If you’ve ever not wanted to exercise, or forgo the nice food you want to eat, then I have news for you.
You’re a sane human being.
We often think that getting in shape (like success in many other areas) is all about knuckling down and ignoring how we feel.
“Do it anyway.”
Yeah, to create any sort of desirable change in your life, there are things you need to do.
But believing that these things are inherently going to be hard and painful, and require consistent feats of willpower to achieve, is missing a key point about human psychology:
If it sucks to do, you’re not going to keep doing it.
And there’s good reason for this. Contrary to what most people assume, your brain isn’t trying to stop you getting ripped by making training and dieting things you don’t want to do—it’s actually trying to help you do them better. Let me explain.
Why your distaste for exercise is the key to getting ripped
Negative emotions—the kind that cause us to procrastinate, and avoid doing all the things we “know we should do,” like exercising every day and eating healthy—are useful signals. Far from being a hardwired self-sabotage mechanism, they’re actually a gift stopping you from wasting time. And as soon as you realise this, you see that letting them stop you going after what you want (e.g., a six-pack) is ridiculous.
Instead, if you can find a way to
a) get the result you were after, while
b) resolving the negative emotions that were making it hard to achieve it the way you were planning to,
then you’ll find you’ve eliminated waste from your process, and figured out how to get the same result with less time, effort and sacrifice!
The tricky part is that we’re so often too dumb to become consciously aware of the inefficiency that our brain is unconsciously recognising (and trying to communicate to us through our emotions).
Basically, if you’re feeling pushed to procrastinate on your efforts towards a meaningful goal (like your fitness), you’re not hopeless—rather, you’re on the brink of doing things much more efficiently. You just need to be open to re-thinking your assumptions surrounding what you’re doing. That is hard. Belief change takes time and a willingness to re-learn concepts you think you understood. But it’s doable.
And boy is it worth it.
So, in challenging some of those assumptions, how can we apply this idea to fitness to make getting ripped an effortless pleasure that practically happens by itself?
How to turn procrastination into a six-pack—Using negative emotions as a guide to improve your results
1. Have a clear purpose with your training and nutrition
First, you need to know where you’re going.
“Exercising” and “eating to be healthy” are the fastest routes to hating the entire concept of getting in shape.
Your brain is wired to get you results. By the same token, it’s also wired to avoid flitting time away on stuff that fails to get results. And even if you think what you’re doing might be productive based on the bullshit you’ve been fed from popular fitness and health culture, your unconscious brain is smarter than that. It figures out causal relationships pretty quickly and if you’re not seeing progress in any obvious direction 6 weeks into your efforts at “getting fit”, it’s going to get you cutting back on those efforts so they can be directed elsewhere (literally anywhere with a chance of being more productive). How does it do that? Make those efforts emotionally aversive. Enter the negative emotions that cause procrastination, i.e., the feeling that you really “can’t be fucked” going for a run this morning.
Instead, you need clear goals that are measurable, achievable, and guaranteed to get you the outcome you want by the time you reach them. As outlined here, I recommend setting a small handful of basic strength goals, and a body fat percentage. Achieve those and you’ll look amazing, feel amazing, and have nothing more to worry about with your fitness pursuits.
2. Limit your process to the absolute minimum that you think can work
The less you try and do to achieve these goals, the better.
We like to get excited when starting out on any project, and add in a bunch to our routine so that we cover everything and get the best results possible.
Common error. Fatal error.
The more you have to consistently do to complete your process, the less likely you are to actually do it long term. And once one card falls, it all comes crumbling down.
Instead, think of your goal as being to develop a process so easy, so time-efficient, and so effortless that there is no reason it couldn’t get done every single week of your life from now on.
Results take far less weekly effort than most people realise. What can’t be avoided is the amount of months they are going to take to achieve. Which is all the more reason to make your weekly process something that’s quick and easy, so you can sustain it long enough to get truly significant results.
For me, the process now looks like five movements trained for a few minutes each per week (totalling under 40 minutes), a daily protein target, and, for less than 12 weeks total each year, a daily calorie target to drop fat. That’s it.
3. When you experience negative emotions related to your process, ask yourself why
Your process isn’t going to be perfect from the start—it takes experience to be able hack away until all that you’re doing is what gets results.
The inefficiency that remains (despite your best efforts at starting with something minimal) is bound to result in some resistance to some parts of your process.
When you encounter these emotions, don’t just try to push through. Instead, ask yourself: What version of this could I do that seems easily feasible and fun? Even if you think it’s “less optimal”, realise that doing ANYTHING consistently for the next 100 weeks is going to get you better results than taking on more, and quitting after five.
And what inevitably happens, every time I have done this, rather than just copping some mediocre progress that could be better if I was working “harder” and doing more, is that I actually get better results. I then immediately question why the hell I was doing more before, spending more of my time, having a worse time doing it… if it was leading me to less of the outcome I was after in the first place!
People still don’t believe me initially when I tell them I work out for less than 40 minutes a week (until they try my training method). And I wouldn’t have either five years ago.
The only way to prove it to yourself is to test it.
See how little you can get away with while still doing the bare essentials of what’s needed to achieve your goals. Watch your procrastination evaporate, let your enjoyment of progress self-perpetuate. And reap far better results because of it.