Habits – #gettingshitdone

Habits, in essence, form who we are. They make up our identity, but identities can change over time and it’s important sometimes to remind ourselves of this:

‘We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.’

Will Durant

No one is born with excellence. It’s a skill, and skills are developed through repetition, often through creating a habit to repeat something. I have learned a lot on this topic from the author James Clear; he taught me that there are no bad or good habits – just habits that will contribute to our goals and those that won’t.

Eating a doughnut is not a bad thing or a bad habit in itself; it’s largely subjective. For someone who wants to lose fat, it isn’t an ideal thing to be doing on the regular. However, for someone who is trying to improve their connection and relationship to food, that doughnut could be the biggest victory of their week or even month.

Up until the age of twenty-four, before becoming a PT, I hadn’t actually accomplished much with my life at all. I was well travelled, had bad grades, no savings and I lived with my parents. Living with my parents was fantastic and I don’t regret it at all, as it enabled me to throw myself full-on into my early years as a PT, with incredibly long days and lots of laundry. If I had to attribute any success since then to something, I would say it was down to creating solid habits.

A lot of what built my presence on social media was not so much what I posted about, but how I went about posting my content. Instead of worrying about how the post did, I just worried about posting every day. Instead of worrying about how engaging the article was, I just worried about writing it. I pencilled time in every day to write the articles and nothing would interfere with that habit. My following was below 2,000 for more than two years, but I kept my head down and just did my daily post and article. It was never about tomorrow’s habit; only ever about today’s actioned habit.

People ask me about my five- or ten-year plan, but honestly, I don’t have one. I just worry about today. Tomorrow is influenced by today, so why even worry about it now? Today I have to write this book and I have to write a marketing email. If I don’t do either of those, I will struggle to relax because it has now become such a strong ingrained habit to do them each day.

In my second year as a trainer, I came across a man named Paul Mort, who claimed that email marketing was the best way to make sales. I could not believe something as old-fashioned as email could be a medium for developing my business. Who the hell wants me to email them? I thought. Let alone every day. But Paul said daily vs weekly yields up to a 30 per cent better return on sales. I couldn’t believe this until I signed up to his paid plan – because he emailed me every fucking day until I cracked!

I now run one of the world’s largest email lists in the fitness industry – one of the most profitable too. I email several-hundred-thousand people each day with something entertaining that has nothing to do with fitness, then pitch for business at the end. In LA, earlier this year, I got stung $500 for a laundry bill and my first reaction was: ‘This will make a good marketing email.’ Not only profitable, but therapeutic – I’d never have known that, having originally thought it was the most boring medium for marketing.

I started my list with one email to one subscriber. I didn’t worry about growing the list, I didn’t worry about sales; all I worried about was setting and ingraining the habit. Focusing on the habit is crucial – it’s not about the instant gratification that comes with effort. The reason most personal trainers fail to build an online presence is because they create a habit and expect an instant return on the investment of effort, and if they don’t see one, then they discontinue the habit. They do not let the habit work over time to yield a substantial return.

THE ICE CUBE METAPHOR

In his book Atomic Habits3 James Clear speaks about an ice cube in a room. It sits there and nothing happens. You raise the temperature by one degree, still nothing happens. Again, another degree, nothing happens; another degree and absolutely nothing has happened. But all it takes is one degree above freezing for it to begin to melt. We should keep this analogy in mind in life and not expect our ice cubes to melt immediately after changing the temperature by a degree or two. You need to focus on it degree by degree – maintaining steady habits to achieve change.

Since I decided to write my daily emails, all I have done is focus on writing them each day. I just got on with it and learned along the way. Now, three years later, I have proof that committing to something every single day has yielded a positive response and a growth of my community and business.

Olympic lifting is all about repetition; there are no short cuts to getting a good snatch or clean and jerk. You must input hundreds of hours and thousands of repetitions, and rest assured that behind great success is a trail of mistakes, lessons learned and small improvements.

Do you know how long it took me to make my first sale via email? Ten months. Ten months of writing an email every day.

At the cost of 5.8 days of solid email writing (thirty minutes per day) for ten months, I made £20 on my first sale. That works out at 14p per hour for my efforts as an email marketer. Not something that many would aspire to on paper. Hundreds of days with nothing in return – just notching the temperature for the ice cube up a degree, so to speak. I posted online for two to three years before I ever got an online client too.

People can’t believe how many emails I send, and they ask me what the trick is to grow an email list. I tell them: thirty minutes of your time every day, for years.

You cannot email someone too often; you can only be too boring.

It’s worth noting this too: people who accomplish great things in life and those who accomplish little to nothing often have the same goal. I’ve been working online as a personal trainer for several years, and I’m sure there are a lot of others who aspire to do it and never will. The difference does not sit within my ability to speak publicly or create engaging content; it sits within my daily habits.

