The Number One Key to Success

With so much information about health and fitness circulating the internet it is easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole and learn all this cool information. Sometimes it even seems overwhelming, “how am I supposed to ever learn and apply all this information?” The good thing is at the end of the day there is one factor that can make any program work. You can have the most perfect program but without this one thing you won’t see any progress. At the same time, you could have the worst program ever and with this one thing you can make that program successful. So, what is this big secret to success and if it is really just one thing why aren’t more people successful? 

That is because this one thing is not easy to do. In fact, by definition it is the very opposite of easy. The number one key to success above everything and anything else in the health and fitness field is EFFORT!

Adequate effort is needed to place enough stress on the body that it deems it necessary to adapt to be able to handle the current level of stress. Once the body adapts an even larger stimulus will need to be placed on the body to drive further adaptation and therefore more effort will be required. No matter how you cut it. You will not adapt without adequate effort. 

Yet it seems everywhere I look people are doing everything in their power to avoid actually working hard. 

This starts with the assessment process where we have coaches looking for everything “wrong” with the person in front of them and coming up with as many excuses as possible as to why that person can’t train hard. We then proceed to tell the client everything wrong with them and start to instill fear around working hard because you do not want to exasperate that compensation! Which leads to people constantly searching for someone to evaluate them, tell them everything wrong with them and give them “corrective exercises” to “fix” them when in reality they probably feel like crap because they haven’t trained hard for a consistent period of time in their life. 

These “corrective” exercises tend to be lower level and not require much effort. They make people feel like they are working hard because they are mentally tough but in terms of lifting effort you are never pushing the body close enough to failure to do anything. 

This gets compounded with coaches and athletes constant search for novel exercise and the next best thing. People start to make exercises more and more complex and add more and more cues and constraints thinking they are progressing the exercise when in reality they are just robbing Peter to pay Paul. There is a continuum of effort and complexity where when complexity rises effort must fall. The more complex the task, the more moving parts, the more implements involved the more you are going to drive down effort. In order to truly give max effort, we must shut our brains off and just get after it. If we are focusing on a million positional cues or doing complex movements, we will never be able to truly give maximal effort.

We should always be striving to learn more and apply what we learn to training so that we can be sure that what we are doing is working as efficiently as possible. But at the same time, we should never let new information rob us of effort. So, as you continue to learn as a coach or an athlete and get excited about trying all these new things make sure the effort stays high and you’ll probably end up moving forward regardless.