I’ve said it several times already, so I hope it’s starting to stick in your mind.

Everyone thinks they’re eventually going to get to a point in the fitness and wellness game where they’ll be traveling along this slightly inclined linear line that’s always improving, with no setbacks or dips along the way.

That simply isn’t realistic.

To be fair, there are people who build their entire lives around literally never missing. They can show you logbooks from ten years ago and tell you they didn’t miss one workout, one day of getting up early to meditate or journal, or one single meal.

Let’s just keep it real.

That’s probably not you.

And that’s okay, because it probably isn’t most people.

It’s like when people argue with me that Bo Jackson didn’t lift weights, so you don’t have to.

You aren’t Bo fucking Jackson.

You aren’t one of the top .00001% of whatever it is you’re trying to do.

So don’t beat yourself up because you’re not one of the best people on Earth at it.

Before this gets too negative sounding, let’s back up.

Getting knocked off track is normal.

Life is going to mess with your plans.

Travel.

Illness.

Work.

Injuries.

Stress.

Vacations.

Bad days.

Emotional shit.

And whatever else life decides to throw at you.

You’re going to encounter things that can and will knock you out of your routine.

Ideally, you build a life where as little as possible disrupts you. But you also accept that some things are just going to happen.

Your goal isn’t to build a system with a zero-percent failure rate.

Your goal is to build a system with a zero-percent staying-stuck rate.

That’s different.

It means building a process that’s so unshakable that you don’t allow yourself to spend long periods outside of it.

You keep improving how quickly you can reboot the system and get things running again.

Your goal can be letting life happen and still being confident that you can jump right back into your routine.

Keep stacking bricks.

Keep moving spoonfuls of dirt.

Keep moving the pile.

You don’t need three days to “get back into it.”

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“Getting Back Into the Swing of Things”

Side note…

I seriously hate that entire “just getting back into the swing of things” statement that everybody parrots.

It’s like a governor you put on yourself.

It limits what you think you’re capable of doing.

Yes, it’s harder to jump back into your routine after an amazing vacation when you have to go back to work on Monday.

Of course it is.

Remember what we talked about before?

That version of you is a terrorist and we don’t negotiate with terrorists!!

Sure, your goal is to build a life so fucking awesome that you can’t wait to wake up in the morning and get back to your job and your life.

But I’ll settle for something simpler.

You don’t need to feel motivated to get up and “get back in the swing of things.”

It’s discipline.

It’s knowing:

This is what has to be done.

This is what I do.

Say it in your head like you’re a medieval knight drawing his sword before battle for a righteous cause.

This is what we do.

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Back to the point.

Your graph isn’t going to be linear.

It’s going to have outliers.

It’s going to have dips.

It’s going to bounce up and down around the mean.

When you’re new to the process, the dips can go much farther in either direction.

Things might go really well for a day or two.

Then you might fall off for a few weeks.

Worst-case scenario, maybe a few months.

But over time, as you get better at your process, something starts to change.

The dips don’t go down quite as far.

Things stay closer to the mean.

You don’t eliminate all the dips, but you eliminate a ton of them.

And instead of being off for months, maybe you’re off for a day or two.

Then you’re right back to the process.

And now you’re trying to build a new streak.

How many good days in a row can I stack?

How many of these fuckers can I get?

Can I get a new record?

An all-time high?

Damn, I got close and lost it.

Can’t wait to try again tomorrow.

Learn how to become the version of yourself who handles the dips with integrity and discipline.

Not the version who handles them with self-pity, wallowing in despair, complaining to everyone about how unfair things are, and constantly giving yourself:

“One more day in the suck. I’ll start tomorrow.”

And then saying that 40 times in a row.

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Don’t Let the Outlier Become the Outlier Section

Here’s the next key.

Don’t let the outlier become an outlier section.

One bad meal isn’t a bad week.

I see this one all the time.

It usually sounds something like:

“The week went really good, but the weekend is just so hard.”

And suddenly brunch and a drink turn into a few more drinks.

Then a bad dinner.

Then all of Sunday becomes a hangover-fueled pity party with whatever food makes you feel better.

Sometimes you have to pick things to sacrifice and become an adult and say no to things.

Sometimes that means saying no to other people.

