Maybe you’ve seen the skinny guy who gets totally amped up to gain weight. They’ve tried and given up in the past, but blame their failure on not trying hard enough—on not having enough motivation. They start off strong—hitting the gym 5 times a week, eating 100% clean (whatever that means), and spending hundreds of dollars on bizarro supplements that even the supplement salesman is confused by.
A few weeks go by and after sacrificing so much in their life… the scale hasn’t really budged. Or maybe their weight even dropped because they cut out the easy calories from junk foods. Soon we stop seeing this guy in the gym.
Why does this keep happening? Honestly, this guy has incredible willpower and motivation—that’s a brutal routine that many professional fitness models can’t even keep up. That isn’t the problem. Eventually anyone will either reach capacity and burn out, or switch their energy to something else—something new and exciting (new job, holidays, new relationship)… and then there’s no room left for the crazy muscle-building routine.
I’ve been that guy too many times to count. (And not just with building muscle, either.)
Us skinny guys aren’t having a hard time because we’ve got bad genes, although that was an excuse I once used. No, us skinny guys are actually quite adept at building burly muscles. In our program the average member will gain ten pounds in the first five weeks and twenty within the first three months. While this may sound crazy, especially if, like us, you’ve tried and failed in the past… these results line up well with what’s found in the research. The largest and most thorough muscle-building genetics study found that skinny guys build muscle far faster than anyone else (study). Some guys in the study added two inches to their arms and doubled their strength in just the first three months.
So why do so many of us ectomorphs fail at building muscle over and over again?
Let’s backtrack a little bit.
Dan Ariely, one of our favourite behavioural economics researchers, believes that New Years Resolutions are such an important marker for change because it offers a fresh start. Perhaps we were skinny, unhealthy and low-energy last year. But not this year. This year we’ve got a clean slate.
But we’re going to slip, we’re going to “fail”—and that’s part of the process. A setback is just an opportunity for us to figure out what went wrong, how we can fix it, and then try again. It shouldn’t been seen as a failure, and it certainly has nothing to do with our ability to build muscle. The moment we stop thinking about change as binary—either as success or failure—but rather as a process that’ll evolve, the more likely we’ll actually reach our goals.
So when looking at our routines and our efforts, we need to look at them objectively. If our routine was failing, which part wasn’t working? What piece is missing?
If our routine is working, but is tough to maintain, what was enjoyable and sustainable? What is wearing us down? What’s the part that’s most responsible for our results? What’s useless filler that just seems to be working?
This is how we gradually develop lifestyles that work for us. This is how we get to consciously decide who we want to become. Then eventually those habits become what we do automatically—unconsciously.
Can you imagine if every single day you unconsciously made good longterm decisions for yourself? What if working out and eating well was so easy that you didn’t even think about it? What if being burly could be your natural way of being?
In the first part of this article we’ll teach you how to adjust and overcome the challenges you’ll face in your first few weeks of building muscle, and in the second part will teach you how to develop them into an enjoyable lifestyle so that you can still be rock-solid and healthy ten years from now.
The importance of habits
Let’s start by briefly discussing the importance of habits. Think of establishing good habits as free “goodness”. They don’t tax your energy levels at all because they’re decision-free. If you turn something into a habit then it becomes unconscious, automatic and no longer stresses you.
Admittedly, selling the idea that habits are your one way ticket to muscleville isn’t such an exciting revelation. Many of us would rather search for the magic pill or new supplement to make us look like Wolverine in 72 hours instead.
Even if you could do it, that would be selling yourself short. James Fell, writer for TIME Magazine, recently interviewed Hugh Jackman and it turns out that his routine is so brutal (many hours of intense training per day and a 7,000 calorie per day diet) and unsustainable that he’s only able to maintain it while filming. He lets his physique and health go to pot as soon as the filming stops. By the the time Wolverine had hit the theatres, Jackman had already lost his jackedness.
