10% OF YOUR EFFORTS WILL GET YOU 90% OF YOUR RESULTS

I’m sure many of you are reading the title to this post and thinking to yourselves “this doesn’t make any sense”. Every piece of effort I put in should make a difference right? Well, to a degree yes. However, if you want to see big changes it requires giving the extra 10% that most people refuse to give. This extra 10% is responsible for those massive transformations that you see on social media. Or those people that you don’t see for 6 months and then all the sudden look completely different. So, what is this extra 10%? Is it some magical unicorn that only appears when I’m not looking? No… it’s actually a lot more simple than that. The extra 10% can be something different for every individual. For some the extra 10% could be getting more sleep. For others it could be training. And for many it could be taking the time to track their caloric intake instead of saying “I’m eating healthier”. 
So, basically when I say ‘the extra 10%” I am referring to the things that YOU reading this in particular are not doing. I was on Instagram the other day and one of the well known powerlifters I follow (QuadslikeRobb) put up a story of his nightly walk with a resistance band looper around his knees. The caption said “45 minute walk”. I’m thinking to myself sheesh 45 minutes walk with a resistance loop around your knees outside of a normal training session. So I reached out to him and asked him if the purpose behind it was to get more glute drive. He responded almost immediately and said that yes his glutes were one of his weak areas so he was working on it. I was astounded, not because the concept is mind blowing, but because this guy eats, sleeps, breathes, and lives around the way he trains. Now, he has a family, kids, and other obligations. But, he gets in done day in and day out. It’s actually pretty inspiring. Now, this post is not geared toward turning you into a machine that eats, sleeps, and breathes health. It is more designed to get you to focus on the areas where you are being “lazy” and filling in the gaps to help you accomplish your goals faster. 
So, in my time as a coach I have trained a lot of really motivated people. People that want so bad to achieve their goals, but at the same time don’t realize that they are their own worst enemies. This happened in particular with two of my clients recently. The first is one of my awesome clients Nikki. Nikki over quarantine fell out of training for a couple weeks and when she got back to working out it took her a decent amount of time to get back bust through her pre- quarantine strength levels. Now, Nikki was training 4 days a week. Nikki was sleeping. Nikki was “eating relatively well”. Wait, wait wait….. Relatively well? So I asked Nikki are you tracking your caloric intake? Are you eating enough? She said no I’m not paying too much attention to it. So I told her to go home and start eating more food. Within 2 weeks all of her lifts skyrocketed and it has been smooth sailing ever since. Another time where this issue came up recently was with one of my clients Kayla. She was working out at least a couple times a week. She was tracking her food a couple times a week. But, nothing was ever consistent. She would miss a day tracking or a couple days working out and she was stalled with her weight loss efforts. So we had a session and I said “look, why don’t we shift your focus. Why don’t we focus on eating more and not gaining weight, but if we do this you have to track your caloric intake every day because if you eat too much you will gain weight”. She agreed, we shifted focus. And IMMEDIATELY, she started losing weight when she paid attention to her caloric intake EVERY DAY. Its been almost a month she has been keeping track and she has already lost close to 7lbs. And she is in a MUCH better head space. Would I consider either of these clients lazy? Absolutely not. But, they were not giving the amount of effort they needed to actually see measurable results. And once they gave that extra 10% the results were immediate.
Many many people waste so much time working for fitness goals that they are not 100% committed to. They train hard, eat well, but don’t sleep. Or they sleep well, train hard, but don’t pay any attention to their diet (or not enough attention). And they end up this vicious cycle of perceived commitment and lack of progress. Which causes many to say “maybe my metabolism is broken” or “maybe I’m not meant to hit my goals” or “why do I work so hard if I’m not getting results”. All of this can really mess with your head. And I will tell you in 99% of cases these people are not “broken” they either can’t see the areas where they are not committed or choose to ignore the fact that they are not 100% committed. 
I’m going to leave off with this. Fitness is like a marriage it does not work unless you are 100% committed to it. This does not mean that you have to live your life around your fitness goals. Nor does it mean that you have to eat plain boring tasteless food all day. It means that if you have a goal, no matter the size, and you are not seeing progress with it. Then you need to look at the areas where you may not be committing yourself to the goal. And again just like anything else, the bigger the goal the bigger the commitment. Stay strong everyone!