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This podcast is for people who want to feel fit, strong, and energised again β but havenβt found a way to make fitness hold when life is busy.
Youβve tried plans that work on paper but fall apart under pressure.
Youβve had periods of momentum, followed by long stretches of drift.
Not because you donβt care.
But because most approaches werenβt built for real life.
On this podcast, we talk about how to build strength, energy, and confidence in your body inside a full life β not an ideal one.
Training that adapts when work ramps up.
Nutrition that stays simple when attention is limited.
Habits that survive travel, stress, family, and changing weeks.
These are honest conversations about systems, mindset, and identity β and how fitness stops slipping to the bottom of the list and starts reinforcing the rest of your life.
I've been thinking a lot about the all or nothing mindset. Why so many people fall into this trap of following pretty intense workout regimes, setting the bar really high. Sorry. Hour long workouts, ninety minute workouts in the gym, maybe CrossFit, maybe classes, following strict diets with minimal flexibility, rigid meal plans, strict rules, maybe setting other strict guidelines around maybe sleep or supplementation or biohacks. And whilst these things in many ways are honorable, they're trying to do make the change, right, take the action.
Speaker 1:There's also a massive issue because what typically happens is that people start out with high motivation and maybe they nail the plan for a couple of days and then something happens in life. Maybe work runs over, maybe the kids need you, maybe there's just responsibilities elsewhere, maybe you make a poor decision that you're not really proud of, maybe you skip a workout, maybe you make a bad food decision and suddenly the plan falls apart. We revert from doing everything to doing nothing and there's no real in between there's no real middle ground And there's kind of two ways that we can address this behavior pattern and I'm sure many of you listening will be going, yep, that's me. I'm the one that makes the puts their impressive plan together and then ends up doing nothing at all and just alternating yo yoing between those two things. And the reason I'm bringing it up now and almost guessing that you're probably nodding your head is that I pretty much hear that on every single call I do with a potential client.
Speaker 1:Almost probably nine out of 10 people say this to me and they say there have been repeating this pattern. Now there's two ways that you can basically address it. The first is to bake flexibility into your approach. Now this is easier said than done because it's not just a practical thing. It's actually more of a mindset thing.
Speaker 1:And actually, if you think about it, the all or nothing mindset is purely mindset. No one's telling you that you've done it wrong if you make a mistake or go out the bounds of the guidelines that you've set for yourself. No one's telling you that you've done it wrong if you do a thirty minute workout versus a sixty minute one, if you train from home versus training from a gym, if you eat a vegetable, if you're following a carnivore diet. There's no wrong or right, it's your perception of that behavior that's actually telling you I've failed, I've done it wrong, let's revert to nothing at all. It's almost like the stoicism approach or anti stoicism, right?
Speaker 1:In stoicism we say no external event is good or bad, right? It's our interpretation of the event that we portray to be good or bad. Thus, we have full control over how we feel because we can choose to react or feel or respond in a certain way to that external stimulus. The same is true of the way that we interpret our adherence or whether it's good or bad around food, around our training and that's so often the reason that we revert to the all or nothing approach is because we see it as this failure point or we see it that we haven't hit the mark, haven't hit the standard, so what's the point? Let's do nothing at all instead.
Speaker 1:Now the in between, the flexible mindset, the flexible approach, practically that might just be doing less, right? It might be making a better choice when you haven't prepared this perfect meal or baking the best choice you can within the scenario. It might be reducing the length of your workout. It might be saying that, okay, doing some push ups from home today is okay when I really wanted to get to that CrossFit class. Right?
Speaker 1:And this sounds so simple practically, but almost no one does it. They see the plan as the perfect and anything less is failure and not worth doing at all. But I promise you that anything is worth doing if it keeps you on track. Anything is worth doing. And the the funny thing is that those moments where you do the flexible approach is so often the thing that actually gets us results because it stops us going through that stop start cycle.
Speaker 1:It keeps the momentum going. It keeps the results going. It keeps us feeling psychologically in a great place. So whatever we can rather than seeing it as this, like, perfect target to hit and everything else is worthless, start seeing it as oh, dead rabbit. Start seeing it as what can I do to hold the line today?
Speaker 1:What can I do to keep momentum? What can I do to wake up tomorrow feeling like yesterday was a success? Now like I say, practically, this is one thing, but actually, psychologically, that's where the real challenge comes because psychologically, we can understand practically, yes, let's work out less. Let's work out from a different location. Let's eat in a less strict way.
Speaker 1:Let's make an optimal choice within the confines of the situation I'm in. But if you don't actually accept that as success and you keep beating yourself up or you feel guilty about it or you tell yourself you're failing, then all of that is pointless. So it's really important to get into this mindset of actually going, that was enough. I have done what I needed to do within the parameters of my life. Right?