…But as a naturally skinny guy you can realistically have a lean, burly and healthy body year round, and you can do it fairly effortlessly. Maybe three hours each week in the gym. Maybe learning to cook a little better. Getting a little more clever with your nutrition and fitness routine.
When you run into a setback—and you will—you’ll need to strategically adjust what you’re doing. Cement in the more enjoyable, convenient and successful parts of your routine into lifelong habits. Over time you’ll gradually weed out the bad habits while adding new positive ones. Being jacked becomes totally natural. And all your friends start complaining to their other friends about how easy you have it—about how you’re all ripped and energetic and don’t even seem to try at it.
There are a couple necessary parts to consciously creating habits. It all starts with:
- Defining a Concrete Goal. (Perhaps gaining twenty pounds of muscle before summertime.)
- Understanding and maximizing your willpower to kickstart change.
- Setting your new habits.
- Honest and brutal accountability.
- Learning to strategically adjust.
Goal-Setting
Where do you want to be?
Before you take a step forward, you need to figure out which direction is forwards. You need to know which direction you’re trying to go. The clearer, more concise and concrete the goal the better.
It’s not enough to say you want to build muscle. How much muscle? Fifteen pounds? thirty pounds? Once you know, you can make a clear and detailed plan on how to get there.
Think of your goal as a mountain in the distance. If the weather is clear, you know exactly which direction to head to keep making progress. Introduce a bit of fog and you’re doomed. Even a small bit of fog can keep you walking in circles for a bit of time until it clears up and you can focus again on moving towards your mountain.
Let’s say you want to gain 25 pounds in 5 months. Great, so that’s 5 pounds every month. Just over 1 pound every week. You can measure yourself weekly and see if you are reaching that goal or not. If you gained a pound then you’re moving forward right on schedule and you can keep doing what you’re doing. If you didn’t, you know you need to find a way to eat more the following week.
(Obviously you need to make sure you’re gaining muscle and not fat, and that’s where good nutrition and lifting comes in… but you get the idea.)
But if your goal is super vague—like “get jacked”—how do you measure that? How do you know when you’re progressing and should stay the course? How do you know when you need to re-evaluate what you’re doing? How do you know when you’ve reached a huge milestone and should reward yourself for a job well done?
Making your goal super concrete
If you feel like you know everything you need to about eating and training but haven’t really started, you need to get clearer with your goals. In the incredible book Switch by Chip & Dan Heath they make a great point: what’s sometimes seen as resistance is just a lack of clarity. Clarity dissolves resistance.
In his TV show Man vs Wild, Bear Grylls always has an ultra-clear goal—find civilization after being dropped off in the middle of nowhere. Because he has a concrete goal he can make clear decisions like, “Okay, I’ll need to follow this river down stream since it’ll lead to the coast and people generally settle around coasts”.
You can apply these same principles to building muscle.
- No weight gain this week? You aren’t in a calorie surplus. You need to consume more calories.
- Gained some fat this week? You’re consuming too large of a calorie surplus for your lifestyle. Perhaps you need a better training program, better nutrition choices, more protein, or a smaller calorie surplus.
- Couldn’t make it to the gym for all three workouts? Perhaps you need to build a simple home gym instead, reorganize your schedule, or make your workouts more efficient.
- Haven’t started because you have no idea where to start? Perhaps you should buy a fantastic muscle-building program that takes care of all that for you
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When you’ve made your goal defined and concrete, there’s no wiggle room left but to just to do it.
Don’t let endless research or decision paralysis wear you down or kill your motivation. The hardest yet most important thing when it comes to exercising and eating well is to actually start doing it. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to start happening.
Make a clear goal that you can reach relatively soon, write it down and put it on your fridge to remind yourself every day. Some ideas to start are: train 3x a week for one month, gain twenty pounds of muscle in five months, and to literally explode your pants into pieces with a simple flex of your glutes.
Willpower
Kickstarting change with willpower
You’re going to need to make some changes to your current lifestyle to reach your goals. Doing the same thing over and over again (a habit) is easy, but making these changes is tough. It’s easy to put off ordering weights from Amazon or scouting out the neighbourhood gym. It’s easy to put off finding a good workout program. It’s easier to go to the grocery store tomorrow.