Most of the time, it means looking in the mirror at your toddler self and saying:

“No. I will not give into this tantrum. We are better than this.”

One missed workout isn’t quitting.

It doesn’t mean you get to miss the rest of the week.

Is it ideal to miss?

Of course not.

Get the fuck up tomorrow and get back to it.

But be fucking careful about being too lenient with yourself.

The:

“It’s fine. I’ll skip today. I’ll start again tomorrow.”

shit is a slippery slope too.

You may get really good at doing it for one day.

Then suddenly you’re down one or two days every week without even realizing it.

So there’s a balance here.

You don’t need to beat yourself into the ground over every mistake.

But you also don’t need to constantly give yourself a warm hug like a mom forgiving her baby boy no matter what he did.

Sometimes if you need a kick in the ass, you need to do the kicking.

Just make sure it doesn’t turn into an extreme.

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One bad Day Isn’t a New Identity

And it doesn’t mean you get to blow off the rest of your week.

So many people are ingrained in the habit of letting one bad interaction turn into a bad day.

The bad day turns into a couple of bad arguments at home.

That spills into work the next day.

Then you’re telling people for the rest of the week how shitty your week has been.

And before you know it, your brain is doing nothing but searching for evidence of how shitty things are.

Now you don’t want to go to the gym.

You order a pizza because you had a bad day.

Then tomorrow you say:

“Fuck it. I’ll start next week.”

And suddenly it’s three months later.

I got on a bit of a rant there.

I feel like Will Ferrell in Old School when he starts talking faster and faster and then suddenly snaps back into:

“What happened? I blacked out.”

But here’s what I’m actually trying to say:

The real damage often comes from the story you tell yourself after you miss something.

You create a belief:

“I fucked up again. I’m a piece of shit. I’m never going to get this.”

That belief shapes the thoughts you have.

Those thoughts create powerful emotional states.

Now you’re sitting inside the rain cloud of a bad mood.

That emotional state fuels the actions you take for the rest of the week.

And those actions produce results you don’t want.

Look upstream.

The missed workout wasn’t necessarily the thing that created the three-month derailment.

The meaning you gave the missed workout might have been.

Long story short:

Things will happen.

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

Get back on track.

Get after it.

The more you practice this, the more unshakable you become.

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Maybe you travel all day, take care of the kids when you get home, and there wasn’t time to get to the gym.

Okay.

Maybe you do 100 push-ups at the end of the day and call that good enough as a mandatory minimum.

Or maybe you plan better and find the time tomorrow.

Instead of thinking:

“I’m going to be so tired and busy tomorrow. I don’t know if I’ll have time.”

Plan to get back into your routine.

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You Don’t Need to Pay a Fine

Let me make one thing clear, though.

You don’t need to punish yourself back into compliance.

You don’t need to set some huge, grandiose goal to offset what you think was a massive setback.

I see this all the time.

Someone eats too much, so they starve themselves the next day.

They miss a workout, so they crush themselves with some massive workout the next day.

They decide they’re going to do two-a-days for the rest of the week.

They decide they’re going to wake up at some insane hour to squeeze more work in, even though they know it’s completely unrealistic.

And now one mistake has created another.

You don’t need to pay a fine.

You simply return to the process.

Now, with everything, there is context.

There are times when I’ll make adjustments after missing something—maybe adding some bike sprints I missed, adding some extra cardio, or changing my food intake after a period of overeating.

But here’s the difference:

I’ve built my system long enough that I know what works for me.

I also know what doesn’t.

Want to know how I learned?

By making a ton of mistakes first.

I used to take the punishment approach to extremes.

I’d work out extra to the point where I would get injured in my sports.

I’d fast for days trying to offset a weekend of overeating.

I’d wake up so early that I messed my sleep up for years.

I learned from it.

And you’re going to have to learn yourself too.

I’m just hoping my advice helps you avoid some of the extremes I learned the hard way.

I’ll say this part again:

You don’t need to pay a fine.

But don’t get so lax with yourself that you’re constantly giving yourself permission to do nothing.

Sometimes you need a kick in the ass.

Just make sure the kick doesn’t turn into an all out assault.

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Getting Back on Track Is a Skill

I talk a lot about the RPG game of life and the skills you acquire and build along the way.