So an aspiring athlete and a gold-medal Olympian have the same goal. These will relate to sleep, nutrition, training and life in general. One of my Brazilian jiu jitsu training partners got a gold medal in the Olympics. He told me that every time it pissed it down with rain, he’d go outside and sprint. I asked him, ‘Why?’ He told me that every person he’d ever come up against in the Olympics would be inside, out of the rain, which made it the perfect opportunity to get one up on them while they remained dry. That sounds like the habit of a gold medallist.

If we take this approach into a training scenario, this could be about setting a habit of training in a certain area of the gym, ensuring you’re using a particular piece of equipment and making it habitual to step outside your comfort zone, increasing that discomfort and gym-based anxiety no more than one degree at a time. Before you know it, you could hit the metaphorical melting point for all your insecurities and worries in the gym, using the squat rack unassisted for the first time. And I’ll bet you could do all of that without having to worry about getting your socks wet like my Olympian friend.

My favourite quote from Atomic Habits is this:

‘You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.’

James Clear, Atomic Habits4

And this is where I need you to take note. Where you are is not important; where you are going is. You may not have the body you want, you may not have your diet in the place you want it. But are you getting better at taking action to make those changes? If so, great. Are you making progress? If so, great. And if you’re not making progress, are you making adjustments so that you soon will be? That’s what is important here.

You could well finish this book and not have made physical changes to the point that someone will notice them just yet. But that is okay. Rather than worry about your current situation, just worry about your current trajectory. You’d be amazed what you can accomplish. Successful habits make successful people.

Think about my trajectory with my email marketing list. It was always improving, although I had nothing tangible to show for it. Yet the thirty minutes a day I put aside for this way of communicating with my clients could just be one of the greatest habits I have ever implemented. One email a day, in time, will pay my parents’ mortgage off, so they have more of their retirement money to live with until the end of their days.

Writing emails has become very therapeutic, almost like keeping a daily diary. However, do you know what made it easiest for me? I have fallen in love with the process of writing an email each day, so rather than it being a burden, a task or a chore, it’s quite simply a habit I enjoy doing.

My advice to you: find your successful habits, implement them daily and then fall in love with executing them. You’ll stumble across great success just from that alone.

Habits in practice: flexible dieting and IIFYM

It’s a good idea to expand on these terms commonly mentioned in the fitness industry. You may have heard of flexible dieting from fitness people or you may have heard of the ‘if it fits your macros’ movement (IIFYM). I’ll clarify the differences. I have touched on macronutrients briefly before. But essentially, the idea of tracking ‘macros’ is to set yourself goals to hit each day to get what is optimal* from your diet, which is commonly known as a ‘macro split’.

Fun fact: adding up your macros equals your calories. With protein at 4 calories a gram, to consume 20g of protein would equate to 80 calories.

IIFYM

I alluded earlier on to the fact that athletes and fitness people have often been misled about what is a ‘good diet’ and what is a ‘bad diet’ for them. For years, I’ve seen confusion over what is an optimal amount to eat (and even when to eat), and this is the case even with people in very good shape playing at elite levels of sport. I have found over the years that the best athletes tend to do so well through their attitude and determination within their field, but I’ve been very surprised to see what some fantastic athletes actually eat on a daily basis. Some have such a poor understanding of nutrition, it’s actually crazy. By the end of this book, you’ll be better clued up than most Premier League football players.

The origin of IIFYM comes from what I can only assume were conversations between coaches and their clientele. ‘Coach, can I eat pasta?’ And the response: ‘Sure, if it fits your macros.’ ‘Coach can I eat some bread today?’ The response again: ‘Sure, IIFYM.’ A bit like, ‘C’mon, mate. I set your macros – if it fits, go for it.’

Now, this IIFYM mentality did great things and evolved into the term ‘flexible dieting’. I’m sure the Pareto principle of 80/20 was thrown around a lot too in Internet discussions – 80 per cent good food, 20 per cent junk – but, unfortunately, IIFYM over the years has been interpreted as: ‘Eat shit but make it fit your macros and you’ll be fine.’

This isn’t what anyone ever intended with this concept. Now, of course, you’re always going to find people who abuse any system and don’t do very well – in the same way that I’d very easily abuse the ‘intuitive eating’ lifestyle by interpreting the guidelines so that I can eat whatever I like: ‘Oh, mate, I had three burgers today, but if I drink six scoops of whey protein, it will fit my macros.’

There are many more complex components beyond macronutrients that are essential to looking and feeling good and living a healthy life: food quality, unprocessed ‘single-ingredient’ foods, vegetables, fruit, fibre, variety – these all contribute to our health and make up the essential vitamins that we need. Another component is food volume. I always ask my clients to expand their food choices by selecting lower calorie foods that could increase the amount on their plates. This would typically include, for example, more vegetables, rice, fruits and leaner meats and protein.

