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This podcast is for people who want to feel fit, strong, and energised again – but haven’t found a way to make fitness hold when life is busy.
You’ve tried plans that work on paper but fall apart under pressure.
You’ve had periods of momentum, followed by long stretches of drift.
Not because you don’t care.
But because most approaches weren’t built for real life.
On this podcast, we talk about how to build strength, energy, and confidence in your body inside a full life – 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 – 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 consistency lately. And the longer and longer I've been doing this, the more I'm beginning to realize that for most people, fitness isn't about, like, the plan, the details, the specifics, or or any of that stuff that we get pulled into. And fitness is probably 90% just about, did you do it or didn't you do it? Like, as that. It's about doing it.
Jake:The people that actually succeed long term aren't the ones that had the perfect plan, followed this specific diet, this type of workout. Did they do three bicep exercises versus two? They are the ones that just show up again and again and again, however imperfect, and just troubleshoot along the way. And I was talking to a few guys the other day, and more and more this theme of just doing it came up. And it made me think of the Nike tagline, just do it.
Jake:Right? And everyone always knows that, you know, we've known that that's a great tagline, but I think my perception of what that actually meant has changed. And maybe what they intended was actually much, much smarter than maybe what they even realized at the time. You know? I believe that Just Do It was about kind of more about taking the plunge and being a yes person, which it probably is to a degree.
Jake:But I also think it's about the action taking and that doing the thing is pretty much 90% of the success. Like, 90% of the success is in taking the action in the first place. So kudos to Nike and whoever came up with that tagline because I feel like it's got a lot more depth than we even give it credit for. So from my experience working with hundreds and hundreds of people now, particularly very successful, busy people, there's kind of two main groups of people that I see. And they can really be defined by their approach and also defined by their success, and they do really fit quite neatly into two distinct categories.
Jake:So the first person is despite their experience, despite what they already know, what they're already doing, when they join, they just get on and do it. They don't ask they ask in like, important questions, but they don't ask too many questions about the details, the specifics, trying to micromanage, like, everything that's going on. And instead, they just go and do it. Sometimes it's not perfect. Sometimes it's adapted, but they go do it to the best of their ability.
Jake:They don't get lost in that detail orientated situation. They're in the perfectionism, and they just take action. And the result of that is that they are the most successful clients. Right? They might not work out the longest.
Jake:They might not have the best intentions. They might not be the most strict with their diets, but they are the ones that get the best results because, a, they just take action from the beginning, so they're actually doing it. And, b, they are the ones still in the game a year later, eighteen months later, two years later, because they have discovered that secret that just doing it in the first place is without a doubt the most powerful thing that you can do. On the other hand, we have people that get lost in the details. From the beginning, there's so many questions about the specifics.
Jake:Like, is this exercise the right exercise? I wanna do put this exercise in instead. Is this food okay? Is this food not okay? I don't wanna eat like this.
Jake:I wanna eat like this. Lots of questions, lots of details, lots of specifics through this facade of I already know what to do. But nine times out of 10, those people will either not take action to begin with, so they'll just struggle to even get going, and it's behind this facade of the details, the details, it needs to be this way, the plan's not right, like specifics aren't right, or they at the first hurdle, they basically fall off track because there's too much complexity, there's too many question marks, there's too many details without just stripping it back to the idea of, well, the details literally don't matter whatsoever if you're not doing the thing in the first place. And that's the irony of all these trendy diets, like crazy exercise plans, these even just lofty goals that we have for ourselves. You know?
Jake:They can be our own worst enemy because complexity is the enemy of consistency in many, many ways. And there's an amazing book by BJ Fogg, shout out to BJ, called Tiny Habits, and it talks about the psychology of behaviors and building habits. And you basically have this this axis of one side, you have motivation, high or low. Other side, you have ability, high or low. And then there's also a third component, which is a prompt, which we don't really need to get into now.
Jake:But, basically, this model works that there's a sort of a curve on the graph, and the higher your motivation, the higher your the the hardness to do it can be in order to actually take the action. And the lower the motivation, the easier the actual ability needs to be to do it. By ability, we mean is it hard or easy to actually do the thing. Right? So you can imagine if we consider ability to be complexity in this case, so how complex is the program?