Guess what?

One of those skills is your ability to get back on track.

Your ability to recover from falling off and return to your process is absolutely a skill.

And like any skill, it takes time and effort to build.

I say this line to clients all the time when they’re frustrated because something is hard:

“Why would you think you would be good at it the first time?”

I don’t mean that in a defeating way.

Sure, some people are naturally better at certain things because of other skills or attributes they already possess.

But for the most part, people need to practice something.

Some people need to practice it a few times.

Some need to practice it wayyyyyyy more.

And that’s okay.

But you have to start.

Maybe you used to fall off for three months at a time.

Then you got it down to two weeks.

Then, after a few more months, you got it down to three days.

Then one day.

That’s huge progress.

You know how you notice things like this?

You write it down.

Track this stuff.

These are things you don’t notice in the moment.

It’s like when you start working out and dieting and you look exactly the same in the mirror for weeks.

Then someone who hasn’t seen you in a while says:

“Wow. You’ve lost weight.”

You didn’t see the change happening because you were looking at yourself every day.

It’s the same thing with this.

I think of it like putting your process in a bumper-bowling setting.

When you aren’t paying attention, you don’t notice the ball rolling toward the gutter.

You only notice the score at the end of the game, when you’ve bowled fifteen gutter balls because the score told you so.

Once you get better at recognizing:

“Oh shit. I’m drifting off track.”

you put the bumpers up.

Now you get a warning sign that the ball is getting close to the gutter.

The goal would obviously be perfection.

Never drift.

That was a test to see if you were paying attention.

Being perfect would be great.

Probably isn’t going to happen.

The real goal is:

Shorten the distance between drifting and correcting.

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Build Your Mandatory Minimum

Something that helps tremendously is keeping mandatory minimums as part of your process.

Better yet, when you look at your week, have three levels:

Best-case scenario.

Pretty-good scenario.

Mandatory minimum.

That way, when life gets chaotic, you don’t automatically abandon everything because your only options are a perfect week or nothing.

Maybe your normal training is an hour, five days a week.

Your minimum might be every other day for 30 minutes with two exercises per session.

Maybe your minimum is three days.

Maybe, if you feel yourself getting into a funk, your minimum is:

Put your shoes on. Get to the gym. Do one exercise. Leave.

I don’t know you or your style.

You need to figure out what works for you.

But I’ve seen this help people over and over again, especially Type-A perfectionists who feel like they’re failing if they can’t do everything perfectly all the time.

Maybe your diet isn’t perfect because you’re traveling or working.

Fine.

Can you still make three decent decisions today?

Don’t let one bad decision turn into a landslide of bad decisions.

Now, there’s another side of this coin.

Be careful how quickly you press the panic button.

Another form of falling off is pushing the mandatory minimum button every time you encounter adversity.

So let’s call this another form of recovery.

The button is there in case of emergency.

You don’t need to be pushing it all the time.

Remember:

Every day is a deposit into your account.

Don’t make the size of today’s deposit the end-all, be-all.

Slow, consistent compounding over time beats chaotic giant deposits followed by periods of making no deposits.

Adapt the size of the deposit instead of closing the account.

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You Didn’t Lose Everything

Another problem people have, which falls into the category of not defining a clear goal, is confusing losing momentum with losing everything.

You don’t need to completely start over.

You don’t need to lock yourself back in at 100%.

Remember that this process is like moving a gigantic pile of dirt one spoonful at a time.

If you moved that pile for 50 days without fail and then missed four or five days, you’re not starting at square one tomorrow.

You already moved the dirt.

You already started building the habit.

You already started getting stronger.

You already started changing your body and your mind.

You just need to get back to it.

I see this all the time when people return to a workout after missing a week or two.

They feel terrible.

They feel out of shape.

They think they’ve lost everything they worked for.

The longer you do this, the sooner you’ll realize:

It’s easier to get back into shape than it is to get into shape in the first place.

Your body retains adaptations from previous training, and what people commonly call “muscle memory” is part of why returning to previous levels can happen faster than building them from scratch. Research has documented faster regain after retraining, while scientists continue to study the cellular mechanisms—including satellite cells, myonuclei, and epigenetic changes—that may contribute to that effect. 