Exercising your willpower means to either override an immediate desire that is typically not in-line with your long-term goals (like passing on video games to free up time) or doing something productive long-term that you’d rather not be doing in the moment (like hitting the gym at the end of a super long day). According to Switch, every single decision you make—even ones as small as what to wear in the morning—slowly depletes your willpower. This explains why even relatively simple things, like shopping, can be draining.
If you haven’t hit the gym before, you’ll need to sign up for one even if you think you’ll feel out of place there. Or build a home gym. (Just don’t use crap equipment by the side of the road that makes even racking the weight dangerous).
If you’re not currently gaining weight, you’ll need to scheme up a way to eat more food (article on that here).
If you don’t feel good or have much energy, you may need to eat more micronutrients (whole foods containing vitamins, minerals and fibre), eat more carbohydrates or improve your sleeping routine.
Building muscle means making a conscious decision to get yourself lifting weights and putting more food on your plate.
“Shrink The Change”, Swapping & Realizing You’re Only Human
While 46% of people making New Years Resolution are keeping up with them after 6 months (study) another study by the same researcher, John Norcross, found only 19% of people were still with them for 2 years (study). (Norcross has had his principles on change helpfully outlined here.) It’s not because their goals weren’t worthwhile or because they were unattainable. It’s because we assume that since we’re motivated now that our willpower will last forever.
It won’t, and we need to anticipate that.
We’re hyper-aware of where we need to improve. It can be easy to make a list of 15 items that need to change now. But we really only have space in our life for one major lifestyle change at a time—if that. Sometimes people even need to deprioritize another area of their life to make room for new priorities.
So what can you do when you’ve only got so much willpower?
Shrink the change. If you want to gain 50 pounds of muscle while losing a tiny bit of fat around the belly while doing cardiovascular exercise 5 times a week… that’s great, but it’s also a mountainous goal that’s doomed to fail.
Prioritize and shrink it down to just one goal, fully achieve it, progress to the next step. That way you can accomplish everything in succession rather than failing at everything all at once.
Let’s say you decide to order a pair of dumbbells from Amazon and start lifting three times per week in front of the TV. Next month, when that is easy and part of your life, then start adding in a bunch of calories. Once that’s easy, worry more about the quality of your lifting and the quality of your calories. A couple months and a couple dozen pounds of muscle later, you could start adding in some more off-day activities like sports or swimming. By the end of the year you’ll be a lean mean health machine.
Change takes time and the more you realize the limits of your body and how to stay within them, the better chance you’ll have to stick with it. Once you can learn to actually accomplish lasting lifestyle changes that aren’t taxing your willpower, that’s when you’ll see results that effortlessly last forever.
(Maintaining muscle is also 1,000% times easier than building muscle, so don’t expect being perma-full and sore and all that stuff to be a lasting part of your life—it won’t be. You wouldn’t even need to lift three times per week.)
Another example from Switch is how people hate to clean their house because they know it will take over an hour, and they don’t have an hour to spare. If you shrink the change to just committing to 5 minutes though you’ll at least do something because the huge task was shrunk to a manageable level.
A good example of this is when Shane and I did our “Lean to Mean” experiment. We set a 30 day limit on eating well and working out. The idea of losing three hours a week to lifting heavy things and chugging protein shakes didn’t sound like a fun time to the sedentary and skinny version of me, but because of the time limit it wasn’t so daunting. I wasn’t giving up my entire future life, just a few hours a week for a month. At the end of the month I’d gained over 30 pounds, felt amazing, and was eager to keep going. The next month was a breeze. Soon we started finding ways to streamline our plan—making it more fun, more efficient, more delicious. Nowadays it’s easier to be muscular than to not be muscular.
