CONSISTENCY – THE MISSING COMPONENT

CONSISTENCY – THE MISSING COMPONENT
By Shane Robert

The 2024 Summer Olympics have just ended. I find myself amazed as I watch the extreme things that the human body is capable of. I find myself even more amazed at what the human mind can achieve. For many of these athletes, they have trained hard for 4 years, or their whole lives, for a chance to display their greatness in an event lasting less than 20 seconds. That is a feat of the mind that most lay people can’t even begin to comprehend.

For the average person, sticking to a workout routine for 3 months is so rare. There are countless 12-week “challenges” that ask people to, among other things, adhere to a certain meal plan and do a specific workout 4-5 days per week. The truth is most people fail these incredibly short challenges. Short, especially, compared to 4 years of adhering to specific nutrition and training plans that an Olympian has to do. These normal people fail while the Olympians triumph, largely because of consistency or a lack of it as the case may be.

Consistency is one of those qualities in sport, fitness, nutrition, and life, that doesn't receive its just deserts. Think about the 12-week challenge example above. What causes their failure? It isn’t that they are unable to workout, or even workout hard, or that theyare unable to eat the food they were supposed to eat. They are unable to keep doing these things consistently over the course of the challenge. The difficulty of the plan is often what leads people to give up on it entirely. However, if a person were to undertake one of these challenges, only putting in 80% effort on the workouts and 80% adherence to the nutrition, but stuck to that 80% for the whole challenge, consistently, they would see greater success than someone who put in 100% effort 20% of the time (or simply quit altogether, as is often the case). Consistency leads to success.

Take something like lifting technique. People love to argue what is “correct” or “perfect” technique in lifting. The answer, of course, is that there is no perfect, especially when taking individual anthropometrics into account. Look no further than the weightlifting that just took place. There are likely no two lifters who lift in exactly the same way. Even the Chinese lifters, who are often called the best technicians in the sport of weightlifting, don’t all lift exactly alike and certainly differ from lifters who don’t have the same build that they do. Men’s 89kg gold medal winner, Karlos Nassar, has a wildly different technique from Men’s 102kg gold medal winner Li Huanhua. Yet they both lift world record-setting weights.

You can see wildly different techniques across all weight and gender categories. The only thing that matters, then, is…consistency. Each of these lifters had to find a technique that felt right for them and keep doing it that way every time they lifted, whether it was an empty bar or a world record. Thousands of reps spread over hundreds of training sessions, day after day, year after year, lifting the same way. Combine this with slowly increasing the loads lifted and you get a formula for someone who can hoist incredible poundages, even if their technique doesn’t meet the criteria for “ideal.”

The best dieters in the world are bodybuilders. No one on the planet is better at losing fat seemingly at will than they are; they put great effort into getting leaner than an anatomy chart simply to gain it all back in the hopes of eking out a few more ounces of muscle so that, the next time they get lean again, they (hopefully) look a little better. To accomplish this, many bodybuilders eat the same foods in the same amounts and track what they eat to hit the same macros/calories, often eating by the clock rather than hunger level. Thousands of meals, day after day, year after year, eating the same way. Through that consistency, they can make small changes and lose fat in a way that seems impossible to everyone else.

All of these examples illustrate that any high achiever has gotten that way as a result of consistency. Yes, genetics play a role. Athletes with the best genetics in the world who train for 6 months are not going to beat someone who trains consistently for 10 years with normal genetics. As a (likely) average person, look at yourself and see where you may lack consistency. Do you switch training programs frequently? Is your nutrition all over the place? If so, find a program that you like and do it as written, rarely missing a day, for 6-12 months. Same goes for nutrition. Find a tracking app and be consistent with the macros and calories that it tells you to eat, rarely wavering, for 6-12 months.

Consistency is like compounding interest. In the short term, it doesn’t seem like much is happening. Over the long term, it leads to huge gains.