‘overweight’ is not an automatic death sentence and being low-level obese (assuming other major risk factors like smoking are in check) may not be quite as terrible as we thought.

Also, greater physical activity and higher quality diets do improve health regardless of weight and total calories, and there will be people who remain overweight and show no signs of metabolic issues (“healthy obese”), at least for a while.¹⁰

Unfortunately, “healthy obese” is usually a temporary state. A large, 20-year cohort study came to a disheartening finding:

“After 20 years, approximately one-half of healthy obese adults were unhealthy obese, and only 10% were healthy nonobese. Healthy obese adults were nearly 8 times more likely to progress to an unhealthy obese state after 20 years than healthy nonobese adults… The natural course of healthy obesity is progression to metabolic deterioration.”¹¹

Once the metabolic deterioration starts, especially in those at higher levels obesity, the costs are significant. Obesity is directly correlated with higher mortality, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and numerous other conditions. The total costs attributed to obesity are estimated at $147 billion a year in the US alone, and obesity is rapidly becoming the single greatest source of ill health in the Western world.¹² In other words, it is a big deal.

The best guarantee for health is to lose the weight.

What About Bariatric Surgery?

The one major issue I haven’t addressed from the headline article is the question of bariatric surgery. Bariatric surgery works by reducing the size of the stomach, mechanically limiting how much we can eat. For reducing bodyweight and resolving both obesity and its secondary consequences, it has proven remarkably effective. Is it, as the New York Times would suggest, the best and only real option for the very-obese?

Bariatric surgery has improved a lot over the years, and the surgery itself is relatively safe, but there’s a risk any time you cut someone open, and those risks don’t stop with the surgery itself. 5-10% of people will experience serious short-term serious complications, and it must be carefully monitored in the long term.¹³ Because the diet itself is so dramatically reduced and the gut mechanics change, micronutrient deficiencies are common. In addition, due to the sudden loss in body mass and preexisting parathyroid issues common in extremely obese patients, there is a higher risk of osteoporosis. In short, a patient will likely have to manage their diet, supplementation, and medical status for the rest of their life.

What does this all mean? There are some people for whom bariatric surgery is appropriate, especially those with a BMI over 40 who have previously tried diet and exercise strategies and would otherwise simply continue on as before. Doctors should stay informed about the risks, rewards, and contraindications and be willing to discuss them with their patients or refer when appropriate.

Dieting and failing in cycles is painful and potentially harmful. If the options are disordered eating, early morbidity and disease, or bariatric surgery, talk to your doctor because it may be right for you. But ignore the naysayers who insist that outside of bariatric surgery, you’re doomed to fail (I’m looking at you, Gina Kolata).

Aren’t You Being a Little Harsh?

The Health at Every Size principles statement “rejects judgments about health and any discourse about individual responsibility around health.” They do this to prioritize self-esteem and promote empowerment: if you are not responsible for your health, you don’t have to be ashamed of yourself regardless of how you look or what medical condition you may have. From this starting position, you can then consider options to work towards well-being.

I sympathize with this approach, I really do, and all these articles and videos come down to this:

• No one should be shamed, mocked, or ridiculed for their weight or health. Shame is rarely a good motivator and often makes it harder to change.
• Everyone deserves informed autonomy; the choice to decide whether or not change is worth the cost.
• Everyone deserves respect and dignity, not bias and discrimination.
• No one has to meet an arbitrary beauty standard to be happy.
• Some people will be overweight or obese through circumstances entirely outside of their control or due to life challenges that would overwhelm most mere mortals.

All of these are true, but none of them can change the facts: we are responsible for our actions, and our actions have a great impact on our health. Although we are influenced by other factors, we are the masters of our fate. Our culture didn’t eat that donut. Our genetics didn’t force us to marathon The Walking Dead when we promised ourselves we would train.

If we don’t prioritize health, that is our choice and our right, but we are not “entitled to make up our own minds about what ‘health’ means.” A cell is insulin resistant or it is not. Your cancer is benign or it is not. Obesity (especially without serious muscle mass) saps our health and vitality.

But how do we take responsibility for our health without identifying with it? How do we get fitter without feeling ashamed about not being fit already? We accept where we are, move in the direction we commit to, live in each moment, and accept the process.

We would never judge a child learning to walk or mock someone learning a language for making a mistake, and we can apply this same principle to ourselves. By living in each moment, learning from our mistakes, and accepting where we are on the road to progress, we can retain our dignity without surrendering to fate.

How can you sort through all the conflicting science out there?

PubMed and Bro-Science: How to Use Evidence in Fitness

References:

1. US Department of Health and Human Services. “Reducing tobacco use: A report of the surgeon general.” National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Office on Smoking and Health (2000).

2. Cummins, Steven, Ellen Flint, and Stephen A. Matthews. “New neighborhood grocery store increased awareness of food access but did not alter dietary habits or obesity.” Health Affairs 33, no. 2 (2014): 283-291.

