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3 Ways You Are Unknowingly Sabotaging Your Progress · Your Strongest Body

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: You are listening to your strongest body.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Betsy Foster, a certified strength and conditioning specialist and certified nutrition coach.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: I've worked as a personal trainer for over a decade, helping people build strength, speed, muscles, as well as a deep appreciation for their bodies and confidence that helps them live their life to the fullest.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Now I'm sharing what I know with you fitness, nutrition and all the deeper stuff to help you discover your strongest body.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Hello, hello, welcome back to another episode of your strongest body.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Full disclosure.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: Someone next door is banging on their roof or on their the side of their home.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: I don't know what they're working on, but it's in the back of the recording, like where I record in the house.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: It's right behind, and so I can't tell if you can hear it, but I certainly can, and it's driving me bonkers.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Unfortunately, this is the time that I have available to record, so we'll see how it goes.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: So hopefully it doesn't disrupt your listening experience, and there's a gentle rain sound that is kind of nice as well.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure if you can hear that.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: This will be a test for my concentration as well as my ability to take a breath and let it go.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Today, we're going to be talking about three ways that you are sabotaging your fitness progress and you don't even realize it.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's because they don't seem obvious, maybe it's because they seem counterintuitive.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: But we're going to talk about these three very directly.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: I'm going to give you ways to also get around it, ways to flip the script and use it to help your progress.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: So one of the ways that you are sabotaging yourself is by aiming for perfection.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: You are aiming for perfection in a life and in a world where we simply one.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: It's unattainable and it's oftentimes just a construct we've made up.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Like perfection.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: It's going to be different for everybody.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: The ideal situation is going to be different for everybody.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: The goalpost is going to be different for everybody.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: And then we are dealing with real life.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: We are constantly dealing with the unexpected.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: As someone who is a true planner in almost every way, I have had to learn how to let go a little bit and allow for change.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: Now I'm going to say that one of the next things I'm going to say in terms of sabotaging is about planning, but we'll talk about that.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: What I'm talking about is being rigid in your expectation of yourself.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Being rigid to the point that when something goes wrong, you throw everything out the window and you feel like you have to start over again, and this disappointment that you feel in yourself or in your behaviors continually becomes a roadblock for your ability to experience success.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: So and sometimes I think we stress about this because we think if we don't aim high and we don't focus on something that is a little bit out of reach, we're going to never push ourselves, and I understand that and I think that that's fine.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: I think reaching past what you feel like you can comfortably do is okay, as long as you are good at reassessing and allowing things to not go perfectly.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: Perfection isn't going to get us where we need to go.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: It isn't because we're either going to.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: If we're doing everything perfectly all the time, we've probably set the bar too low perhaps, and if we aren't getting everything perfectly whatever that nebulous term might be we are probably getting some success most of the time.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: And that's what I'm going to say here is what, instead of focusing on 100% of the time, can we focus on most of the time?
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: Can we focus on most of the time Meaning, when you look at a whole week, all the behaviors of the week, were you in alignment with your goals and what you've set out to do most of the time.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: This is really important.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: I often talk about it in nutrition because people get stressed out about their like hitting their daily macros or getting their certain amount of vegetables per day and hitting their calorie count per day, and our bodies don't keep score of the day.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: We are looking more at a cumulative experience, and what is going to create body change and strength change and health change is going to be over time, and it's going to be how we did this thing enough.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: How much were we able to do this in order to start to shift things in the direction of our goal?
