How to adjust your health habits when you feel unmotivated and tired
Are you in a Dip right now?
Feeling unmotivated, a bit drained, and perhaps overwhelmed when it comes to diet and exercise?
Thoughts like, “Can I do this?” “Is this worth it?” "and “I suck at this” can float around with you in the Dip.
The Internet will tell you to use DISCIPLINE and GRIT and WILLPOWER to get off your lazy ass and WORK FOR IT. #america #bootstraps
But here’s the thing.
Our bodies evolved over millennia and are a lot smarter than us and our mere decades of knowledge. When bodies give signals to rest, it’s for a reason, even if you don’t understand it.
Signals for rest include:
Big mental pushback thinking about doing a workout
“Uuuuuugh I don’t wanna”
procrastination/doing literally anything else
heightened emotions—stressed, sad, frustrated, hopeless
And of course, physical fatigue
low energy
low strength
sleepiness
In The Adventure Ready Academy, I have my trainees write out how their personal signals for rest present themselves, called Red Flags, so we know that when they pop up, it’s time to focus on recovery.
Two ways people mess up once presented with a Red Flag:
They ignore it and push through, making them more exhausted and creating a bigger deficit to recover from down the road.
They throw their hands up and say “F-ck it! I can’t do this!” and quit, reverting to old habits and unhelpful patterns, only to have to sheepishly climb back on to the wagon later.
Here’s what to do instead:
Choose a couple easy bare minimums for your physical and mental health, like:
Eat some protein before your comfort food
Replace a workout with steps, or stretching, or an abbreviated workout
Do only what’s crucial for your job (it’s less than you think)
Then—and this is important—give yourself permission to rest by choosing from a Nourishment Menu—small actions that fill your energy cup:
Go for a walk
Take a nap
Play with the dog
Talk to a friend
For example: Today I skipped my workout and had a very pleasant screen-free day eating pancakes with the wife, washing the cars, puttering around the house, and playing with the dog, which felt extremely restorative.
I still got my steps and had a solid amount of protein (my minimums).
Literally no one, not even the super jacked fitness influencers, is crushing training and nutrition perfectly every day.
It’s not possible on account of we’re not robots (yet).
The secret sauce is dialing down your efforts to match what your body has that day. You will then be filling your cup so you’re able to crush it sooner.
Otherwise you keep digging and digging and soon your body forces you to take a break with sickness or injury or a full-on mental breakdown, and guess what? That’s going to suck a lot harder and take a lot longer than a mild rest day here and there.
Not only that, you’ll be a total downer crankypants and that ain’t cute.
👉 Crush your minimums, recover hard, and live to smash another day.
Since The Adventure Ready Academy is a whole year long, my trainees encounter several normal life Dips.
Sometimes they worry that they’re not “doing the program right” if they’re not absolutely crushing it 24/7.
I get that, because pretty much all other training programs are short-term and designed to get you to a result in a set period of time at any cost.
You’re supposed to white-knuckle your way to the end because the end is the goal, not learning how to live every day in a way that leads to your goal.
I intentionally made my program 12 months long because you need time and practice to build your own health routines that give you the resilient body you want.
It’s kind of like joining a business program that promises to make you $10k in 30 days, versus a program that promises to teach you how to build your own systems to consistently make $10k every month.
We practice building systems around rest and recovery, and pivoting when life throat-punches us off the proverbial wagon.
We also practice getting strong AF and eating like champions and moving toward our goals.
👉 This is all to say that having Dips is a normal part of the process, and if you want to succeed at this long-term, we’ve got to practice the whole process.
Love & muscles,
Coach Mac
Muscle Sherpa
