How to design a routine to actually achieve your goal

Handstands a six pack speaking another language being well-read the splits being present. Every goal that you have or haven’t achieved is a result of what you do each week. Yet the way most people try to design their routine leaves them with something too fat and fragile to ever withstand the test of real life forever than saying, God life’s being busy and never getting anywhere. That busy life, the reality is that is the baseline that you are working with. That’s not going to get easier. But what you can do is design a better routine, one that’s lean and potent and means that the more life throws your way, the better you actually thrive. Let me be super clear about this. The only way that I’ve been able to achieve the things I listed before is by crafting a routine that is so easy to get done.
It would be absurd for me not to nail it every single week, even when I’m flat out, even when I’m travelling, even when I just can’t be bothered, which is very common for me. In this video, I want to show you exactly how I’ve done this to my entire routine so that you can apply the same thing to whatever goals you have and start moving towards them today and continue unimpeded for the next five years until eventually you wake up a different human being. There are three steps to nailing this. Get these right and any goal is yours in just a matter of time. The first step to building a routine that actually works is deciding what you are not going to do. The crazy thing that happens when you turn ephemeral goals into a weekly routine is that you are forced to decide, namely what you are not going to pursue because you have a very limited capacity, time, energy, mental capacity to focus on things, and we can make a process of how we achieve goals as effective as possible.
Efficient. Take very little time, but if you’re trying to go after every goal in the world, it’ll be something I’m going to be able to achieve any of them. So building routine is about reducing your goals down to a decision on what makes the cut and the less that makes it, the better your chances of achieving the things that you do choose. The big breakthroughs that I’ve had have not been through some magical things that have added to my routine, but about how much I’ve built the confidence to remove. That’s what allowed me to accelerate with strength training and fitness, was cutting my goals down to just six movements, lasering in on that. And same thing on a bigger picture with the things I’ve achieved in terms of language learning, reading, it’s only through the decision that this is all you’re going to focus on.
Nothing else matters in terms of your weekly targets that you can then actually start executing consistently with confidence on those things. The bulk of your routine, the slower results, the leaner it is, the less things you have to focus on, the more agile and rapid your results are going to be. So I suggest doing is just choosing the minimum amount of goals that you’re happy working on for the next year, starting with that because then we can build a routine around making sure that those things actually do happen. For example, you might want to learn handstands, muscle ups, get your body fat down so you can see your apps. Get conversational in Spanish, get some basic flexibility, read a list of non-fiction books and be more present day to day. I’m going to show you how to build a routine for that list, which seems quite long.
Thankfully, with a smart approach to fitness, we can actually do that really efficiently if viewing this yourself. Less is more. Make a list now. Decide what the things are that you actually going to make happen, and then we can move on to step two. So now you’ve decided on your goals and you’ve eliminated everything else from possibly distracting you vying for your attention. Now we decide what our routine is going to look like for each of those goals. Now, this is where people go so wrong and get things utterly backward. Most people, when building a routine, we get really excited and think, okay, I’ve got energy motivation now. How much can I get done on each of these each week? The want to go extreme. That is the opposite thing to what we want to do because all we want our routine to provide us is a consistent opportunity to show up and do something.
As I talked about in a previous video, very few of the results we’re after are going to come down to the amount of work we put in each session and almost entirely down to how many sessions we can show up and do something that’s somewhat effective. And so our routine wants to facilitate this and you can think of it as just being a placeholder for effort. We want our routine to just act as little buckets of time carved out for each of the things we’re working on in our week because believe me, and you’ve not experienced this yourself, things are going to come up. Everything in your life is going to try and pull your attention away from consistently showing up and doing the work that you need to do to achieve these things. And so all our routine is a pre-made decision that at a certain time each day, each week where you’re going to show up and do something.
