4:30 p.m. Tuesday. But today is no ordinary Tuesday. No, today is different.
You woke up this morning pissing excellence. You could run through a brick wall and then cage fight a cougar, and WIN.
If feeling amazing was illegal, you’d be Pablo Escobar and Al Capone’s love child.
This, of course, only means one thing. You are absolutely going to destroy your gym session today.
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Deadlifts? CRUSHED IT.
Step ups? STEP UPS ARE MY B*TCH.
Spiderman push-ups? PETER PARKER I WILL DESTROY YOU.
The one hour you just spent in the gym couldn’t have been more productive. You worked your ass off, gained strength, burned fat, and laid the foundation for lean muscle mass to be built upon. It’s what you need to see any sort of results.
Except it’s not.
This widely believed notion that amazing workouts are necessary for results, while true, is so misguided in todays world which craves instant gratification. Workouts are important, but compared to the real important stuff, they represent only a small fraction of your success.
There are 168 hours in one week. If you trained hard for four hours in a week (which is on the higher end for lots of folks), it represents a measly 2% of your entire week.
If your boss told you that the company’s focus should be on the products that bring in 2% of the company’s revenue and ignore products that bring in 98%, you’d probably think your boss was an idiot.
Yet SO many people do this with their approach to health and fitness! Your training should not be your first priority when it comes to improving health and fitness. It shouldn’t even be your second or third! Here are the factors that contribute to the other 164 hours in your week that should be prioritzied.
Sleep.
If you do not sleep well, you are not healthy. Let me repeat that.
IF YOU DO NOT SLEEP WELL, YOU ARE NOT HEALTHY. PERIOD.
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You can train as hard as you want and eat vegetables until you turn green. It won’t mean a GD thing if you don’t sleep well.
You are dumber, uglier, slower, weaker, more prone to injury, less creative, more miserable, irritable, and fatter when you don’t sleep. And if you don’t believe me, reference one of the 2,490 studies that these books pull from to verify that fact.
So if you’re trying to improve your health and are skipping over the fact that you don’t sleep well, you better fix that, and fix it quick.
Diet.
Abs are made in the kitchen. No amount of planks, crunches, and side bendy-do’s will burn fat quite like cleaning up your diet can. Training can help build muscle and create curves and bulges in the right places, but eating better will strip your body of the fat hiding all that well built muscle.
If you’re skeptical that sleep and diet alone produce results like we’re saying they do, try this. Don’t workout for a full month. That’s right, take a month off. Instead, get a FULL 8 hours of sleep every single night for the month, even weekends. In addition, get STRICT with your diet. No sugar, alcohol, or processed garbage.
We are 99.99% positive you will feel and look better at the months end.
Think about it… at 3 meals per day on average, that’s 21 meals you need to be on top of. Compare that to your 4-5 workouts. Where do you honestly think more of your time and effort should be placed?
Stress/mindset.
Did you know that mental stress and physical stress cause just about the same physiological response in your body? This means the excess muscle tension, high blood pressure, and decreased digestive activity that resulted from your botched meeting with upper management are the same things that will happen as a result of your gloriously hard workout.
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But guess what? Having these things occur in your body 24/7 is a great way to never see results and feel like a steamy bag of cat turds all the time.
And not only will you feel rundown, but your body will be completely out of whack due to overexposure to stress hormones, difficulty sleeping, trouble digesting food, and all sorts of stuff you don’t want happening on a regular basis.
Stress is usually the underlying and silent saboteur for a lot of folks and their fitness goals. It might seem like it’s not a big deal to feel stressed all the time because, hey, thats life!
But if you let stress run rampant, you might as well take two steps back for every one step you take forward.
“Manage your stress, manage your results.” – Coach Chris (that’s right… quoting myself in an article that I’m writing #I’maDouche)
Sleep more. Meditate. Float. Massage. Color. Have sex. Low intensity cardio.
Whatever works for you!
These factors account for more success than any amount of training will ever do for you. They are the other 23 hours in your day.
Do not neglect them and expect to see the results you’re envisioning!