It might feel hard.

It might suck for a few workouts.

But it can come back quicker than you think.

And don’t forget…

It’s supposed to be hard.

That’s the point.

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Start Smaller Than You Want To

I touched on this with mandatory minimums, but don’t underestimate how important a super-small move can be when you’re trying to get back on track.

Sure, after a few weeks off, you’d love to walk into the gym and do the exact workout you were doing before.

That’s probably going to be hard.

Even harder if it’s been months.

When you’re really off track, don’t start by designing the perfect six-week comeback plan.

Don’t create the extreme, kill-yourself workout.

Depending on how low you’re feeling, do the most simple thing possible.

Put your shoes on and go for a walk.

Eat a decent meal afterward.

Go to bed.

Plan a workout you can actually do tomorrow.

Go into the gym and do one or two exercises.

Then get out.

Stick to your appointments.

Keep your word to yourself.

Let those little decisions and little wins build into bigger wins.

Get yourself moving.

Build momentum.

Let it snowball.

Don’t underestimate the importance of the mandatory minimum and simply doing something instead of sitting in the sadness and doing nothing.

You can’t get to level 10 without starting at level 1.

But remember…

If you’ve already beaten levels 1–9, you know how to play the game.

It’s easier the second time.

You’ll pick up the controls again.

The level will look familiar.

You’ll remember how you beat the enemies.

You’ll remember where the items and power-ups are.

And all of a sudden…

you’re back.

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The Setback Is Also Data

Aside from the hard-ass approach of:

“Just get your ass back in there tomorrow.”

there’s another opportunity hiding inside the setback.

Remember You Are Not Your Hardware.

When you have a setback, your old hardware and old patterns are going to be firing on all cylinders.

The moment you miss something and those old feelings show up, the old patterns are ready to act.

Maybe it’s:

“I need some crappy food to feel better. I’ll get back to it tomorrow.”

Maybe it’s:

“This is just who I am. I can’t change it.”

Maybe it’s:

“I don’t have time tomorrow.”

And then the next day.

And the next.

Maybe you call someone to complain about how hard everything is, and instead of helping you move forward, the conversation keeps you sitting inside the same pattern.

These moments are opportunities to collect more data.

Analyze yourself.

Ask:

What happened?

What changed?

What was I feeling?

What was I doing differently?

Where did the routine break?

Was the plan unrealistic?

Did my environment change?

Did I stop keeping my word?

What could I change?

And here’s the most important question:

Why do I do this?

Where did this pattern come from?

Is this how I want to act moving forward?

How do I want to act differently?

What can I practice the next time this situation comes up?

How can I track it?

And most importantly:

How do I take accountability for it?

Every derailment can teach you how to build a better system.

Getting back on track is also data collection.

Most people get stuck inside the emotions of their habits and failures.

But those emotions usually aren’t the whole story.

Look upstream.

What beliefs are creating the outcomes?

Remember:

Beliefs → Thoughts → Emotions → Actions → Results.

The Formula is the key.

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Eventually, Getting Back on Track Becomes Part of the Track

And this is where I want to land the plane.

Eventually, getting back on track becomes part of the track.

Instead of thinking that getting knocked off course is a failure, you recognize that it’s part of the growth formula.

You get off track.

You notice why.

You adjust.

You return to the process with a new plan based on what you found.

You practice.

You continue practicing.

You adjust again.

You repeat.

Forever.

This process doesn’t need to be a perfectly straight line.

You just need to get really fucking good at finding your way back.

And I’m going to remind you one more time:

Don’t get so lenient with yourself that you’re constantly okay with falling off.

Challenge yourself.

Create a new streak.

How many days in a row can you do what you said you were going to do?

Sometimes you need to look yourself in the mirror and say:

“Fuck that. I’m not going to miss today.”

And sometimes life is going to happen.

You’re going to miss.

That’s okay.

Then the challenge changes.

How fast can I get back on track?

Because eventually, that’s the skill you’re really building.

Not perfection.

Not an unbroken streak.

Not a life where nothing ever goes wrong.

The ability to drift without disappearing.

The ability to fall without staying down.

The ability to get knocked off course and find your way back.

Get really fucking good at finding your way back.