Swap – don’t add or remove. Let’s say you like to snack on junk food (Doritos anyone?) before bed—a behaviour you’ve been meaning to change. Let’s also say you have trouble eating enough to build muscle. And let’s also say you have trouble eating enough protein to build muscle. A clever way to accomplish all of your goals would be to swap something muscle-buildy into that junk food habit cycle.
Since you’ll need more calories, removing Doritos (an easy source of calories) from your diet isn’t going to help you. Instead, you need more healthful calories and more protein. So an option would be to dip your Doritos into a small bowl of plain Greek yogurt for some added calories, protein, micronutrients, and deliciousness.
If you like drinking milk and need some more calories, just swap out that regular 1% or 2% for a higher fat whole milk. Need even more calories and micronutrients? Mix in some cocao.
For swaps like these ones almost no willpower is needed. This leaves willpower available to focus on the trickier stuff.
Change things around you. Some people can’t eat wholesome foods unless all the junk foods are removed from their house. Other people don’t make it to the gym because it’s too long a drive.
If you’re running low on willpower, why not change everything around you instead of yourself? If the gym is too far, too expensive or too busy and stressful… buy some adjustable dumbbells and lift at home.
The environment we live in has a huge effect on us. If you do have small plates, buy bigger ones—it’s been shown to make us eat more. Eat with bigger spoons and drink from wider/shorter glasses instead of tall/narrow ones.
If you feel too tired to cook every night, cook in bulk on the weekend. If you can’t handle large serving sizes, snack more during the day. If you forget to snack (as is common for us skinny guys), put a big bowl of delicious nuts or dried fruit on your desk, making it instinctive to snack throughout the day. Even better if it’s in a clear bowl! (study)
Once you change the environment, these changes will be willpower-free, leaving your willpower available for other things.
If you feel lazy, maybe you’re exhausted. You will need to honestly judge yourself, but when you’re feeling lazy… are you actually lazy or just completely exhausted?
If you’re exhausted, something in your life needs to change. You may need to eat more wholesome foods to give your body what it needs to function properly, you may need more restful sleep (members, great post on that here), or eliminate useless stressors in your life.
Don’t beat yourself up by thinking you’re too lazy to get off your butt when it could be the complete opposite. Get smart about it instead.
If you’re already feeling low-energy, lifting may seem like another energy sapping activity… but people who work out regularly develop more energy and more willpower than people who don’t. To start it might take a bit of energy to to develop the habit, but once you’re used to it, it’ll reward you back with good health and great energy levels. This is why it makes such a great first step.
Make it easier to be healthy & strong with your favourite foods. You need to develop a lifestyle that includes solid exercise and good foods. But that doesn’t mean you need to eat bland, expensive or inconvenient superfoods all day long. The meals you cook should be quick to prepare and fit easily inside your schedule, they should be made up of foods you already enjoy, and they should be well within your budget. This could be stew cooked in bulk on Sunday, meat and potatoes on the barbecue eaten with your family, five-minute peanut butter and banana sandwiches in your dorm room, two-minute smoothies in your mini-blender, or gourmet five course meals—that’s entirely up to you and your lifestyle.
Sleep replenishes willpower
When you wake up after a good restful sleep you have 100% willpower. The moment you make a decision like deciding between eating a bowl of muesli cereal or having a protein smoothie, you’ve already used up a small piece of your willpower for the day. This is why many successful people like Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Obama wear/wore the same outfit everyday to make their mornings as decision-free as possible.
Some people have very taxing jobs that require them to make a lot of decisions and they understandably feel completely drained by the time they get home. If you fall into that camp, one option is hitting the gym before work starts. That way you’ll have full willpower to draw from to ensure you get there. Not only that but there are some mental clarity benefits you’ll get throughout the day from exercising (study).
There’s an age-old saying that you should sleep on big decisions. This makes sense, as get to make the decision with full willpower, allowing you to make the best long-term decision even if it means short term difficulty. At the end of the day, when your body is exhausted you will always pick the short-term option. This affects any important decision you’ll make in your life like: eating well, working out, saving money, quitting drugs or smoking, etc.