Jake:How many intricacies are there? How perfect does it need to be? How long does it take? How hard is it to actually do? If you build a complex system and you get obsessed with the details and specifics, then you're gonna have to require a very, very high level of motivation in order to complete that action.
Jake:And if on a certain day the motivation is low for whatever reason, it's very unlikely that that action is actually gonna get taken in the first place. And by motivation, by the way, we don't mean it necessarily just in the short term sense that you maybe think of motivation. When we talk about motivation in this behavioral model, we're actually talking about it in terms of it could be your deep why as well as actually in the moment, how motivated do I feel? Both are valid and both are distinct and important. But for the sake of this, just assume that motivation could be, wanna lose weight, but it could also be, in the moment, comfort is not is more important to me than motivation.
Jake:So that short term and that long term. So you can see if you make the system simpler, you don't require as much motivation in order to actually go and complete it. And just to give you a practical example, imagine if you were following a keto diet and you had to do two hours weight training in a gym that was a thirty minute drive away, right? So you can imagine with that, it's like, right, I have to make sure there's no carbs in my food. I can't eat out.
Jake:I need to prep all my meals beforehand, make sure it's got this perfect ratio of fats so that I'm in ketosis. And then for my workouts, I need to find three hours to get to the gym, commute there, train, have a shower, commute back. So you can see that there's a lot of complexity and a lot of barriers to entry to actually complete that action in the first place. Then on the other hand, it might be, okay, I only eat whole foods. That's the simple rule.
Jake:Eat whole foods and maybe eat enough protein. Really, really straightforward. There's a million, million ways you can do that. And then maybe a workout's there thirty minutes and they're from home using your body weight. So you can see how, okay, well, I don't have to commute anywhere.
Jake:I don't have to dress a certain way. I can just literally drop down on the floor, do it in thirty minutes, and then get on with the rest of my day. So it's not to say that there isn't any validity in a more complex, more demanding plan. But if this is either some somewhere in the start of your journey or restarting or consistency in actually doing the thing or the problem for you, then it serves no benefit to you to actually have a more demanding or complex plan because none of that matters if you're not actually doing anything in the first place. So that's why having something that's more simple and straightforward to take action on is much easier to actually stay consistent with because the barrier to entry is much lower.
Jake:So what I wanted to explain now that was that the most successful clients are the ones that actually just do the thing. Like, it's not always perfect. It's not always sexy, but at least they're doing the thing. And then we also have people that from the start, there's a lot of details. There's a lot of micromanaging.
Jake:There's a lot of, you know, reasons for and excuses for not doing it. And that often leads to never taking action and potentially not getting the results that you want. So just trusting the process and actually just taking action imperfectly is really the key to success from my experience. So I wanted to go over just three quick strategies that can really help you with consistency. I've seen this work with all of our clients, even ones that struggle with it at the beginning.
Jake:Once we talk about these strategies and change their mindset, this is absolutely game changing. So the first one, as we've already discussed, is lowering the barrier to action. Really, really straightforward. Maybe that's where you work out, it's how you work out, it's length of time that you work out, making it as convenient and as easy as possible to actually do it as we can. That goes with training, it goes with nutrition as well.
Jake:So in Vibrant People, we typically use a body weight approach. Most people are working out from home unless they're traveling or unless the gym is super convenient and our workouts are typically short, so under thirty minutes. You can see how this lowers the barrier to entry as much as possible, removes a lot of complexity. We make it as easy as possible to understand so that guys are taking action first, and then we can worry about the specifics and the complexity later. Right?
Jake:We can always stack that, but I'm a true believer that you need to earn complexity by actually doing the thing over and over and over again and proving to yourself that you can actually keep the promise because complexity is not gonna serve you unless you can actually do something that's simpler in the first place. So lowering that barrier to action. The next one is to bake flexibility into your routine, and this is a system that you've probably heard me talk about before if you've been following me for a while, and that's called the tiers of opportunity. It's something we created for vibrant people and our clients. And that's really straightforward.
Jake:And it's basically about going, if plan A doesn't work, which might be the thirty minute workout, what's plan B? What's plan C? What's plan D? Having the fallback plan so you're not relying on it being this, like, perfect way every single time in order to actually get it done. So maybe you're just scaling back the time required, for example.
