The Bad Week
One of the first viral videos I can remember is “The Last Lecture.”
In September 2007, a Carnegie Mellon professor named Randy Pausch walked onto a stage with months to live – terminal pancreatic cancer, which is a truly awful disease.
The talk was poignant, and surprisingly positive. One line in particular has always stuck with me – we don’t get to choose the cards we’re dealt, only how we play the hand.
This philosophy is applicable to all aspects of life, but today I want to focus on how it can be applied to your health and fitness journey.
Most people think consistency means a good stretch.
It doesn’t.
Consistency is what you do in the bad week. The travel week. The four-hours-of-sleep week. The week the deal blows up, and dinner is whatever’s left in the fridge at nine o’clock.
Anyone can train well and be consistent when the stars align just right.
The question is what happens when they don’t.
And what usually happens isn’t a decision. It’s a negotiation.
You wake up and start making the case to yourself.
I’ll go later. I’ll go tomorrow. I’ll train twice as hard on Saturday.
By the time it’s settled, you’ve spent more energy ruminating than just doing the thing.
Energy spent negotiating with yourself is energy not spent creating the best version of yourself.
Pausch also said time has to be managed explicitly, much the way you’d manage money.
Same principle, different currency.
Look at your week honestly. The things that get done are the things with a time attached to them – blocked off on your calendar.
Everything else is an intention, and intentions tend to lose to whatever is loudest that morning. If you check your phone first thing when you wake up… well that can be 30-45 minutes of time that disappears into the ether.
So create space – put a time on it.
Then the question is what to do with it, and that depends on where you are right now.
If you haven’t started dedicating time to your fitness, start smaller than you think you should.
For a lot of people, they’ve been thinking about getting healthier long before they take action. The pain points aren’t meaningful enough – yet.
When the pain of not starting gets loud enough, and they decide it’s truly time to make changes, many are overly ambitious with their game plan. Things have gone too far, and they want results yesterday.
Totally normal. Very understandable.
So the plan ends up looking like this.
Strength training three days a week. Cardio two days a week. Yoga on Saturday and meal prep on Sunday.
That plan survives eleven days. Not because you lack discipline, but because you built something that requires perfect conditions, but you live a normal life – it’s anything but perfect.
Build the version that survives the bad week instead.
Two training sessions per week. If you currently average 4000 steps a day, intentionally get 6000 steps – pick stuff you’d feel silly skipping.
The bar has to sit lower than your resistance on your worst day, because the point at the beginning isn’t the training effect. The point is becoming a person who shows up. That identity is what carries the load later, and you can’t build it from a plan that isn’t realistic.
Small and boring, repeated, beats ambitious and sporadic – every time.
If you’re already training and want to take things to “the next level”, stop adding and start attaching.
The reason your mobility work never happens isn’t motivation. It’s that it’s floating – untethered to anything already in your day, waiting for a gap in the week that never opens.
So tether it. Anchor the new thing to something already automatic. Ten minutes of a dynamic warm-up ( that you learned at Fit Lab) after breakfast and before your shower.
Looking to add more lean muscle? Have 20g of protein every time you have a cup of coffee.
Take a 20-minute walk immediately after dinner, phone in your pocket, shoes by the door. The existing habit becomes the cue, and you stop relying on remembering.
This is how people stack four or five healthful practices without their week feeling any fuller. Nothing too new got scheduled. It got attached to something that was already there.
Then be patient in the stretch before results show up.
That gap is real.
Eight weeks of honest work, and the mirror hasn’t caught up. This is where most people quit, and it’s also the only road through.
Pausch made a good point about people: if you wait long enough, they’ll surprise you.
That applies to the person in the mirror too – you have to extend belief before it’s been earned, or you never get to find out.
Along the path to achieving your big goals, notice what’s already changed.
Flights of stairs that stopped making you winded or hurting your knee.
Sleeping through the night.
Picking up your kid without worrying about your back.
Most people only measure what hasn’t happened yet, and they miss the whole, meaningful middle.
And none of that came from a perfect stretch. It came from the weeks that played out badly and you showed up anyway.
Remember – you don’t get to pick the week. You get to pick how you play it.
Courage.
Greg.