In Willpower by Tierney/Baumeister, the authors share that research has found that sleep deprivation has been shown to impair processing of glucose, which affects your willpower (bit more on that below).
Baumeister believes that in order to get the most out of your willpower, you should use some of it to set aside time for quality sleep.
How to increase your willpower capacity
Exercising has often been called a cornerstone habit because adding exercise into your life can affect so many other areas of your life. In one study, researchers found that regular exercise increased willpower, allowing people to make better decisions throughout the day. Those who were exercising also started smoking less, drinking less, overspending less, procrastinating less and missing fewer appointments. They also had better mood regulation.
It’s possible that you can directly train your willpower too, and adding exercise into your life might help you do that. The brain is incredibly complex and we’re not sure yet if willpower can be trained as a skill or if we merely get better at specific things through practice. However, many researchers have likened willpower to a muscle because, like a muscle, stressing it makes it grow bigger. And just like with our muscles, fully annihilating our willpower won’t make it grow faster. It’s better to stress it often, fully replenish it, stress it again.
Researchers have found that doing small tasks that are out of the ordinary can be taxing at first, but once they become a habit, your willpower grows to accommodate them. Things like using your non-dominant hand to open doors and brush your teeth, promising not to cuss and watching your language, etc. They tax your willpower a little bit, but they don’t bring you to a point of failure. This allows you to slowly stress and grow your willpower.
Exercise and nutrition would be a more intense way to add in a willpower stressor, so it’s uncertain whether hitting hitting the gym is growing your willpower because it’s improving your health and energy levels, or because you’re also training your willpower muscle while doing it.
How to replenish your willpower when you’re drained
Calories! Your brain uses a lot of energy. Researchers think that upward of 20% of your daily calorie intake is used up by your brain (study, article). More specifically, your brain uses glucose. Glucose is just a simple energy unit—the type of sugar our body likes to use and store (in the form of glycogen). Some foods are also made out of glucose—dextrose, maltodextrin, potatoes, rice, etc. Glucose delivery is an essential part of willpower. Researcher Todd Heatherton famously found that consuming glucose reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion (article).
So what happens when you don’t have enough available glucose in your system? Your brain doesn’t just shut off when it’s not getting the energy it needs from food (thankfully). Rather, it switches into “energy saving mode”, which basically means you’ll resist doing any high-energy stuff. When you’re exhausted, this allows you to keep your deeper processes, like breathing, running smoothly.
This means that when you’re exhausted you can’t write your best chapter for your novel, you can’t learn a new instrument, and even insignificant decisions become hard to make (like whether to eat frozen pizza or chicken strips).
How Glucose Affects Willpower
There are many examples from Willpower about how important the steady delivery of glucose is. In one study they reference, below-average glucose levels were found in 90% of juvenile delinquents just taken into custody. There is a chapter focusing on the struggles of type-1 diabetic patients having an extremely hard time in life (skipping appointments, emotional outbursts, more arrests). These are good people with a disease that negatively affects their life because of what it does to their self-control.
This is found elsewhere too. Dogs given sugar laced drinks better obey commands, and quitting smoking is easier while eating more calories than normal. Women get short on willpower during the luteal phase, when their body requires more energy to produce hormones, and they end up making more impulsive purchases, smoking and drinking more, and having more arguments. Many women are on strict diets, and during this phase they often break down and eat high calorie foods—finally giving their bodies the extra energy they crave.
Even driving while sick is more dangerous than driving while mildly intoxicated. Taking care of your body takes precedent over your activities, so your body dedicates glucose/energy to fight off the germs… leaving less for your brain. (Evidently our immune systems don’t understand the dangers of driving.) The reason we sleep so much when we have a cold is perhaps to reserve the glucose in our system for fighting germs.
