Fitness ‘Ideals’ and Doing Everything Right

“Darren, I’m doing everything right, like you said in this answer and that answer. I eat nothing but chicken, rice and vegetables all day in the exact quantity that this online calculator told me. I get 8.5 grams of protein per pound of my bodyweight every day. I sleep like a thirty hours a night, and I train 60 hours a week but I’m still not seeing any results!”

OK so that’s all pretty exaggerated, I never make any of these recommendations, but the underlying thought process holds true for a lot of questions I answer regularly.

You can follow me on Quora here if you want to ask me questions. I can’t promise I’ll be able to answer every single one, but I try to answer the most interesting ones that float at the top of my feed.

You’re not seeing results you say, but you’re doing everything right?

You can see my confusion in this matter…

By definition, doing everything ‘right’ would mean you’re having a fairly easy time working towards your objective, but that’s not what is happening, so how can you be doing everything right?

Doing everything right should make achieving your objective easy.

This paradox makes my head hurt.

While we’re on the subject, you also know something isn’t ‘right’…

Start by throwing out the notion of working towards an objective as being ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ In fact, completely remove those words from your vocabulary, they have no place in the process of change.

Success in fitness isn’t solely about doing more of the ‘right’ things, and less of the ‘wrong’ things. It’s about creating the ideal environment for success as it relates to you.

Here is the only thing that matters:

Are the things you are currently doing taking you towards your objectives?

• Yes? Keep doing what you’re doing…until you ask this question again in the future and get a no…
• No? Re-evaluate your plan, make a change, track how it affects progress, ask the question again in the future…

Throw every other hair-brained idea out the window about what you’re doing ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’

It doesn’t matter what you do, if you don’t know how that is affecting progress.

Look, I know what I said… I told you to eat this amount of protein, or that amount of calories, or to do these exercises but here’s what I meant:

All of these things I’ve told you to do are just good starting points. They’re my best educated guesses based on the information I have…good guidelines…not absolute rules!

They don’t mean my educated guesses are going to be perfectly correct on the first try.

They don’t mean that implementing them today results in progress immediately tomorrow.

They don’t mean you’re not going to have to continue to tweak your plan to make changes.

And even after you figure you’ve got everything dialed in, you’re doing everything ‘right,’ you’re going to still have to make changes because you’re a biological organism and you are constantly adapting.

That’s life, hence, your plan needs to be constantly honing in on that moving target, and not some fitness ideals, such and such, told you on the web.

Based on what the scientific body of evidence suggests to me, I can recommend that ideally you eat 1.6–2.4 grams of protein per kilogram of lean mass if you want to gain muscle mass — and frankly even if you want to lose weight/fat and are exercising you should probably be in that range too.

I can recommend that you probably want to start by ideally eating about this-much-food, to complete this specific objective. Maybe even I break down a recommended macronutrient ratio.

Or that to gain muscle, ideally you’re going to have to pick up some skill in resistance training, with roughly this amount of volume, at this intensity and do it like this.

The big thing is, educated guesses don’t apply to everyone the same way. They give me a range maybe, but you’re going to have to tweak the system based on tracking progress and more educated guesses.

None of these recommendations guarantee success. The same holds true of any other good bit of information you’ve learned anywhere else.

The information is only as good as what you do with it.

You might need more, or maybe even less protein than the conventional wisdom.

You might need more, or maybe even less total energy intake than the conventional wisdom.

You might need more or less sleep than others.

You might benefit more from other foods, than the ones you’re eating right now and believe strongly to be ‘healthy’ or ‘the best option based on what you read.’

You might benefit from shorter or longer workouts, more weight training or less weight training, higher intensity training or lower intensity training.

There is an endless list of tweaks available, but don’t be tweaking everything at once. There is a reason science tries to isolate variables, and you should too.

A person who isn’t eating the ideal amount of protein, and still making progress is having WAY MORE success than the person eating the ideal amount of protein and complaining about a lack of results.

You have to take it for what it is.

I’m taking the information I have, plugging it all into a system I’ve honed over time to give me an ideal starting point and then giving you my best guess based on the circumstances.

That system is completely useless without the most fundamental pieces:

Step #1 — Create a plan for achieving well-defined objective based on the information you have about the current situation.

Step #2 — Track progress of said plan, as you work towards said objective.

Step #3 — Learn what you can from what you’ve been measuring/tracking over a week, couple of weeks, to a couple of months (biological adaptations can take a little while…)

Step #4 — Cycle back through Step 1–3, tweaking one or two things about the plan.

Based on progress, reformulate your plan based on best educated guess/most impactful change potential, then track progress, learn from the data.

Repeat until objective is achieved or objective changes.

You’re trying to isolate the things that make the biggest impact for you.

Don’t get trapped in Step #1 over and over and over again. This isn’t groundhog day.

Forget everything you think you know about fitness for a second.

It really doesn’t matter what I told you, if it isn’t impacting progress.

Those are just realities, don’t get stuck in the mindset of ‘but I’m doing everything right!’ because if you were, you’d be making progress.

Conventional wisdom doesn’t always apply.

There is no magical amount of protein, or estimated calorie intake, or length of time spent in the gym, or calories burned in a workout session, or amount of water/sleep, or magical diet ingredients that apply to everyone.

There is either working towards your objective, or not working towards your objective.

Everything else is a tweak-able component of the process. Everything else that you’ve read is just a recommended starting point, people are different and thus most folks will have to tweak away from the ‘norms’ to get the outcome they desire.

Ideals can be broken, let progress be your guide.