The Workout You Can Repeat Beats the Perfect Workout You Can't
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's optimal.
What's the optimal training split?
How many days should I train?
What's the best exercise for this muscle?
What's the best creatine?
Should I train this muscle twice a week or three times?
These aren't necessarily bad questions.
But I think sometimes we start trying to optimize something before we've built anything worth optimizing.
You can spend hours researching the perfect hypertrophy program, but eventually you have to do the thing.
And then you have to do it again.
And again.
Because the best program on paper isn't going to do much for you if your life doesn't allow you to consistently execute it.
Adherence Is Part of the Program
Let's say you find a six-day training program that looks incredible.
The volume makes sense. The exercises are well selected. Everything is laid out perfectly.
There's just one problem.
You consistently only make it to the gym four days a week.
Work runs late. You have kids. Weekends get complicated. By Friday you're exhausted. Whatever the circumstances are, the same two workouts repeatedly disappear.
At some point, we have to stop asking whether six days would theoretically be better and start asking a more useful question:
What can you actually repeat?
Interestingly, research examining resistance-training frequency gives us some flexibility here. When weekly training volume is equated, higher training frequencies don't appear to meaningfully improve hypertrophy by themselves. Frequency can therefore be used partly as a way of distributing the work in a manner that makes sense for the individual.
That doesn't mean programming doesn't matter.
It means your life is one of the variables the program needs to account for.
A well-designed four-day program that you consistently complete may be far more useful to you than a beautifully designed six-day program you repeatedly fail to finish.
Adherence isn't something that happens after we design the program. It should be one of the variables we design the program around.
Build Something Worth Optimizing
I think the word optimal gets thrown around so much in fitness that we've started losing sight of the fundamentals.
I've had consultations where someone wants to know which supplements they should take.
What's the best protein powder?
Which creatine should I buy?
What can I take to improve fat loss?
Then we start talking.
How's your sleep?
Not great.
How's your nutrition?
Inconsistent.
Training?
Whenever I can get there.
Stress?
Through the roof.
Protein intake?
Not really sure.
We're worrying about marginal improvements while some of the biggest rocks haven't even been put in the jar.
That's not to say supplements or smaller programming decisions never matter. They can.
But their importance changes depending on how much of the foundation is already in place.
Before asking how to optimize something, it might be worth asking:
Have I built something worth optimizing?
Consistency Gives You Information
There's another reason I care so much about repeatability as a coach.
It gives me usable information.
If your training changes every week, your nutrition is inconsistent, your exercise execution changes from session to session, and your effort is all over the place, it becomes difficult to understand why you're getting the results you're getting.
There's too much noise.
But give me several weeks of consistent training and now we can start learning something.
Are you progressing?
Is your volume appropriate?
Are you training hard enough?
Are you recovering?
Does your nutrition need to change?
Are we actually seeing a plateau, or did you just have a bad Tuesday?
This is something I've become increasingly interested in throughout my own training.
It's also one of the principles I recently wrote about when discussing progressive overload: if range of motion, execution, effort and other variables are constantly changing, the numbers in your logbook become harder to interpret.
Repeatability creates better comparisons.
And better comparisons create better decisions.
Consistency isn't valuable only because consistency sounds disciplined. Consistency gives us data.
Stop Recommitting. Start Investigating.
I've watched another pattern happen with clients.
Someone creates an ambitious plan.
Then life happens.
They miss workouts. Their nutrition gets away from them. They become frustrated.
So they tell themselves:
"I just need to recommit."
They come back fired up, build another ambitious plan, and eventually find themselves in exactly the same place.
At some point, I don't want them to recommit harder.
I want to get curious.
What keeps breaking?
Maybe Sunday meal prep would eliminate several difficult decisions during the week.
Maybe training four days instead of six would fit their schedule better.
Maybe keeping a high-protein option at work would prevent the afternoon scramble.
Maybe morning training would work better than repeatedly hoping they'll have the energy after a ten-hour workday.
Or maybe the plan is perfectly reasonable and we've identified something different:
You need to get comfortable doing some things you don't always feel like doing.
That's why good coaching requires curiosity.
We need to understand whether we're dealing with a poorly designed system or normal human resistance.
Those aren't the same problem, so they shouldn't receive the same solution.
Repeatable Doesn't Mean Easy
This is where I don't want the message to get misunderstood.
Building your training around your life doesn't mean building a life where you're never inconvenienced by your goals.
Change requires something from you.
If you want to become someone different, there will inevitably be a period where you're no longer living exactly like the person you were, but you're not yet fully the person you're trying to become.
That space can be uncomfortable.
You might need to wake up earlier.
You might need to prepare food on Sunday.
You might have to train when you'd rather go home.
You might need to protect your sleep when everyone else is staying out.
Sustainability does not mean comfort.
A sustainable program respects the realities of your life without surrendering to every moment of resistance.
There's a difference.
Find Your Version of the Lunch Bag
I've carried some version of the same meal-prep lunch bag for close to 18 years.
I've taken it through 50-plus-hour workweeks. Morning shifts. Night shifts. Overnights. Bodybuilding preps. Career changes.
My food was already there.
I didn't need to spend my afternoon figuring out what I was going to eat or trying to calculate how much protein, carbohydrate and fat I still needed.
The decision had already been made.
That's incredibly repeatable for me.
Would I tell every client they need to eat out of a meal-prep bag for the next 18 years?
Of course not.
You need to find your version of the lunch bag.
Maybe you train three days.
Maybe it's four.
Maybe you cook twice a week instead of preparing seven days of food at once.
Maybe breakfast is almost identical every morning because eliminating that decision makes everything else easier.
The specific system matters less than whether it reliably produces the behavior you're trying to create.
Behavior-change research gives us some support for this idea. Strategies that specify when and how physical activity will happen can improve follow-through, and consistent contexts appear relevant to developing stronger physical-activity habits.
You don't have to copy somebody else's structure.
You need to build one you can actually live inside.
The Boring Works
After more than a decade of training, I've become much more willing to track, observe and trust the process.
I don't need every workout to prove something.
Some days are better than others.
Sometimes the goal is progression.
Sometimes the goal is simply putting together a good session and living to fight another day.
Because I'm not interested in winning one workout if it costs me the next six weeks.
I'm interested in the marathon.
That's what I wish more people understood about fitness.
The best program isn't necessarily the one that looks the most impressive on a spreadsheet.
It's the one that's appropriate for your goal, demanding enough to produce change, and repeatable enough to become part of your life.
Then we collect information.
We adjust.
We improve.
And eventually, when the fundamentals are consistently in place, we can start worrying about that last little bit of optimization.
Until then?
Do the thing.
Then build a life that allows you to do it again.
You don't need a perfect week. You need a structure that gives you enough good weeks, repeated long enough, for something meaningful to happen.
Build a Plan That Fits Your Life
Knowing what to do isn't always the hard part. Building a structure you can consistently follow is.
My Disciplined Mind coaching isn't about handing you a cookie-cutter training program or expecting your life to fit around someone else's system. We look at your goals, training, nutrition, schedule, habits, and the places where things repeatedly break down, and build a plan around the person actually living it.
Because the goal isn't to create a plan you can follow on your best week.
It's to build one that still works when life gets busy.
Learn more about coaching with My Disciplined Mind →
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