Now here’s the cruel catch-22 for most of the Western world. They want to lose weight, so they need to eat less food, and they need willpower in order to do it… but because they’re eating less food, they have less willpower. Our bodies can also grow “addicted” to junk food laced with sugar, since it knows it’s a great hit of instant energy. So we’ll actually start to crave sweet things when we’re feeling exhausted. This is why people become very emotional (grouchy) while they’re cutting—they don’t have as much self-control as they normally do.
As skinny guys though, this is amazing news. We need to eat more to fuel our muscle growth but those extra calories won’t just turn into bigger guns, they’ll give us the fuel we need to keep up with our new routines. This makes it easier to make healthy choices like cooking our own food and hitting the gym.
(Eating a lot of food can also stress our willpower, since our body will start telling us that we don’t need any extra food. The good news is that the extra food will give us more willpower, which we can then reinvest into eating more food. It’s wise to make your bulking diet as easy on the appetite as possible though.)
If you know you need some willpower in a pinch, have a Coke or a Gatorade. Generally though, the best way to ensure a dependable and predictable amount of willpower is to eat lots of nutritious foods with lots of good stuff in it (vitamins, minerals, etc.) and maintain a healthy bodyfat level (not really much concern there for us skinny guys) for a steady stream of willpower and energy throughout the day.
Celebrating Small Wins
Many people who don’t reach their resolutions blame themselves, negatively affecting their self-esteem. (For example, we may begin to see ourselves as people who can’t build muscle.)
There will be rough patches in whatever you pursue. Plan for it, brace yourself, and always remind yourself how far you’ve progressed. If you gain ten pounds, get sick and lose two pounds… you’re still up eight pounds!
It’s important to remind yourself that what you’re doing is worthwhile, and that if you don’t reach your goal, that it has nothing to do with your self-worth. If you slip or lapse, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure—it just means something in your plan needs to be strategically adjusted.
If during your first week of working out you only make it to the gym twice…that’s still twice more than you normally did! Realize that you can’t reach 100% compliance over night and instead focus on what’s working (keep doing that) and continue to tweak what you’re doing.
Most people don’t encourage themselves, but it’s so easy to be extremely critical of ourselves. Positive reinforcement that what you’re doing is important matters. There’s a reason smart businesses are trying to gamify their products—leveling up and getting rewards (even something as simple as a happy sound) helps to keep you carrying on.
When you reach a big goal that you have like to gain 20 pounds, don’t bail on the celebration part! Follow through with the reward. Otherwise you’re just manipulating your willpower into something more like a torture device—perpetual denial of pleasure in the present moment.
Willpower should be used as a tool to stop selling out your future self so you can enjoy the bigger and better parts of life like feeling and moving better, having the energy to spend with your loved ones, and having more confidence in the present and future moments.
Emotional Fuel For That Final Push
When your willpower is nearly empty and you’re feeling drained, you’ll have less self-control and become more emotional. Your emotions affect you both positively and negatively, but you can turn them into fuel for your physical pursuits.
You can lean on positive emotions like hope, enthusiasm, happiness, surprise, joy, contentment, pride and love to motivate yourself to reach your goals. Positive emotions encourage learning and curiosity—perfect for new experiences and change. You can start by believing you’re up to the challenge of creating a better, stronger, healthier future and be full of contentment about your current spot on your journey.
Understandably, people don’t like using “negative” emotions for motivation—emotions like pain, anger, fear, dismay, disgust, shame, etc. But we’re programmed to feel them. They help us navigate the world safely. They can be like putting blinders on—forcing us to become extremely focused and determined. No one is thinking about what they’re eating tonight when they’re scared because they’re lost in a dangerous neighbourhood in the middle of the night.
Using emotions like anger can help motivate us to adapt. For example, if we hit the gym consistently yet our weight stays the same on the scale at the end of the week (argh, again) you can use that anger to help you add a protein shake to your breakfast, eat a bit more past fullness than you normally would, or track your calories more diligently.
Gordon Ramsey in Kitchen Nightmares has a special knack for making apathetic owners angry and disgusted. This way they take responsibility for their mess and finally change. Martin Seligman, a famous psychologist, puts it this way: “If you have a stone in your shoe and it hurts, you’ll fix the problem.”