However, what I have found is that following macronutrient goals gives people the initial momentum for improvements to their diet. I’ve found that even just setting a protein goal alone has seen a spontaneous improvement in the quality of the diets of my clients over the years. I’d also back the fact that even just being mindful of caloric intake, whether divided into macronutrients or not, would have a massive impact on the amount of food you eat.

When I give a regular person, who could be very new to dieting or even tracking their food, a mid-tier protein target, suddenly some form of planning has to occur, and it’s very rare for someone – even if they are new to eating in either of the aforementioned manners (IIFYM or flexible dieting) – to sit down with their family with just a chicken breast on their plate. More care goes into the intake of the food, and that is compounded over time.

A lot of this game is about being mindful of our food consumption. All too often we eat out of boredom, or because something catches our eye, or a smell gets us interested as we walk past a bakery. For thousands of years food was scarce, and although the food industry has a target on its back, of course they’d be silly not to make calorie-dense foods, hedonic by nature, very appealing to the eye and the taste buds (after all, they say the first taste of your food is in how it looks).

And I don’t think we can criticize or abuse the food industry for doing this. Everything is about marketing – whether it’s putting sprinkles on a doughnut or making yourself look good to ‘market’ yourself when asking a stranger if they ‘come here often?’ But being conscious of your goals and aware of the calorie content of certain foods, even when something appeals to you, will strengthen the argument in your head to say what’s most difficult in the world of fat loss: ‘No thanks, I’m good.’

If I were to use my James Smith Academy calculator online I could get a macronutrient split back that may look like this:

‘Thank you for using the James Smith Hypothetical calculator, your macronutrient goals are: 190g protein, 44g fat, 200g carbs.’

So to translate the macronutrients into calorie totals:

190g x 4kcals per gram + 44g x 9kcals per gram + 200g x 4kcals per gram = 1,956 calories

That’d be my ‘macro’ goal.

Flexible dieting

Flexible dieting and IIFYM can be used interchangeably, but I personally have an alternative take on how to do it.

My version of flexible dieting is a slightly different approach to dividing your macronutrients up and how you prioritize what to structure first. What I get my clients to do is assess and then implement everything in order of importance. Of course, for someone looking to lose fat, the bottom of the pyramid is calories. It shouldn’t matter how much of each macronutrient you’re consuming if you’re not hitting your calorie target.

Protein is the second key player here. You’ll find out a lot more about protein in this book, but it plays a big role in muscle growth and fat loss. You’ll have a very tough time at either end of the spectrum, whether your goal is muscle growth or fat loss, should you not get enough protein.

Carbohydrates and dietary fats are both energy sources with their own respective benefits, but when it comes to looking to lose fat, you can select what suits you based on personal preference.

I find IIFYM a very rigid and strict structure compared to my preferential ‘flexible’ approach. Again, this probably depends on the person. If you are someone who loves numbers and works in tax and accounting, you might like the idea of having numbers to aim for each day. Someone like myself, who’d rather get caught up over two numbers than three, might prefer the more flexible approach. To give you an idea of what I mean, let’s use the same macro goal as before:

190g protein; 44g fat; 200g carbs

Ideal scenario

Not-so-ideal day

Bad day

Like a majority vote we don’t need every day to be a winner, just the majority. Keep in mind that people who are in good shape for a living rarely get long streaks of success without a bad day; they often just call it a ‘cheat day’ to mask the fact they’ve had a bad day. We can’t expect our diet to be good all the time – it never is. It’s just about getting more good days than bad days.

Train wreck of a day

Make a mental note or an approximation of calories consumed or don’t even track at all if personal circumstances are bad; remember that saying – ‘one hot day doesn’t make a summer’.

Your position can be anywhere within the many shades of success, and everything becomes more of a spectrum of suboptimal to optimal rather than black or white, good or bad, success or failure.

So you will sit somewhere on this spectrum with both your diet and your training every day. All we want to do is move towards the optimized end of the spectrum whenever possible. The truth is, you never really need to be fully optimal. To live that life you’d have no alcohol, go to sleep at 8 p.m. every night and probably never have children. If we all aimed for a perfectly optimal life, it would be pretty boring. The reason I prefer a more flexible approach is so that some days it’s okay to give your diet less attention and focus, and that is fine – it’s a part of being human.

All I want from you is to implement some processes each day, those habits and whatever you do to bring you in line with being as optimal as possible. I don’t expect you to hit your protein every day, but try on as many days as possible. I don’t expect every training session to be spectacular, but keep it as intense as possible.

Truth is, things get in the way of an optimal world. An argument with your partner, feeling under the weather, rain on the way to work when you’re late already. This is all about getting the best possible scenario each day and not beating yourself up if you have a bad one; it’s not wasted, it’s just suboptimal.

The main objective is to get more days optimal then suboptimal. It might sound oversimplified, in which case I’m glad, because it’s true, and it’s attainable.

* Optimal is subjective here. Personally, I think that someone hitting their macronutrient target vs just a calorie target is essential to optimize their return from tracking in the first place.