I have now coached in three different decades and sadly the problems that were around in the ‘noughties’ but seemed like little speed bumps for clients are now a way of life for the vast majority of people.
It’s getting REALLY hard to affect real change in anyone past a 20 year old with nothing else to think about than their gym program.
As we always say in the industry if you train for 3 hours (and that’s a big IF…) there’s another 165 hours to tear yourself apart.
It often feels like everyone is always moaning about…everything. A lot of lives look like tightropes and any deviation from that (which is ALWAYS going to happen) leads to big falls.
That can be anxiety, depression, illness, injury….
The average person always seems one step away from a crash and in this article I hope to give you a simple concept that will enable you to stop having good days on the tightrope and really bad days off it.
Let’s start having good days and great days by creating ‘buffer zones’.
I’m tired.
I’m broke.
I’m ill again.
I’m fat.
I hate my body.
My knee hurts.
I can’t lift that.
Cardio is too hard.
I often listen to people trying to compete with each other as to whose life is harder, whose kids are the most trouble, whose the most tired….
It reminds me of those blind ants who follow a scent to determine direction. A follows B follows C follows D….follows A.
None of them stop to think that they could just change what they’re chasing and step out of the circle.
Like the creaking of the planet as we try to extract every little thing we can out of it, the average human is doing the same to themselves, then trying to blame everyone else but the one person who lets it all keep happening.
I get it. It’s hard to admit that you have completely f**ked up and your life isn’t what you want it to be.
I also understand that society is shaped in such a way that makes it hard. But you don’t have to be complicit and take part in how it evolves. You really don’t.
The average Westerner currently lives life like they’re on a tight rope desperately trying to stay on it at all times and defend it at all costs.
The typical approach is to:
MONEY: Earn enough money to get by whilst spending the most you can afford on everything, then complain that things are too expensive and there’s no money for life-changing things (like fitness coaching)
CONDITIONS: Never be cold and never be hot. Use aircon and radiators for a constant temperature then complain and become unable to function when it’s a little cold or too sunny
EFFORT: Always give 5/10 to everything for fear of giving your all and failing. Never really push and never really rest. Just constantly half-arse everything.
TIME: Fill it with all sorts of mundane, distracted crap then when extra really is needed, complain you’re just so busy
SLEEP: Sleep as little as possible and wait until you collapse into bed, then complain when you’re stressed and don’t have energy for the things that actually make you happy.
PEOPLE: Lots of superficial, crap ‘relationships’. Alternatively, try to find someone to ‘complete them’ (or cling on to them on the tightrope). This often leads to not being able to live fully as they’d like. Then, when one or both inevitably start to wander from the tightrope to fulfil personal ambitions, it feels like a hole is left in the jigsaw.
HEALTH: Do what needs to be done to be ‘not sick’ – just enough to go to work and stop your kids hurting themselves. Rely on medication to keep removing the problems your own actions are creating.
FOOD: Eat what you want and avoid hunger.
BREATH: Short and shallow, again, just to stop certain death, then complain that any significant cardio work is ‘too hard’ because you can’t breathe and go dizzy.
WARM UPS: Turn up barely on time for workouts or your running group, leaving your energy systems largely offline and your muscles unprepared, then complain working out is too hard and it hurts your back.
STRENGTH: Only push hard enough in the gym to feel that your muscles did ‘something’
CONDITIONING: Focus on maybe ‘getting some steps in’ as if a tiny bit of extra heat is going to stop you getting diabetes and heart attacks which are now 5x more likely due to lifestyle.
MOVEMENT: Do the bare minimum in terms of range of motion. Sit, walk, maybe jog if forced, then complain that joints hurt when asked to do anything slightly off the tight rope.
THE WAY FORWARD
The way to sort this out in your own life is to create buffer zones which give you scope to deal with actual problems and make the most of opportunities. You’re able to zig and zag depending on what’s in front of you instead of panicking when conditions aren’t as you need on the narrow tightrope.