Habits
Automating good things in your life
Willpower will consciously get you moving in the right direction right away, but habits are the routine practices that you don’t even think about consciously—brushing your teeth at night, exercising, eating fast food, going to work. (At least I hope you don’t debate about whether or not to go to work each morning.)
For many people, most of their habits were not chosen. They just sort of “fell” into them because they were the easiest route in the short-term. One study found that we spend about 45% of our day in habits – almost half of our waking moments doing regular ol’ things that we likely didn’t decide to do and aren’t even thinking about!
One of the reasons we naturally fall into our habits is to reduce the number of daily decisions in our lives. This is good—very good. It frees up willpower and decision-making power for other things. If you go to work as a habit, you can use your willpower to motivate you to go the gym instead. If you then learn to go to the gym as a habit, you can then use your willpower for something else.
Yet we often hear people talk more about bad habits rather than good ones.
This makes sense. Bad habits are a huge deal. Five of the top health risks in the US are from repeated, habitual actions: drug abuse, obesity, smoking, risky sexual behaviours, and not exercising enough (study).
In studies following people who seemed to have enormous self-control, researchers found they weren’t even using their willpower. They already had incredible habits established, so they didn’t even need to think about anything (Tierney, Baumeister 2011). These people saved their willpower to help create good habits, and then those habits allowed them to stop using their willpower. At the end of the day, they’re not exhausted and worn down. They’re completely healthy—exercising, eating well, etc. all without even thinking about it. They weren’t using willpower to decide whether or not to go to the gym… they already went to the gym without even thinking about it.
Establishing good habits is the only way you will find success long-term. You can build muscle quickly at first, allowing you to make very rapid and encouraging progress during your first few months of (smart) lifting and nutrition… but depending on your ideal fitness goals, it could take several years of smart, focused training to reach your ultimate goals.
To reach the physique of a natural bodybuilder like Eric Helms, for example, it could take upwards of a decade of lifting, eating and sleeping well.
Your motivation, however strong it is right now, will surely wane before then. Instead of using your motivation poorly (doing weeks of intense research without beginning a routine, doing a super intense training program that fully depletes your willpower, etc), use your motivation, starting today, to help set up a manageable, enjoyable and sustainable lifestyle that you can carry on for a few weeks and gradually turn into an enjoyable habit-driven lifestyle.
That is how you accomplish an enormous transformation that spans months and even years.
Converting willpower into habits
In The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, he writes that researchers from MIT discovered the neurological loop for habits. The loop is: Cue, Routine, Reward. He has a great PDF for free on his website that delves deeper.
It’s generally very hard to break bad habits, so it’s best to program new better ones to replace them. The cue is what tells your body to do this action. According to Duhigg, a cue could fit into one of these categories: location, time, emotional state, other people, etc. It could be something like “I always hit the gym after having a coffee after work”, so once you’re done the coffee, that’s the cue. Some people work out in the morning and set up their gym bag by the door at night, that way when they wake up and see the gym bag by the door, it’s their cue to initiate the habit—to head to the gym.
The routine is the actual action—in this case, the lifting part. (Since you’re consciously creating a habit, for now you’ll need to use your willpower to substitute this future-habit into the habit loop.)
The reward is necessary for the habit to stick. Over time, working out will become its own reward. The endorphins from working out, energy boosts, feeling better, the strength improvements, looking better—these will be the reward. But all of us know that starting to work out can be difficult. You feel physically tired from the exercise, you feel mentally tired from having to use your willpower, your muscles become sore since your muscles aren’t used to working out, and you lose some time in your day. Having a reward is important to keep you going strong until the longer term benefits start to kick in.
Here are a couple ideas for a post-workout reward, but pick something specific for yourself that you really love:
- Having a snack that you love but don’t normally eat, like cookies or ice cream
- If you love movies, watching a movie to relax
- If you’re a naturally very-busy guy, give yourself some time to rest like having a bath after training. (The manly man version of a bubble bath is an epsom salt bath, but any kind of bath will do!)
