fitnessblog

When someone comes to me with an injury (or one of those nagging aches that’s been hanging around for weeks and they can’t figure out why) I run the same diagnostic almost every time.

It’s simple. You can run it on yourself. And it’ll teach you what to look for to dodge future issues.

The 3-part diagnostic

I’m looking for a recent spike in any of these three:

• Volume – how much of the thing you’re doing
• Intensity – how hard the thing is
• Novelty – how new the thing is to your body

A big jump in any ONE of these increases your injury risk. A jump in two or three at once? Bingo.

Here are some examples:

• You fall in love with a new hobby, like rock climbing (novelty), and spend hours at the climbing gym your first week (volume), but pick up a nagging wrist injury you can’t seem to shake.
  
• You decide to sign up for a half-marathon race with your friend. A few weeks out, you jump right into the later stages of a training program to catch up (volume & intensity), but get shin splints and can’t complete the race.
  
• You start a new strength training program and decide to max out on each lift to really test yourself (novelty, intensity), but partway through your shoulder does something funky and now it aches when you try to sleep on your side.

Running the diagnostic in real life

I’ve been coaching Steve (founder and Rebel Leader of Nerd Fitness) for the last couple of months, and recently his back started getting tight after a round of golf.

When we ran the diagnostic, things became clearer:

• His step count jumped from around 6,500 on a normal day to 17-20k on golf days (volume spike)
• He went from sitting at a desk straight into cranking full-power swings (intensity spike)
• Golf also asks the body for rotational power it doesn’t get much of day-to-day (novelty spike)

His back was responding as we might expect when we turn the dial up on all three variables at once.

Here’s how we use that information to build a plan.

✅ Raise his baseline daily walking week over week so 15k+ steps isn’t a shock to the system

✅ Build in a real warm-up before he tees off to prep his body properly

✅ Create a bigger buffer of strength, mobility, and stability in the areas golf demands most (rotation, hip mobility, etc.)

The bigger idea: graded exposure

This diagnostic works because it points at the same principle running underneath almost everything we do in coaching: graded exposure (AKA Progressive Overload).

Strength training? The goal is to challenge your body just the right amount. Too little, nothing happens. Too much, you put yourself at risk. It’s the Goldilocks zone we’re after. 👧🐻🐻🐻

Training for an event? Give yourself plenty of time to build up for it so you never have to spike up your intensity or volume at the same time. My client CJ just finished a half marathon and felt amazing the whole way – but only because we spent 16 weeks of consistent, gradual training getting him ready. He’d previously dealt with shin splints and other issues. This time? Injury-free. Here’s what he messaged me after the race:

Recovering from an injury or chronic ache? First, make sure you get checked out by your doc. Good physical therapy is basically graded exposure with extra steps. You’re slowly rebuilding capacity and tolerance in the area, teaching your body it can handle load again.

Heck, this even applies to habit change. Too much change at once? Hard to sustain, easy to burn out. Too little change? Progress is so slow it’s hard to evaluate what’s working. We want just enough challenge to move the needle.

Same principle. Different applications.

Run the diagnostic on yourself

Whether you’re feeling something nagging right now, OR you’re about to start something new (a class, a sport, a season, a project) – ask yourself:

1. Am I (or did I recently) make a giant jump in volume? (Amount of the thing)
2. Am I (or did I recently) make a sudden leap in intensity? (How hard the thing is)
3. Am I doing something completely new? (First Zumba class, first hike of the season, first pickup basketball game in 5 years)

If you said yes to one -> ease in. If you said yes to two or three -> really ease in.

This doesn’t mean you can’t do hard things. It means giving your body a fair chance to keep up with what you’re asking of it.

Level up one step at a time. That’s how you stay in the game for the long haul. 💪

-Matt

Tell me if this pattern sounds familiar.

One of my clients (let’s call him Elliot) would go hard every three months. Aggressive diet. New workout plan. The full deal.

And it would work…for a few weeks. Then life would do what life does – motivation would fade, work would get stressful, there’d be a sick kid to take care of, a vacation – and the whole thing would unravel.

Three months later, the cycle would start all over again. Only this time, everything felt a little worse. The scale would tick up, his knees hurt more, and he felt more out of breath going up the stairs.

Determined, he’d say to himself: “I just need to try harder this time.”

When I sat down with Elliot to build out his coaching plan, we realized that even though every previous attempt felt like progress in the short-term, in the long run, the system was failing him.