Now, the most effective way to make this happen is to determine these inputs as being as little as possible, making the marker of success, the smallest possible input that we can. The routine part of things does not need to be genius. We can change what we do within this time and it’s not tied to outcomes. We don’t need to achieve anything again, other than showing up. So for our examples, language learning, we want to get conversational in Spanish, five minutes of some sort of practise every weekday. That’s it. And I’ll show you how to actually implement all these in a second. We want to read a bunch of books. Again, five minutes of reading of something from our list of things we want to read again from my experience each weekday and we’ll talk more about what happens if you miss sessions and stuff. But that gives us a two day buffer for these daily activities for building more presence day to day.
We can just plan to show up and meditate once a weekday. No time goal for this just sitting down, closing your eyes, being present. Again, you can get fancy with how you meditate, but the point of the routine is just to allow you space to show up and do it. Okay? Then with our fitness stuff, so we can combine a few things here, handstands, muscle ops, visible labs, general strength. We can achieve all these things, just both training these six basic planes of motion covering all our strength muscle basic mobility basis. So each of those once a week, again, just showing up and putting in an effort or doing it. No time limit, just an effort of using the maximum strength we have. Again, you can get fancy with how you train, but if you’re showing up each week for each of those movements and trying hard, you’re going to progress with it.
Again, the point of the routine is we’re just creating the space to allow this to happen. You can always improve your process once you’re doing it. So that covers all those strength goals, body composition, and then for flexibility, we can also add in some select flexibility movements. I made a video doing this recently. So we can choose one or two key movements we want to get better at, add those into our routine again, once or twice a week, and that is it. Done all our listed goals now have a weekly input target. So we’ve so far reduced all our goals down to a select list and eliminated everything else from our focus. We’ve then decided exactly what our weekly input is going to look like for each of those. The final step is to implement these inputs, and what this looks like is making them non-negotiables in your calendar.
The way I do this is literally have each of these actions in my calendar as recurring events when I think it’s going to be most feasible to them. And why I think this is so important, rather than just trying to rely on memory or building an automatic routine that purely relies on habit is that again, life comes up. You can’t always have the perfect day, day after day after day, things are going to change. We want our routine to be like a ninja that can always move around, things that come up, fill in the gaps, slot in seamlessly where it needs to. So that again, we hit these weekly targets regardless of what life throws at us, which is again, why steps one and two are so important of reducing down the number of things we focus on and how much we try and put into each of those things.
So my calendar for all these goals would look something like this. And here’s the non-negotiable part. If you can’t do it at the time that it is planned for, if you don’t skip it, you move it. So for all of these things we have backups, anything that you said you’ll do five days a week, there’s two spare weekend days that you can always move it to if you need to. Although I’d suggest as much as possible just try and get things done day to day throughout the week. Because if your goal is five minutes of Spanish practise, there should not really be much reason not to get that done. I’m sure you spend more time scrolling your phone than you do reading the books you want to read or practising your language or meditating. So it was good discipline to try and move it throughout the day.
Your training worse came to worse. You could literally bunch all six of your strength movements up on Sunday and get them done for the week. So once these are all in your calendar, they’re now must do tasks and you can get them done earlier if you want. You can get them done when they’re in your calendar, if you like the structure of regular routine, or you can move them like I very often do and do them way later than planned, but still get them done. And that to me is how you build a successful routine that actually carries you to where you want to go with your goals. It’s kind of boring, but it’s effective because we can talk all day about how to train well and how to get the most out of practise sessions, how to learn faster, how to accelerate strength gain.
But if you are not doing the thing regularly as planned, then all of it fades into irrelevance. And this is what I see as being the biggest hurdle to anyone getting results in anything is just pure consistency. And relying on willpower is not the answer because there’s a reason you’re not doing the things you’re trying to do if you’re not doing them. So do this now for whatever goals you’ve got. Write down what you want to achieve, write down the minimum weekly inputs for ’em and put those in your calendar now and you can figure the rest out if you want help determining what the actual input looks like for the fitness goals, always here to help. You can learn more in the link in the description, but otherwise, I hope this is helpful, insightful, useful. Lemme know the comments, want to see more of you achieving the things that you want to achieve because it’s all so doable with the right approach. So I hope this helps. Peace out.