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: And so that means that most of the time is going to matter more than all of the time.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: If you can envision with me the idea where your pursuit of perfection makes it so, you have three days of perfect workouts, perfect nutrition and perfect sleep, all to be met with an unexpected challenge on day four.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: And then days four, five, six, seven and the first day of the next week are thrown off and you have given up, and you have thrown yourself maybe a tiny pity party, or you've decided it's not worth it, or you're frustrated with yourself, or you say you'll start when you can be perfect.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: When we look at that picture, then we had three successful days and five unsuccessful days.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: Now, when we say I'm going to aim to do these behaviors most of the time but not stress about getting it perfectly, then two days I'm getting it at 80%, one day I'm getting it at 100%, one day was like a 60% day and then the next two days were an 85% day and one day of the weekend was a 40% day.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Listen, this is abstract, but it's saying that like when we look at that picture, we have more overall success for seven days.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: Then we do, if we got our perfect three days and our unsuccessful days after that, because we have allowed for a different definition of success or perfection and a different definition of failure.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Merely, things didn't go perfectly.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: What is the best thing I can do in place of that behavior?
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: Okay, so that's number one.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: Number two is getting bored with your workouts and changing them up too much, or changing anything up too much.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: You are not giving yourself enough time.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: I promise I actually feel very confident that if you have not seen results, one of the reasons is because you have not been doing the same thing for long enough and you might need to do it more frequently.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: But we have this idea, in exercise in particular, that more is always better and that we need to be sweating a lot and we need to be flailing our bodies around a lot.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: And if your goal is to get stronger or to change your physique or to even improve your health, there is going to be a lot of benefit to being very intentionally slow and purposeful, with the same movements over time, the same movements over time, and there can be variation in that, but oftentimes people are doing seven different kinds of workouts that are definitely calorie burners, but that's not necessarily what's going to help everybody reach their goal.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: And for most people who are thinking about sort of like, building a strong body, feeling strong in themselves, feeling seeing change in their body, we're gonna have to do some repetition.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: That is the whole point of reps is the repetition, and I see far too frequently people feeling like they're not seeing results and then changing things up very quickly, changing things up when they don't see results after a week or two weeks.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: And that goes for exercise and nutrition.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: You know the same thing with nutrition in terms of like sometimes you gotta stick with it for long enough to let it work.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: And if you are getting bored and changing it up too often, you're not giving yourself enough time to adapt.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Adaptation is what leads to those results.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: And lastly, number three, and this kind of flies in the face of what I said before, but bear with me, this is not about perfection or getting it right.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: This is about not being reactive versus proactive, so not planning or thinking ahead.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Planning does not have to be rigid, but it is thinking ahead.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: So when we are reactive, we are only in our crisis management stage and maybe there's no crisis.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: So sometimes when we react, it doesn't feel very stressful and sometimes we're able to figure things out pretty easily.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: But in the times when our options are limited, our time is not bountiful.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: Like we got other things on the schedule, maybe we don't have a lot of food in the refrigerator available to us, maybe we don't have a lot of time for the workout, whatever that might be.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: If we have to be reactive in that scenario, we're either gonna fall back on old patterns, take the path of least resistance, which oftentimes, if we're trying to create change, the path of least resistance is not going to create change for us, or we're just gonna get super stressed out and even if we do kind of do what we were planning or what we want to do, it's not gonna feel good because we're being reactive.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: If we're being proactive, we set ourselves up for success, less stress and the ability to manage challenging situations with and go with the flow.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: To meet that resistance, I always say, like nutrition for fitness goals isn't hard, and that is because I believe in sort of a really holistic idea of nutrition as well as no restriction, but also like something that is really fulfilling and nutrient dense and all of these things like eating for performance and fitness goals doesn't have to be very restrictive, but it does require a little bit of planning ahead of time.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: Like if you want to be successful in terms of using your nutrition to optimize your performance and get the most out of your body and see change, you've got to be thinking ahead and you've got to put some almost like bumper.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: You know, when you're bowling you put the bumper rails up and it helps you, like not go off to the side.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: If you plan ahead, you've created those bumpers for yourself and then you are minimizing the amount of times we're going to go in a direction you don't want to go and sometimes it's not going to work.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: And sometimes you go to a bad bowling alley that, like the bumper, doesn't come up all the way and it rolls over.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: But if you take the steps ahead of time you're minimizing the opportunities.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: You have to be reactive without a plan and to either again fall back on old patterns or take the quote unquote easy way out, and sometimes we need to pick the easy thing.