Finding Leverage

"Four ounces can move a thousand pounds" - Chinese Proverb

Getting Through The Training Week

Life moves in a constant rhythm between chaos and order. We work to build structure into our days, only for stress and the unexpected to pull us back into disorder. For many, training becomes an anchor in that ebb and flow - a brief, organised window of grounding and accomplishment.

Despite best intentions, no programme survives contact with reality. A common struggle for most is completing their planned sessions each week, and prolonged inconsistency is dangerous territory for both progress and motivation.

A way to counter this situation is to step back and find the bottleneck - the single limiting factor affecting everything else. Addressing that factor becomes your leverage, your four ounces to move a thousand pounds.

Parts In A Complex System

Even a well-designed programme, matched to your goals and abilities, is no guarantee of progress. The programme is a set of predictions, and when it meets reality, external factors that directly influence its success come into play.

For example, your results also depend on:

• The state of your nutrition, sleep, stress levels.

• Mental skills in the gym - your awareness of technique, how you manage fatigue, how you apply effort (are you pushing too hard or not enough).

  
  

• Bandwidth and energy - will you be able to attend your workouts predictably and show up in the right physical and mental state?

A limiting factor is the weakest element in a system that most restricts its overall performance. Until it’s addressed, improvements elsewhere have little effect.

For example, if you’re trying to improve your 400 m sprint but lack basic ankle stability, adding more intervals isn’t the answer. You must first fix the instability, rebuild strength in the gym, integrate that gain into your running at lower intensity, then return to high-intensity work.

The limiting factor was ankle stability - and nothing else could meaningfully improve until it was addressed first.

Hunting For Asymmetric Gain

Here are three examples of finding leverage in different ways.

Susan trained well from Monday to Wednesday but regularly missed her last two sessions of the week. This wasn’t a scheduling problem, it was a recovery one. Her limiting factor was sleep, more specifically how she was spending the hour before bed. The house was bright, her phone was active, and she was scrambling to organise tomorrow. The solution was to automate her smart lights to dim at 20:30, programme her phone to ‘Do Not Disturb’ (except emergency contacts) and schedule her planning for tomorrow to be completed before dinner. The result was getting into bed on time and being able to fall asleep quickly as opposed to laying awake for hours with an overly stimulated nervous system.

Marcus, a new father, was struggling to handle his workouts due to the sleep deprivation of having a newborn. His limiting factor was also sleep, but there wasn’t much that could be done about it. His next limiting factor became his expectations, as he was still trying to train as he did before his baby arrived, and expecting to the same results. His idea of progress had to change. He couldn’t commit or recover from a high-volume programme, but he could predictably manage 4 x 30-minute sessions per week. Two at home on a stationary bike, and two in the gym focused on maintaining strength with a few key lifts. That was enough for now and he could win at that.

Steven found himself arriving late to the gym and rushing through his workouts, to get home on time and fulfil his personal duties. The reason for this was working later into the evening each day. He admitted this was less of a necessity and more of an unintentional drift – Working from home, and having a lot of autonomy, he had nothing to stop him. His limiting factor was boundaries. The fix was to install the Freedom app, which automatically blocked his desktop apps and websites at 1700, every day. By setting a hard boundary and automating it, he managed to compress his time better and prioritise more effectively. When it was time to stop and switch focus, he was now in a better place to do that.

Go Forward, Retreat or Go Around

If you are reading this, I’m sure you really want your gym training to go well. Don’t get stuck in a ‘grey zone’ of chaos for too long. Define your problem as best you can and find the highest leverage action you can take to make a change.

Finding and targeting limiting factors is an ongoing process. Once you solve one, another will appear, and that is part of the game.

Your system of life and training is likely only as good as your limiting factor.

Open Questions

1. What is the one granular thing currently holding you back from getting what you want?

   
   

2. Is the trade-off of making this change worth the reward? And if not, does the goal need to change?

Join Us To Move Forward In Your Training

Take control of your strength and fitness by joining our 1-1 remote coaching programme. It's not straightforward to plan and execute your own training. Our system is designed to solve that problem. Check out what our members say here.