Maybe you already know your fitness and diet answers?
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With the new year in sight many people are deciding to go on a new fitness and diet program as part of their new year resolution – are you?
The question becomes what program to follow? Fitness program X, and diet Y, or the super special combo of fitness and diet XY. The reality is if you can perform some type of consistent exercise program and eat healthy food (we know them at a common sense level) you will make gains – get in shape and lose weight.
But we humans are always looking for the ‘secret routine’, the super-efficient program. And sure I could offer you a potential example such as fight-or-flight fitness, but many times we are searching for the sake of searching – instead of just doing something – moving, jumping, running, throwing some weights around.
Lyle McDonald over at bodyrecomposition wrote up about this problem (information vs application) and I think his observations are true in many cases.
…what many do is this: they keep flailing about for that perfect program, the secret program, the magic program. They continually look for that new and ideal program; and in doing so they never ever get around to acting. Or if they do act, they do it in such a haphazard/half-assed way that nothing good comes out of it anyhow.
Lyle has over 300 articles on his blog with many of them about diet so you can see there is plenty of information out there, not to mention the million+ diet books that exist out there, all available at the click of your mouse. Now of course many of these ideas are basically rehashing of the same principles, and there is a range of how much scientific evidence behind them, but there are more than enough that we know works (but of course I think diet and fitness could be more effective if the industry stopped following some of the dogmas – but that is another story). But what do people do?
… people will cast about for the magic program, the magic diet, the magic training and wonder why, by December 2011, they still haven’t gotten anywhere. They will have spent the entirety of 2011 doing the same thing they did in 2010: continually absorbing new information without ever getting around to actually applying it in any consistent or meaningful fashion.
This is pointless and self-defeating. What these people need is not information, they need to actually apply what they do know. In a lot of ways it was simpler before the information overload of the Internet. When you only know about one or two programs, you either do one of those two or you don’t do anything. Now people can literally waste a career of training and dieting doing nothing but reading about the next magic program.
Consistency is key. It is hard to know if a program is working for you if you don’t do it consistent enough and long enough. Yes, I understand the desire for new programs to keep you motivated, but most exercise programs have some sort of periodic cycling pattern, including new exercises, etc.
We tend to think we are missing out, we haven’t found the magical formula that will make you jump 6 inches higher, take 13 minutes off your marathon time, give you that 6 packs of abs you always wanted to display at the beach, or allow you to finally beat your nemesis at your favorite sport.
Lyle finishes off on this topic quoting another trainer:
But that doesn’t change the basic point I’m trying to make: most people don’t need more information, they need to apply the information that they have. If this hasn’t made sense yet, I’ll follow up with a quote from strength coach Steven Plisk, written years ago in Hardgainer magazine (if my memory serves).
He said something to the effect of this:
We’ve tried every periodization scheme known to god and man with our athletes. What we found is that hard work on a mediocre program works better than half-assing it on the ‘perfect’ program.
So don’t worry about finding the perfect program for the start of 2011 – just get out there and put in some hard work, and eat a healthy diet.