Habits are like glue, they take a while to set
How long do we have to consciously will ourselves to do the routine before it becomes a habit loop? A 2009 study found the average amount of time to establish automaticity was 66 days, with 18 days being the shortest time (study). Every time you go through the habit loop, it’ll get easier and easier to to repeat.
In that sense, a habits is like glue—the longer you’ve kept it up, the harder it is to pull off. This is why it’s so hard to break bad habits… and why our good habits never seem to stick—because we lost motivation and burned out before the glue could set into a habit. For those wondering, doing something every day is not necessary to form a habit, so sticking to the three hour-long weightlifting workouts per week that we recommend is perfectly fine.
Accountability
The Ulysses Contract
Let’s say you had a particularly tough day at work. Your willpower has been momentarily exhausted. Normally you can use your willpower to hit the gym, but today you don’t have any left. If you had the choice, you’d just order in some take-out food, sit back and watch something on Netflix. Most people do have a choice, so they skip the gym.
But you don’t have a choice. You can’t sit back and skip the gym. A few days ago when you had more willpower, you gave your buddy Dave $50 in cash and told him that he was free to spend it if you don’t hit the gym 3x a week for month. If you meet that goal at the end of the month, he gives the money back.
Now you’re faced with two options. Do you go to the gym even though you’re tired, or do you go through the pain of losing 50 bucks? Most people will choose the less painful option—they’ll go to the gym. And good on them, for they’ll be sacrificing present mediocrity for longer term health, strength & happiness. After a good night’s sleep, with your willpower fully replenished, you’ll be glad that you made the right choice.
Without the accountability of the cash in place though, when we’re exhausted we’ll always default to the less painful route. Usually this means lazing around at home eating junk food that’s easy to prepare (or order). Many studies found that even people who are extremely disciplined when it comes to their future, once you wear down their willpower to the point of exhaustion, they will always favour the present tense.
This accountability system is called a “Ulysses contract”. It’s when a person freely makes a decision to bind their future self.
A good example of this is our Lean to Mean Experiment—my first 30 days of (successful) weightlifting. Shane and I were roommates, and, because we’re huge fans of Dan Ariely’s research, we set up an accountability jar. If we missed a workout it meant we had to put $10 in the jar. A missed meal was $5. We set a 30-day deadline for the contract so that we knew the pain wasn’t going to last forever, allowing us to go a little harder on ourselves. I failed to have a couple meals on super busy days (we were starting our design business at the same time) and ended up losing a bit of money. But the pain of the cost was enough to get me to hit the gym 3x a week and finish my half-eaten bowls of chili that I normally would have abandoned (by rationalizing that I’d already eaten “enough”).
The next month, fifty pounds heavier between us, both Shane and I signed up for continuing on with the jar for another 30 days. During that second month we didn’t fail once. Our big eating and gym-going had already transformed into a habit.
Make your goals public so you stay accountable in your group of friends. It’s a lot easier to rationalize another slip as “not too big a deal” if you’re the only person who knows about your muscle-building challenge. It’s awesome when our members post introductions and their goals on the forum. We even have some guys checking in with one another to see if they’re following through.
If you don’t have a buddy you can give $50 to (or however much would work for you), there’s our community forum for encouragement and help. Outside of that, there are online services that act as an impartial referee (like www.stickk.com) for any goals you may have.
Don’t make the amount too little or it won’t motivate you. You want it to be just high enough to hurt a bit. (But don’t make it so high it’ll ruin your life!)
Closing Words
If you take one thing away from this article, it’s to stop thinking about change as being an all or nothing kind of thing. Change is not like an Oreo. If you’ve missed the gym a few weeks in a row, that’s the perfect reason to get back in there, not a reason to mark yourself as a failure.
If there is any way we can help you reach your goals, let us know. Our program may help. We wish you the best of luck with your ongoing beastly journey—we’re all rooting for you! 