As my friend and Rebel Leader Steve Kamb writes in his upcoming book How to Try Again:

So that’s what Elliot and I did – we stopped pouring energy into the thing that wasn’t working.

(By the way: Steve is hosting a live Q&A TONIGHT just for people who have pre-ordered the book! If you want to join, and read the first two chapters of the book 2 weeks early, visit HowToTryAgain.com for details and next steps!)

A lesson from the beach

If you’ve been to the beach, you’ve probably seen the signs warning about rip currents.

Here’s the counterintuitive thing about them: when one is pulling you out to sea, you’re not supposed to swim AGAINST it. You’ll exhaust yourself, and you’re not going to win.

What you’re actually supposed to do is swim sideways. Parallel to the shore.

And if you can’t escape the tide? Float or tread water.

You’re not getting closer to the beach – but you’re not exhausting yourself either. Holding steady and staying afloat is the critical first step to getting back to safety.

This is the P in the PACT framework Steve writes about in his book – Pause.

Not a one-time emergency move. It’s a skill we can use again whenever required.

And this was the exact piece that was missing from Elliot’s earlier attempts. When we rebuilt his plan, we didn’t start with what his “optimal day” would look like.

We started with “how do we stay afloat when life throws you into a rip current?”

This is the thing that most fitness plans miss, and what I’ve seen actually work hundreds and thousands of times with clients in Nerd Fitness Coaching.

Progress isn’t about operating at our peak all the time, forever. It’s about learning how to toggle between periods of maintenance and periods of focused effort.

Ultimately, that’s the strategy that gets us towards our goal.

I get it!

The allure of “continual optimization” and “just try harder” FEELS good.

As Steve says:

That feeling is the trap. It’s what sent Elliot into an unsustainable sprint every three months.

And SCIENCE is on our side, too.

We can maintain muscle and strength on one-third of our normal training volume for weeks at a time.

So, when you’re slammed at work and cut your 4-day program down to one short session – you’re not losing ground, you’re staying afloat. You might not be winning, but you’re not losing either.

That’s the difference between the yo-yo and the staircase.

How to put a Pause plan into action

When your energy is low, you’re juggling 50-kajillion things, and you’re stressed – what can you fall back on that keeps your head above water?

For Elliot, this looked like:

• A quick breakfast protein shake he actually liked that was easy to throw together
• A short bodyweight workout (~15min) 2x/week
• Push-ups while the coffee brewed.

Once we implemented that, he no longer crashed out after a few weeks.

For you, your “tread water” plan might look like:

• A shorter version of a workout you already like
• Stocking up on high-protein freezer meals you can grab in a pinch
• A brain dump before sleep to get whatever’s rattling around in your head onto a page
• Short movement breaks throughout the day – 20 squats before lunch, a 5min walk before your next meeting, etc.

There’s no right or wrong answer here. Experiment to find what works best for you.

Steve has a line that I want to leave you with:

When life has you caught in a riptide, the urge is to put your head down and swim harder. That’s what backfires. Instead, pause and tread water until you’re out of the current.

You got this. 💪

Still floating,

-Matt

When someone joins our coaching program, we ask them to rank three things in order of importance so their coach knows where to start:

• Fitness
• Nutrition
• Mindset

Almost everyone ranks them in exactly that order. Fitness first. Nutrition second. Mindset a distant third. (And that makes sense! They came here to move better and eat better. That’s the tangible change.)

But here’s what’s interesting:

When I look back through eight years of success stories, the physical wins are there (stronger, healthier, more energy, etc.) But almost none of them lead with that. What they talk about is the mindset shift.

It was the thing that took them from “fitness is a struggle” to “fitness is a natural part of my life now.”

And it’s not the mindset you’re probably picturing. It’s not “just do it.” It’s not white-knuckle motivation, or gritting your teeth and building an iron will like a Marine.

The real unlock comes from an unexpected place: improv comedy.

“Yes, and…”

If you’ve ever watched Whose Line Is It Anyway?, you’ve already seen this. The first rule of improv is “yes, and.”

Steve draws the comparison really well in his upcoming book, How to Try Again (which releases June 16th!):

Turns out that’s also one of the most powerful things you can do for your fitness.

In coaching, the “yes” is accepting what’s actually going on in your life right now – and stating it as neutrally and factually as we can.

The “and” is the piece that’s within your control to act on. It’s where we decide what we’ll actually do with that information.