Sadly, an overriding belief is still that more money makes us happier despite concrete proof that beyond basic physiological needs and some discretionary income, it really doesn’t.
What makes us happier is FREEDOM so if attaining more money isn’t done in such a way that you feel mentally, physically and logistically free to use it, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
The way to do it is to actively create discomfort and actively seek a little stress so that you can then operate at any point between ‘ideal’ and ‘tough’.
MONEY: Aim to earn more within the boundaries of pre-set working hours and stress levels.
Simultaneously learn to live on MUCH less so you can save more and deal with tough times. If you audit all your spending and be BRUTALLY honest about whether you need to spend that money, you’ll find hundred if not thousands of pounds fairly easily.
The wine, the cigarettes, the clothes, the shoes, the car upgrade, the house with the two rooms you don’t use, the house lights on all the time, the heating on when the temperature’s not super comfortable….
CONDITIONS: Get out of bed if it’s raining and cold. Take cold showers and train without aircon on in the gym. Your body will learn that it can operate in a wide range of conditions letting you get much more done and enjoy many more scenarios in life.
EFFORT: Learn to go much, much harder but also learn to completely rest. Turn your phone off, sit in the garden and just…sit. Meditate. Read a book quietly.
TIME: Say no to lots of things for a while to give you time to do what needs to be done to build these buffer zones. I guarantee you do many things that someone, somewhere has made you feel is obligatory. If it’s not the law and ignoring it won’t result in someone dying, you can choose to not do it if you get past your own narrative about it.
SLEEP: Schedule a sleep time. Turn off the technology, black out your bedroom, stop arguing with your husband and stop texting and talking to people online. Read, sit, breathe, go to bed and sleep. Everything else in this article will become much easier naturally.
PEOPLE: Find amazing people, have high standards of what you want a relationship / friendship to be or be okay with being alone at times.
HEALTH: Eat really well 90-95% of the time and aim to rarely ever get sick by building a huge immunity buffer rather than one that is one virus away from collapsing. See food, water and sleep as your first medicine supply. Aim to never need a doctor unless it’s an emergency.
FOOD: Be okay with being hungry. If you want to lose fat, you need to eat less than what you’re used to and what your body expects. You NEED to be hungry sometimes. You’ll also come to appreciate less ‘exciting’ food because you’ll find joy over a bigger zone of taste stimulation.
BREATH: For 5 minutes per day, learn to breathe deeply and slowly then start to do it when you walk around. Breathe through your nose unless you’re doing hard exercise.
WARM UPS: Show up early for your exercise. Warm up, get your blood pumping and stretch so your body is ready. Give it time to prepare and it will give you more at higher intensity of training which is what is needed to bring about change.
STRENGTH: Get as strong as you possible can. Not just a little bit – really make it a thing. It changes everything. Go very close to failure (safely). Reaching failure means you’re about to get better, not that you’re a useless person. Forget that bullshit mindset. Fail more in the gym and you’ll fail less outside of it.
CONDITIONING: Understand heart rate training and what each level of intensity does. Do it all and elevate what your body can do and for how long. Get super fit so al the stuff around the tightrope doesn’t feel like a workout, it’s just humans doing life.
MOVEMENT: Stretch and mobilise and find full ranges of motion in your workouts so that everything outside is well within your movement buffer zone and you can cope with it / enjoy it with ease.
Life is not meant to be lived as a challenge to create a straight line which never changes, never deviates and never gets harder.
Growth occurs at the edges of what you can do but you MUST be willing to go there.
Do this and ‘good days’ will become the norm, ‘great days’ will happen much more regularly and ‘bad days’ will become acceptable blips rather than things that bring you down for a few weeks or months!
Train until you look like shit in the gym. Eat natural food most of the time. Go to bed early . Do your stretches. Get in cold water. Sweat hard and look like a beetroot. Stop trying to spend your way to happiness. Be bored more often. Give yourself nothing to do sometimes.
Doing the unsexy stuff is what makes you sexy, your body sexy and your life sexy!