3. Elbel, Brian, Alyssa Moran, L. Beth Dixon, Kamila Kiszko, Jonathan Cantor, Courtney Abrams, and Tod Mijanovich. “Assessment of a government-subsidized supermarket in a high-need area on household food availability and children’s dietary intakes.” Public Health Nutrition 18, no. 15 (2015): 2881-2890.

4. Dubowitz, Tamara, Madhumita Ghosh-Dastidar, Deborah A. Cohen, Robin Beckman, Elizabeth D. Steiner, Gerald P. Hunter, Karen R. Flórez et al. “Changes in Diet after Introduction of a Full Service Supermarket in a Food Desert.” Health Affairs (Project Hope) 34, no. 11 (2015): 1858.

5. Dubowitz, Tamara, Madhumita Ghosh-Dastidar, Deborah A. Cohen, Robin Beckman, Elizabeth D. Steiner, Gerald P. Hunter, Karen R. Flórez et al. “Diet and perceptions change with supermarket introduction in a food desert, but not because of supermarket use.” Health Affairs 34, no. 11 (2015): 1858-1868.

6. Hobin, Erin, Heather Lillico, Fei Zuo, Jocelyn Sacco, Laura Rosella, and David Hammond. “Estimating the impact of various menu labeling formats on parents’ demand for fast-food kids’ meals for their children: An experimental auction.” Appetite 105 (2016): 582-590.

7. Rising, Camella J., and Nadine Bol. “Nudging Our Way to a Healthier Population: The Effect of Calorie Labeling and Self-Control on Menu Choices of Emerging Adults.” Health Communication (2016): 1-7.

8. Lee, Morgan S., and Joel Kevin Thompson. “Exploring enhanced menu labels’ influence on fast food selections and exercise-related attitudes, perceptions, and intentions.” Appetite (2016).

9. Flegal, Katherine M., Brian K. Kit, Heather Orpana, and Barry I. Graubard. “Association of all-cause mortality with overweight and obesity using standard body mass index categories: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” JAMA 309, no. 1 (2013): 71-82.

10. Blüher, Matthias. “The distinction of metabolically ‘healthy’ from ‘unhealthy’ obese individuals.” Current Opinion in Lipidology 21, no. 1 (2010): 38-43.

11. Bell, Joshua A., Mark Hamer, Séverine Sabia, Archana Singh-Manoux, G. David Batty, and Mika Kivimaki. “The natural course of healthy obesity over 20 years.” Journal of the American College of Cardiology 65, no. 1 (2015): 101-102.

12. Finkelstein, Eric A., Justin G. Trogdon, Joel W. Cohen, and William Dietz. “Annual medical spending attributable to obesity: payer-and service-specific estimates.” Health Affairs 28, no. 5 (2009): w822-w831.

13. Schauer, Philip R., Bartolome Burguera, Sayeed Ikramuddin, Dan Cottam, William Gourash, Giselle Hamad, George M. Eid et al. “Effect of laparoscopic Roux-en Y gastric bypass on type 2 diabetes mellitus.” Annals of Surgery 238, no. 4 (2003): 467-485.

The post Nobody is Doomed to be Fat appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Everyone is responsible for deciding who they want to be and for taking ownership of their path to get there. [Photo credit: J Perez Imagery]

Pin Down Your Reasons

You probably began training for either aesthetics, health, performance, or some combination of the above. You wanted to look good, feel better, or make the varsity team. These are all good motivators, but they’re too vague to focus your training and too wishy-washy to motivate you when you’d rather pound Funyuns and marathon Game of Thrones than hit another set of five squats.

At the very least, we need to dig a little deeper. What total are you looking to hit at your next meet? How exactly do you want to look? By pulling out something more specific and tangible, you can move toward finding a program, choose meaningful metrics to monitor progress, and start moving in the right direction.

This is where most people stop, but with you, I’d like to take this a step farther. If you want to progress quickly or beyond a basic level, to the point where you have to make sacrifices and reevaluate yourself, you’re going to have to get personal. Like Brandon Lilly recently asked on Facebook:

“What does a PR total add to your life?… When you really break it down, what does a PR cost your life (family, studies, other hobbies), and how much is it actually worth?”

It’s a great question that you must ask before it’s too late. It’s a terrible feeling to mindlessly plow through greater and greater performances, striving harder and harder, only to hit a serious setback, get rocked back on your heels for a while, and wonder to yourself: “Why am I even doing this?” To get to answers that last, you might have to change the questions you’re asking:

• Is there anything enjoyable or motivating about the training itself?
• Is there anyone counting on you to succeed? Do you get respect, admiration, or work as a result of what you’ve accomplished?
• Are you doing this out of fear of failure or some other negative outcome?
• If you stopped training or dieting tomorrow, what would you lose? Would you be happy?
• Does it reinforce your self-image? Can you respect yourself if you’re not a “fit person,” and would you lose respect for yourself if you fell off the bandwagon?
• Do your fitness habits define your social group? If you don’t post your session on Instagram, did it count?