What this sounds like in real life

I have a client, Val, going through a job transition right now. Pressure to wrap everything up at the old role, real fear about the unknown, and genuine excitement about what’s next. A lot of big emotions at once.

But the sentence I kept hearing was: “This is just going to be hard.”

That’s not a bad place to start. It’s honest. And it beats saying “everything is wonderful” when it isn’t. But it’s loaded, and it was sitting on her like a weight. So we reframed it into something more neutral and factual:

Try it this week

Run one of your own situations through “yes, and”:

• Yes: What’s the neutral, factual version of what’s actually going on right now?
• And: Given that context, what’s one realistic action step?

As Steve says:

You got this. 💪

– Matt

Have you ever caught yourself thinking, “I need it to work this time“?

Maybe you’re trying to start a workout routine again. Maybe you want to take better care of yourself and finally eat in a way that feels good. Maybe it’s something else entirely.

Whatever it is – if you’ve tried before and it didn’t go how you hoped, a quiet desperation can creep in.

(All things I’ve had people share with me.)

These thoughts are completely NORMAL. But I know it doesn’t make it any less sucky to deal with.

And worse, experiences like these make you gun shy to try again.

You start looking for the perfect plan – the one that can guarantee success no matter what.

And any setback? Just more proof that we can’t hack it.

So how do we break out of this “Doom Loop” and gear up for another attempt? And how do we make it go differently than last time?

These are the fundamental questions that Steve tackles in his upcoming book, “How to Try Again” (have we mentioned the book before 😜)

While Steve guides you step-by-step through the process, I want to highlight one section in particular that I think is really helpful for when you find yourself stuck in this mode. Here’s what Steve writes:

These same lessons apply to any change we attempt (including improving our fitness!)

The Matrix

If I had powers like in the Matrix and I could just download all the info I’ve learned in the last 15 years of coaching into your brain, this is what I would share:

Treat each workout, each nutrition strategy, as an experiment to see what works for you.
Take your best guess and go for it, even if you don’t know for sure.
A “failed” experiment isn’t a failure – it’s feedback we can use to try again, differently.

Because here’s the thing – there is no one workout, no one nutrition strategy, no one routine that works all the time, for everyone, forever.

Sure, there are fundamentals that you can continue to rely on. That’s why we built things like the Beginner Bodyweight Workout, or our 10 Nutrition Levels. To give you a really good starting point to run your first experiment and to help you avoid the overblown hype rampant on the internet.

But that’s just the first step.

From there, we learn to notice what does and doesn’t work for us, and adjust accordingly. Then we rinse and repeat until the heat death of the universe.

Heck, I’ve been training for 25 years, and I STILL make adjustments all the time. That’s not a flaw in the plan – that’s the whole game.

How this applies in day-to-day life

Here are some examples just from this past week:

• Squats are bothering my knees – I’ll try subbing in step ups today.
• I am so sick and tired of chicken. I’m going to experiment with some plant-based proteins this week.
• Life is really chaotic right now – I don’t think I’ll be able to get to the gym reliably. I’m going to pivot to a short bodyweight routine I’ll do before work to save time.

That mindset shift (from ‘perfect plan’ to ‘try and adjust’) is how Dawn stopped feeling caught in the Doom Loop and got the courage to try again.
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Since the beginning of this year when she took part in the Nerd Fitness Challenge, she’s completed 6 rounds of experiments, learning more about herself and what’s working for her each time.

(If you want help setting up and running your own fitness ‘experiment’, here’s everything you need to get started.)

——

One thing I’ve noticed in talking with clients over the years is how good we are at recognizing how much things have changed in the past, and yet how we think everything is likely to stay as it is right now moving forward.

If there’s one thing I can guarantee you, it’s that things are going to change again.

If we can let go of trying to find the ‘perfect plan’ and start with good enough, if we can run mini ‘experiments’, if we can learn how to try again, we’re giving ourselves the best chance of navigating through the chaos.

It takes courage to try again – especially when we’ve been burned in the past. To pick yourself back up after a setback, a big life change, or a disappointment.

I’ve read a lot of books, studies, and taken courses on behavior change in my time as a coach.

How to Try Again takes all of those lessons, but delivers them in a way that’s, more than anything, human.

Thank you, Steve, for pouring yourself into this book and sharing it with the rest of us.

-Matt
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P.S. You can grab a copy of How to Try Again here.