Speaker 1:If you're a professional bodybuilder and your soul or an athlete and your sole purpose is to be successful in this realm and it's the actual means to your living and what you your aspirations for life, then obviously it's a different story. You've got to hold yourself to a high standard. But 99.9% of us, we're just trying to be the healthiest, fittest version of the person we can whilst also holding our businesses, holding our careers, holding our family. Now it's impossible to be peak if you want to hold all those three things together, right? So we have to be realistic about the lives that we actually live and build systems or have approaches that actually fit that.
Speaker 1:And if that means sometimes doing a lot less just to keep momentum, some if that means doing what you don't deem to be maybe optimal to hold the momentum and keep moving forward, then absolutely so be it. Right? Embrace that. Embrace it. And we've got to really think about how we can start feeling good about that.
Speaker 1:Now the second option other than flexibility is actually to almost like lower the barrier to entry in the beginning, and this is something that I really strongly believe in. It's almost like you can combine these two approaches, but I think this is really important. So the idea of having lowering the barrier to entry or having a minimum standard isn't to actually lower your standards or lower your ambition, but it's to set a realistic target that can always be hit even on your worst days. And that forms what we usually call, in Vibrant People, the floor or the baseline or the minimum standard. What this does is it means that we can basically hit our targets and feel like we've succeeded every single day without fail.
Speaker 1:So when we're setting a floor, we're basically going on the worst possible day, like, what can you actually do? So for me, that might be I train with my body weight for fifteen minutes, strength with a bit of mobility every single day. Pretty much no matter what happens with the day, however crazy it is, that can get done. And I've proved that to myself through the trials and tribulations of life, three kids, business and all those things. And for food, it might be, Okay, I'm just going to eat whole foods and try and get protein at every meal.
Speaker 1:That's it. No more restrictions. No more specifics. No more rigidity. We keep it really, really simple within those parameters.
Speaker 1:And I know I can do those things every single day, basically. And then maybe you have one around bedtime. I go to bed at a decent time before 10:00. When you set a minimum standard like that, it doesn't mean that that's what you do every single day. It means that that's the least that you do every single day.
Speaker 1:You can do if you have time or more energy, you can work out longer. You can go to the gym. You can train for ninety minutes if you want, but that's seen as a bonus rather than seen as the norm or the baseline. Now what this does is that we can hack this mindset piece where we beat ourselves up when we feel like we've fallen short or we feel like we haven't missed the standard Because our plan or system to actually move forward and see it as success is so low, and we've made sure we've optimized it for our lifestyle and what we can hit on the worst day. What that does psychologically is incredibly powerful because it means that every single day we hit the mark, we build momentum, we feel great about ourselves, we have a glass half full mentality.
Speaker 1:Some days we do more and we feel even better, but we don't feel like we failed if we don't hit the mark. And the mistake people make is that they set these impressive plans into motion, these lofty plans, and it's really difficult to hit the mark every single day, especially if you run a business, especially if you have a demanding career, especially if you have a family. These plans do not fit. And so often, they are like shoving a square peg into a round hole, the square peg being the plan and the round hole being your life. Right?
Speaker 1:And I understand that you wanna be ambitious. I understand there's an urgency to hit your goals. But if you keep falling off, you're never going to hit your goals. You're always gonna feel like you're failing, and you're always gonna break those promises to yourself. And the beauty of setting a minimum standard or a baseline that is above nothing but enough to actually get results, and you will be surprised how many results you can get from just doing fifteen minutes and eating whole foods.
Speaker 1:That's pretty much our approach anyway. Disclaimer. But when you set a standard that feels it's high enough to get results but low enough to actually do every single day, the feeling of keeping that promise to yourself every single day, I cannot tell you how powerful that is. And this will very quickly become a habit. It'll become your identity.
Speaker 1:And that whole issue of going on and off becomes an it's not even a thing anymore because it's just what you do. When you get to that position, if in the future you do wanna increase your ambition, you wanna train for longer, you wanna add more modalities, you wanna dial in the diet a bit more, you are gonna have a much stronger foundation to go and do that because that baseline is there. Whereas most people, they fall into the trap of working from absolutely nothing into this impressive plan, and there's no in between. There's no nothing to save you when it all falls apart. So in summary, focus on building plans that are humble versus ambitious.
Speaker 1:If you are ambitious, build flexibility into the plan. Make sure it's not just all or nothing. Make sure that in betweens, there's contingencies, there's safety nets, there's plan Bs, whatever you wanna call them. And what I really suggest is actually having a minimum standard and actually seeing that as the plan and anything above is just over exceeding. Anything above is just to be celebrated.
Speaker 1:What those two things do will change everything for you. So if you like that, guys, make sure you hit the subscribe button. It really helps. If you've got any questions or comments, I would love to hear them. If you liked it, give it a like.
Speaker 1:And if you wanna see more from me, make sure you follow me on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, whatever it is, and I'll see you on the next one.