Your reason will be different from anyone else’s. More important, you will almost certainly not be proud of all of them. Among your reasons may be a need for recognition, a fear of being exposed as a fraud, or dissatisfaction with your body image. That’s okay. You can’t make an informed choice until you acknowledge them. Like the weird aunt who gives everyone socks at Christmas, you can’t ignore them, and when your training or life takes a sour turn, you never know which motivation will get you back under the bar… or how much you may come to depend on your crazy aunt.

“That Guy” Doesn’t Matter

No matter who you are, at some point you’ve reached outside yourself for a target to strive for, wisdom to follow, and guidance. This is perfectly normal—no one is an island—but I have never met anyone who did not, at one point or another, fall into the “that guy” trap. “That guy” is a catch-all for any mental shortcut that points to another person as an answer (negative or positive) to a question:

• “That guy is awesome and he did it this way, so that’s how it should be done.”
• “That guy is awesome despite following an inflammatory diet. Don’t follow him- he’s special (and probably on steroids).”
• “Why trust the advice of anyone who’s not as fit as you? Those eggheads aren’t worth listening to.”
• “Why trust the advice of a world class athlete? Their advice is useless to the average Joe.”
• “That guy (celebrity fitness personality) agrees with what I’m saying. Are you saying they’re wrong?”

I have heard all five of these sentiments (more or less) used in the same argument, and not one of them is valid. At best, each individual case may be an example of a larger truth. At worst, it’s outright wrong. If “that guy” is right, he is right because his position is correct, not because he happens to believe it. Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics. Dr. Oz occasionally says things that are actually worth listening to. Accepting a dumb idea or rejecting a good one because of its source may mean wasted time or missed opportunities.

This gets to the heart of why we do this even when we know it’s wrong: it’s lazy. Instead of doing the hard work of figuring out what works for you, sorting through first principles and honestly assessing what you need to do to get better, you just do what someone else does. It’s an easy out. If it works, great! If it doesn’t, you can blame it on bad genes, steroids, whatever you want.

If you’re just getting started, you probably don’t have a grasp of the first principles or how your body responds to training. That’s fine, just find a good coach. If you don’t have the time, money, or interest and just want something to do, understand the limitations of that approach. Pay close attention to your training as it progresses. If it works, great! If not, move on and find something else. In either case, your experience says nothing about “that guy’s” program or about you. Take what you’ve learned, find another program, and get back at it.

Fitness Isn’t Faith

If there is one bit of advice I wish I could get every trainee in the world to understand at every level, it would be this: never allow your pursuit of fitness to become a religion. Fitness isn’t faith, health isn’t holy, and dogma is no substitute for discipline.

Faith is a “strongly held belief… based on spiritual apprehension rather than truth.” Don’t believe. Be convinced. If you believe a program, diet, or exercise works, carefully consider why you’re using that word. Does the evidence and your experience overwhelmingly support your position? Or is it because the program lines up with your preconceived notions of right and wrong? Has your raw, organic, barefoot lifestyle actually improved your health and sporting performance, or have you equated “natural” with “good” and assumed it must be working?

We don’t need JP Sears’ “Ultra-Spiritual Life” to remind us how overwhelmingly self-righteous people can become about healthy behaviors. Being healthy (however you define that) doesn’t make you holier-than-anyone. You are making a choice to achieve certain goals for your own reasons. This is one reason I refuse to refer to foods as clean, and want you to strike this concept from your mental dictionary. Not only is clean eating impossible to define, but it implies other foods are unclean (and, by association, that the people who eat them are unclean as well).

Dogma, “a set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true,” is a losing battle. The perpetually weak lifter who swears by the Westside Method or the dadbod paleo proselytizer has missed the point on two levels. First, to borrow a term from Dr. Jonathan Haidt, dogmas “bind and blind.” Once you believe them, you’re doubly committed because your reputation or self-esteem are at stake for having been duped. Worse, they lead you to ignore outside evidence, even when it appears that a different approach could get you better results. On a deeper level, we’ve all heard the adage that “a good program done 100% is better than a perfect program never started.” We all know it, but we somehow think that making only half of our workouts or slacking on our diet will work as long as we bask in the warm glow of dogma. Discipline will trump dogma every time.

“Everyone” Includes You

Regardless of where you’re coming from or where you’re going, everyone has to face their reasons for doing what they do. Everyone, at one point or another, will make the mistake of outsourcing their critical thinking to “that guy” or “that idea,” and we are all better off when we catch ourselves doing it before we go too far down the wrong path. Everyone is responsible for deciding who they want to be and for taking ownership of their path to get there. Yeah, “everyone” means you… and it means me, too.

Temper your mind:

Can You Train Mental Toughness?

Motivate your clients and your business:

How to Be a Successful Fitness Business Owner

The post 3 Guiding Principles for Every Athlete appeared first on Breaking Muscle.