Jake:So maybe you go from thirty minutes to twenty minutes. Maybe you go from twenty minutes to ten minutes on plan c. So basically giving yourself lots of strategies and that, you know, on the BJ Fogg equation, on the Fogg behavioral model, imagine on the ability section, we're just slowly moving that to easier, easier, easier. So despite a busy day, despite stress, despite anything that could be causing you not to actually do this, we're creating as many making it as easy as possible to actually action and just having these fallback plans so that we actually get the thing done. In terms of that flexibility, it can look many different ways.
Jake:It could be shortening the length of time you commit. It could be where you train. It could be how you train. It could be when you train as well. Really important.
Jake:I mentioned before in the behavioral model oh. I mentioned before that there's one component that we haven't talked about, which is the prompt. So that's the the trigger or the cue that actually gets you to do that, which is why it's really key for people to actually work out at the same time every day because when we make it, you have to earn the right to actually have random workouts as well because it's gonna require a lot of motivation, a lot of strong habits to in order to do that. If you actually have a prompt, so for example, maybe in the morning, the first thing you do is go and drink your coffee. Right?
Jake:Brew a coffee. So why do you do that? Well, you've created a prompt which is waking up, and then the coffee comes afterwards. So maybe you tag the workout onto the end of that, which is when I have my coffee, then I do my workout. Really, really strong way to build habits.
Jake:And the problem with, obviously having a specific time that you do a workout despite all its merits is that sometimes it doesn't work out the way that you would plan. So instead of just going freestyle and really like I say, you have to earn the ability to be freestyle with your workouts, if you do that without that, there's a lot of chance that you're actually gonna not take the action if you skip the intended time. So let's say your plan is to work out at 7AM, doesn't happen for whatever reason, and you're like, right. I'll do it later. Chances are later is never gonna come.
Jake:What you do with the tiers of opportunity is actually give yourself additional prompts throughout the day. So it's like, okay. If it doesn't happen at seven, twelve is my next opportunity. And if it doesn't happen at twelve, seven after the kids have gone to bed is my next opportunity. So not actually just giving up and going freestyle, but actually having prompts at specific times as fallback plans, as well as potentially changing the location, changing the type of workout, changing the amount of time that you've actually that you actually put into the workout.
Jake:So really, like, baking flexibility in, not just a practical skill, but actually having systems in place to actually go and action those things because psychologically, that's the way that you're actually gonna take the action. And then the third and final point is dropping the perfectionism. Goes back to the details point before. If you're you get too obsessed on it being a certain way and it having to be perfect, and then as a result, if it's not perfect, you don't do it at all or you self sabotage or you feel guilty or shameful or you feel like you failed, that's not gonna serve you at all. The most successful clients are the ones that take action, however imperfect.
Jake:So really embracing the idea that thirty minute workout let's say you do a your workout is thirty minutes at 7AM at a gym and you do six exercises just for the sake of this argument. Imagine if you add fifteen minutes and it had to be at twelve and you could only do three exercises. A lot of people would see that as failure and not do it at all. But that fifteen minutes done is gonna be a 100,000,000 times better than doing nothing at all. Right?
Jake:When we say it like that, it seems obvious. But in the moment, a lot of us feel that if we haven't hit the mark, then what's the point? Same goes for diet. Right? Maybe we wanna eat whole foods all day and want it to be perfect.
Jake:We wanna hit our protein targets. Cool. Great. Fantastic. And then an opportunity comes where you go out for dinner and, you know, the bread the sourdough bread with the butter is staring at you and you're thinking, man, yeah, go on.
Jake:Let's do it. And you do it, and then it's not even bad. Right? There's nothing bad about that. But for some reason, we tell ourselves, we've fallen off plan.
Jake:What's the point? Self sabotage. Now I might as well just go all in and then just ruin the whole momentum that I've built, basically. So really getting away from that perfectionism and actually going, cool. Like, let's just adapt and evolve and ebb and flow with what comes and try to not tie perfect or imperfect to certain abilities or certain scenarios or certain actions and actually accept that there's gonna be some natural ebb and flow in this.
Jake:Those three things. So lowering the barrier to entry, bake flexibility into your routine, and dropping the perfectionism, I believe are, like, the key to actually staying consistent with your fitness plan. And really going back to that sentiment at the start, I truly believe that 90% of fitness isn't what you do. It's just doing it. Did you do it or didn't you do it?