The Consistency Blueprint
Are your expectations pricing you out of your achievements?
Let me paint the scene.
You’ve been making great gains. You’ve developed some rhythm at the gym and you’re starting to feel stronger. The scales have finally started to shift and your waist measurement has decreased. Your clothes are fitting a little bit better and people are starting to notice the physical changes you’re making. It feels good to be noticed.
But after a while all of that starts to stop.
The rate of change on the scales has slowed down and your lifts don’t seem to be improving. It’s starting to head towards winter too, which means shorter days and colder nights. Hitting the gym is starting to feel like a chore and an evening in with Netflix and Ubereats is a lot more appetising than an hour and a bit at the gym where you feel like nothing is getting done.
All of a sudden your flawlessly effective routine is in tatters. Four times a week has turned to twice a week and now to once a fortnight. Your progress has begun to unravel. The scale is trending in the wrong direction and your clothes are getting tight again. You start feeling shit about yourself, but not having a solution to the problem allows the willingness to sit in the comfort zone to prevail over the want to change.
You fight with inconsistency for weeks and months on end until the warmer weather hits and summer body season approaches. The warmer weather is a slap in the face to get your butt into gear and start working on your goals again. Repeat process.
Sound familiar?
In this article, I’m going to attack the elephant in the room. I’m going to get to the real reason you’re not achieving your goals right now. The real reason you’re struggling to stay motivated and upbeat about your training and nutrition.
You might not like some of the stuff I’m going to say and that’s okay, maybe change isn’t for you right now. I don’t live, laugh and love my way through fitness and if you’re looking for some cheesy inspiration then you’re probably searching in the wrong place.
But if you’re reading this because you genuinely — and I mean genuinely — want to get to the bottom of your inconsistencies and leave mediocrity in the past, this article has the potential to rock your world.
My aims for this read are:
For you to understand why you are inconsistent in your habits
To teach you how you can continue making progress even when you’re feeling demotivated
To help you set bigger goals
Motivation, we need to have a talk
When someone says they aren’t achieving their goals due to inconsistency, what they are really saying is that they’re not meeting the progress deadlines they’ve set for themselves and as a result they’re feeling lost, confused, demotivated or all of the above.
Inconsistency is bred through a lack of motivation and being demotivated is most commonly a result of lack of progress.
Let’s be real here, when you’re making gains every week, you probably aren’t demotivated. You’re turning up each week and getting your sessions in because it feels like you’re getting better. The longer you can stay in this mind-frame, the longer things will keep going.
But what happens when all of that stops? What happens when the scales stop moving? What happens when the muscle you’ve been putting on slows down? What happens when your big lifts plateau or regress and you don’t have an explanation?
It’s easy to train when things are going well.
This is going to be a bitter pill to swallow. If you have physique based goals such as losing fat, gaining muscle and toning up, it ain’t happening overnight. Not a chance. Not if you want to sustain your results.
If you want to crash diet, lose a bunch of scale weight (including muscle as well as fat) then put all the weight back on as fat, then be my guest. But you don’t want that, that’s why you’re here reading this article, right?
Changing your physique is going to take time. It’s going to involve getting better with each week. It’s going to involve creating new habits. It’s going to involve a fight against existing habits that need to be removed but do their best to stick around.
Let’s go through the reasons that you might be feeling demotivated.
Check your expectations at the door
We live in a day and age where we want it all and we want it right now. The quickest fix is the best fix. What someone else is doing must be what we must do.
Motivation starts to fall apart when progress stops being made at the desired rate.
The solution? You need to set realistic expectations of yourself.
It’s great to be ambitious. I am ambitious across all facets of my life and I strive to always do better. But what I expect from myself remains in the realm of realism and what I want may be a long way away.
From the moment I realised that I had a relatively decent base of strength, my goal with training has been to become an international level powerlifter and represent Australia abroad. Still is. This has been my number one training goal for over 4 years now and it will probably remain my goal for a while yet. I’m getting pretty damn good at powerlifting but I’ve still got my work cut out for me and I probably don’t currently possess all the skills necessary to be there, but I will chip away and over time the pieces should fall into place.
With that in mind, you need to honestly reflect on your capabilities.
If you’ve got 15 or 20kg of scale weight to lose, you’re not making that happen in a couple weeks after a couple sweat sessions. You’re especially not making that happen if you are prone to binge eating, rarely show up at the gym and have no fkn idea what you’re doing when you’re actually there.
This why you might be seeing the yo-yo progress. You’re expecting the world is a such a short amount of time and are so damn fixated on this massively ambitious goals without playing the hand that’s directly in front of you.
This is going to require being honest with yourself and assessing what you’ve currently got going against you. That might mean for some, that you’re struggling to get yourself into the gym itself. It could be that when you’re there you’re working out on the fly and aren’t actually doing what is going to be conducive to your goal. You may constantly be training in the comfort zone. Maybe you think that lifting weights are going to make you bulky (sidenote: it doesn’t happen, you can read about that here)
For others it could be nutrition. Your negative connection to food might be something you need to address. Being afraid to eat more even though your goal is to build muscle. Getting on the sesh every week and undoing anything you’ve achieved in the gym only to punish yourself during the following week.
