The Glue Between Training Sessions
Are you building a strong foundation or a Jenga tower?
Every completed training session lays a brick onto the foundation. It locks in the work from that session and continues to build towards larger fitness goals.
Easy or hard, fast or slow, each brick laid compounds over time developing speed, strength, endurance, and skill. In the beginning, the focus is on consistent action, but as progress is made and more ambitious fitness goals are set, the focus shifts to performance and maximizing fitness gains.
Like a snowball rolling downhill, lots of progress can be made quickly early on, but as more snow is accumulated and a higher level of fitness is achieved, moving the ball forward and continually making fitness gains becomes more difficult.
In the later stages of a fitness journey, the bricks laid each day are still the key to making progress, but at higher levels of performance, the mortar that holds the bricks together becomes increasingly important. With higher stakes and faster speeds, small adjustments have a massive impact on the end results.
Without mortar, bricks stack on top of one and other like a Jenga tower. They stay upright for much longer than anticipated, but eventually, they come crashing down. At the extremes this is obvious. Training hard every day with perfect form is great, but eating cake and brownies for every meal will hold back any meaningful progress.
This example is painfully obvious, but many smaller mismatches are easily missed and leave bricks stacked high without much holding them together.
Imagine a runner who logs 40–50 miles a week, slowly building bricks and getting faster each week, but they aren’t eating enough, or stretching often. The consequences aren’t immediately noticeable or significant, but eventually, progress will plateau or an injury will occur.
It’s easy to get caught up in the satisfaction and gratification of completing a hard training session, but the devil is in the details and a combination of little things holds the hard work together.
The key ingredient in holding everything together is planning. Often overlooked, serious planning can be the difference between constantly rebuilding bricks after they topple over and continuously building upon a strong foundation.
Planning is the first input for a healthy mix of mortar because it reduces the willpower required to make the right choices.
After a long training session, a tired mind gravitates towards the quick, easy, but likely unhealthy meal. When a healthy meal is planned out in advance and prepped before the workout, opening the fridge and choosing the right option becomes easy. Planning makes the right choice the easy choice. It takes the thinking and effort out of decisions and turns the path of progress into the path of least resistance.
This also rings true with sleep. It’s essential for muscle repair and growth, but there are no shortcuts for getting the proper amount of sleep. The easy choice most days is to stay up late and let the tv autoplay the next episode of a show or keep scrolling through social media posts for “just a few more minutes”.
With a little time spent planning the evening, the easy choices shift dramatically. Instead of passively looking for something to fill the time before bed, an alarm serves as a reminder to begin winding down and the book placed on the pillow earlier in the day has to be picked up before getting into bed.
Planning and scheduling make the right choices easier because they reduce decision fatigue. Like anything else, making decisions requires energy. The more decisions made, the more energy expended and the more energy expended the harder it is to make the right choice.
Planning is proactively making the right choice. The same way Amazon designs their website to encourage shoppers to buy more stuff, anyone can design their life to encourage early bedtimes, healthy meals, stretching, mobility, meditation, and all the other little things that hold together the bricks of training.
Investors spend their careers looking for asymmetric bets. In other words, they are looking for something with limited risk, but a huge potential reward. For example, Kyle Bass, a hedge fund manager, bought 20 million nickels because the value of the metal used to produce them costs 6.5 cents. There is no risk involved in this bet because the nickels will always be worth at least 5 cents, but he immediately notched a 30% gain on his investment because the material value is higher than the price he paid.
Investing time in planning has a similar asymmetric risk profile. At some point, it’s necessary to spend time cooking, programming workouts, and making countless other decisions related to chasing down fitness goals. The time can be spent in a reactive state, overcoming tempting shortcuts on the fly. Or it can be spent proactively creating systems and preparing, so when the time comes to make the decisions, all the hard work is already completed.
Consistent training will always have the largest impact on fitness progress and the rewards of dripping sweat and sore muscles are immensely satisfying. With such tangible results, it’s easy to see why hard training sessions are glorified and praised.
But the work done behind the scenes, the mortar, is what holds these big bricks together. The hard choices that go unnoticed and unpraised are just as important. The only way to build a lasting foundation that will stand the test of time is ensuring a hefty glob of mortar attaches each brick to the next.
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