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: Sometimes we need to pick the easy thing because that removes stress for us.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: Planning and putting things in place to be successful ahead makes the decision easier.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: It makes the decision easier.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: Prepping the food ahead makes eating it easier.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: Having some snacks in the car makes the stress of like needing to squeeze food in easier.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: Having a program makes going into the gym and feeling like I don't know that I can do this today easier, because at least you don't have to turn on your brain and think about what you have to do.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: It's all there for you.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: We are trying to create opportunities to make things easier and to make things less reactive.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: We got enough stuff in life that we're going to have to react to and that is costly on the psyche and on our physical bodies, because that kind of psychological and emotional stress creates stress on our bodies, and then we're just adding another layer that we have to push past or overcome.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: We want to have less to overcome.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: So, if you want to be successful with your fitness or your nutrition, taking a few steps no-transcript to be prepared but not perfect is going to make a huge, huge difference.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: So let me just recap those three.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: These are the three things that are sabotaging your progress, that you might not even know you're doing.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: You're aiming for perfection, being disappointed when you can't reach it, and it's throwing you off.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: You're not giving things enough time to change and to see results, and so you are adding too much variety in, or there's no sort of plan or progressive strategy for your workouts and or your nutrition.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: You're just kind of throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: And then, lastly, you're being reactive and not proactive and you're not taking the few steps to plan ahead to make each of these behaviors a little easier to accomplish.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: I know that if you can change those things, you're going to see wildly better success.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: Wildly better.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: You are going to experience wildly better results.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Let's say that See that banging is getting to me.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: Okay, so that's.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: That's what I know you will experience.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the podcast or if you've been on my Instagram, you probably know I'm running a free five day nutrition challenge fit fuel.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: This is a challenge to help you with these things.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: So it's not going to tell you what foods to eat and not eat and it's not going to give you food rules, and it's not going to be highly restrictive and you're not going to have to cut anything out.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: This is about giving you the tools, the specific tools you need to be able to reach your goals and do it on your own.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: So anybody who's going to promise that they can give you the plan to reach your fitness goals with your nutrition and tell you exactly what to do is not giving you the skills and tools to have the autonomy to make the decisions on your own.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: So this challenge is actually going to give you the tool a tool a day for five days and then have you apply it right away, right away.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Around 10 minute videos per day, a simple challenge you each day that you can take on, and then you can fill out your scorecard at the end of the five days with all of your challenges and you can be entered to win a Lululemon gift card.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: There is a macro masterclass.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: So, in addition to these daily lessons, I'm doing a whole live class to help you understand macro nutrients, understand how to interpret those numbers and what they mean, as well as how to build your optimal nutrition plan, something that's specific to you, and all of the structures that are going to help you make the best decisions to reach your goal.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: So you got that live class.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: I've got giveaways on the live class and, yeah, this is a.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: This is five days to transform your nutrition, to give you the reins to reach your goals.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: It is going to be awesome.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: I am so excited about it and the registrations are coming in and I'm thrilled.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: So, if you've already registered, thank you, thank you, thank you.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: I am so appreciative.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: I want you to do me a favor.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: If you've already registered, I want you to go to Instagram and send me a DM and say, hey, I'm in.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: I registered for fit fuel because then I can say, hi, I can get to know you ahead of time.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Just make sure I can, like you know, put a face to a name that you're in.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: I'm thrilled.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: If you haven't registered already, what I want you to do is go to be foster strongcom, slash, fit fuel, and I'll put the link in the show notes and you can read all about it.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: I've got frequently asked questions.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: So if you're not sure if it's for you, this is going to explain whether or not this is the right thing for you and and it's free.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: So a win, win, win, win, win.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: All right, that's it that I have for you.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: That's all that I have for you today.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: My words are like they're struggling today, but that's okay.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: Thank you, as always, for being here.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: I want you to go build your strongest body and I'll talk to you next time.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: Bye.