With so much information available on how to improve your health and wellness, it’s a slap in the face when you see people who work hard in the gym but sabotage themselves with habits that have a bigger impact than they realize.
If this seems like a waste of a blog. It’s not. I’ve talked with plenty of people who struggle with one or more of these bad habits and continue to ignore them, thinking they’re optimizing their performance because simply they exercise.
So, if you really want to screw around and find out, here are five surefire ways to halt your progress and create barriers to improvement.
1 – Smoke tobacco.
Tobacco use is the second greatest global risk factor for mortality, yet people still smoke. Want to increase blood pressure and blood glucose? Light up.
One large study with over 27,000 Taiwanese adult males (age 23-64), found that former and non-smokers showed significantly greater overall health and physical fitness performance than current smokers. Another smaller study showed that current smokers performed significantly worse than both former and non-smokers in aerobic capacity (VO2 max) tests.
Numerous studies have linked smoking to reduced grip strength and greater CMM (cardiometabolic multimorbidity). Overall, smoking is associated with lower muscle strength, including grip, and higher “fatigability.” Given the strong correlation between grip strength and longevity, it’s hard to think of a worse habit than smoking.
2 – Minimize Sleep.
Sleep is the free, superpower supplement. We’ve written about the importance of sleep many times, and it can’t be overstated that sleep is crucial to your performance.
It’s not just the work you do in the training session that counts, it’s how well you recover between training sessions that dictates your results over time. Get the best sleep you can objectively assessing your environment, schedule, and habits.
3 – Eat too much.
How many times have you heard “You can’t out-train a poor diet?”
If the goal is fat-loss, you need to be in a caloric deficit. If your goal is more energy, you might need to eat more carbs and/or fats. Most likely you need to eat more protein.
You can’t determine what you need more or less of until you take a snapshot of what you’re actually eating day to day.
Also, the calorie estimates on your smartwatch or the conditioning machine are not accurate. Most devices are wildly inaccurate with their calorie expenditure formulas.
Focus on giving your best effort during training sessions and stop fixating on “calories burned.” What matters far more are the calories you’re eating throughout the day with your goal in mind.
4 – Do more work than you can recover from, or don’t do any intense work.
Many people have the “more is better” mindset, so they train five or more days a week thinking that will get them to their goals faster. In reality, too much volume and intensity prevents proper recovery between sessions.
On one end of the spectrum, if you’re training every day at a low intensity, you’re not creating enough stress to drive adaptation. Strength train to create a manageable stress that you can recover from.
If you like to move daily, that’s great, but be aware of the intensity you’re working at from session to session.
5 – Skip sessions frequently.
The #1 principle we preach: consistency.
If you skip sessions repeatedly, you can only look inward as to why you’re not making progress.
If you can train twice a week, make those two sessions count with intense, focused efforts spaced 48-72 hours apart for recovery. Training once a week is still better than not training, but it’s rarely enough to produce meaningful change.
Your progress depends less on what you add to your routine and more on what you remove. Eliminate these five progress killers, and you’ll start seeing the results your effort deserves.