You’re going to have to acknowledge that you don’t have all the pieces together and that there’s going to be a process of refinement. That might mean improving your self-belief or educating yourself on how energy balance actually works, so eating a little bit more and the scale moving won’t scare the shit out of you.
You’re going to continue letting yourself down and succumbing to this never-ending cycle of swings and roundabouts if you’re constantly pricing yourself of consistency. You’re better than that.
Stop now and think; is what I expect out of myself realistic or am I chasing something that’s currently unattainable?
How you define progress is going to matter
The easiest way to alter your expectations is going to be how you personally define progress.
When we’re speaking about goals in fitness, we’re almost always looking at everything through one dimension. Muscle gain. Fat Loss. Toning. Strength. If whether or not we have achieved these buzzwords is a simple yes or no answer, we’re going to grab the short end of the stick more often than not and it’s not going to be enjoyable.
The easiest way to combat this is going to be the way we set our goals. We’re going to have to look beyond the big, macro goal we’re trying to achieve and start executing on the smaller, micro scale.
More often than not people are training because they want to look and feel better about themselves and they’ll stop training because they don’t. The best solution to this problem is to start setting goals that have nothing to do with what you look like.
Good goal setting starts in the gym
The gym is the best place to start. It seems to be the only place on planet earth where people spend time doing things without getting better, why is that? The answer is quite simple; the focus is constantly on looking better. That’s why you’ll see the bro’s constantly slamming chest and arms while neglecting their chicken legs, why people lift their shirt up halfway through a session to check out their abs or weigh themselves multiple times during their visit.
We can mitigate this by starting to set goals related to how we’re training. Striving for new personal bests, things we’ve never accomplished before. Maximal lifting is the most rewarding kind of lifting. Being able to lift more weight than you’ve ever lifted before is it’s own kind of rush. The squat, benchpress and the deadlift are going to be the easiest to achieve these kinds of pr’s. They’re highly applicable to most fitness goals and these look cool AF.
If you can start working towards big pr’s, you’re going to start shifting your focus away from how you look. The irony is that you’re going to start training harder, with structure and with logic and in turn you’re going to begin looking better without meaning to.
You don’t grow a big squat without nice quads and glutes. You don’t grow a big bench without nice arms and a solid chest and you don’t acquire that big deadlift without a nice back. You don’t achieve either of these things by lifting peanuts either, so by focusing on performance you’re going to get the best of both worlds.
Address the backend
What you’re doing inside the gym is the front end of goal setting, then habit based goals are going to be the backend.
These are goals that are going to be pertaining to your lifestyle, nutrition and movement habits.
I mean this from a good place, but I need to supply some tough love. If you’re battling with consistency and motivation all the time, you do not have all the pieces in place to get the end result you’re after. Something isn’t quite clicking.
That’s why we see people smash 8 week challenges only to lose half of what they achieved during that period or why someone who does keto loses a bunch of weight really quickly only to put it all back on once they can no longer sustain the diet. Short term and unsustainable results fuelled by novelty.
People going from 0 to 100. From no cardio to all of the cardio back to no cardio again. From ordering ubereats three nights a week to eating chicken, rice and broccoli for a 6 week period only to go back to eating takeaway. It doesn’t work.
The habits aren’t embedded and the actions are forceful. More often than not, people don’t enjoy what they are doing in an attempt to achieve their goal, they do it because they believe it is the only relief from their pain. If you’re not enjoying something and that something is a drastic change, that’s gonna lead to relapse more often than not.
What does work isn’t sexy. It doesn’t get you quick results and more often than not there’s nothing to brag about. No one is posting on instagram about how they hit the protein content each day for two months straight, or how their sleep has improved since they started focusing on recovery. That shit doesn’t sell likes the same way a flash-in-the-pan before and after shot from a challenge does.
But getting a little bit better each week or each month is what the winners are doing. Being able to identify your shortcomings and tackle them head on rather than brushing them off to the side is important.
Each of these goals are going to be unique to you, this is why cookie cutter programs do not deliver in the long term. Guidelines only get you so far, but they do not get far beyond surface level. For one person, showing up to the gym every week for a two month period is going to be a serious achievement. To someone else, hitting their calorie and macro targets consistently is going to be the goal. To another, not punishing themselves after stepping on the scale and seeing the already fluctuating number go up 100g is going to be the focus and the gamechanger.
Pick the low hanging fruit
The goal is to pick the lowest hanging fruit and notch up the short term wins. If you classify these wins as progress, you’re going to remain motivated because you’ll feel like you’re constantly achieving something. The consistency will be there. When the consistency is there, your medium term goals start to get ticked off. The habits become embedded into your lifestyle and all of a sudden that huge fat loss goal you’ve been struggling to achieve for so long becomes a realistic possibility.
