Dude, your nose is bleeding.
"I tracked it one time. 56 workouts." A client told me that on a call in August. By workout 57 he'd stop getting better. "That's typically when my wheels fall off." Then: "I'm just waiting to fail, you know?" He was five weeks into working with me. Who he was He's a founder in his mid-40s with two kids. His calendar looks like this:
He'd let himself go from 195 to 215 pounds before doing anything about it. He calls it "some version of burn it all down." His cholesterol had gone up on every blood test for two and a half years. His doctor wasn't happy. And nobody around him said a word. "If my nose was bleeding, they would say, dude, your nose is bleeding. But when you're going to have a heart attack, nobody says anything." What he always did He went all in. On our first call he told me, "If you tell me to track every day, that's what I'll do." He wanted to train about nine days a week. That's how he got to workout 56 every time. Weeks 1 to 4: Reset So I went the other way. Four days a week, never more. No daily tracking. I told him I didn't want to give him another job, and I asked for a little bit of trust. Weeks 5 to 12: Build By August the basics ran without him thinking about them. Then his weight stalled. That's when we added a little tracking, to show him where the extra calories were coming from. One of his go-to delivered lunches came in at 680 calories and 30% of a day's saturated fat. What he thought was a cup was double a cup. We fixed those, and the scale started moving again. Mid-August he had two ball games in one week. The weight kept coming off. In September we made sleep the project. On the mornings he showed up dead tired, I told him those sessions were character builders. They're about showing up. He called it "putting the grain of rice in the jar." He kept dodging his blood test. "In my head I've been putting off the tests. I'm like, one more week and I'll be back." I told him I thought it would look much better. "I hope so," he said. "I don't know how quickly that kind of thing changes." He sent me the results at 11 at night. His best numbers in two and a half years:
The plateau In late September his weight stopped moving, just like he'd predicted. "Plateaued again," he told me. Then his hardest work week hit, right on top of it. That's exactly when his wheels used to come off. On our call this week, he never once said it would mess with the gym. He said this: "It was like being stuck in the mud and you came along and just stuck like wood under my tires... Slowly, we got out of the mud together and now we're going. Like, why would we stop?" Weeks 13 to 24: Exit That's where he is now. Those blood results gave him real confidence. His sessions get better week to week. His push-ups went from 5 to 20. He's cruising toward his goal weight. You can tell it's working because he messages me less. The anxiety is gone. Our calls have more jokes in them. We're not putting out fires anymore. We're getting him ready for regular life. Today he flies to California for a week, with Panama and New York after that. He picks hotels by the gym now. "I guess I'm one of those guys now." We have 12 weeks to make sure he never restarts again. My job is reading him, knowing when to slow him down, and knowing which levers to pull. If you've gone all in more than once and the wheels came off every time, book your Restart Audit. You leave knowing exactly why it never sticks, whether we work together or not. Not for you if you want another program to grind through. Stay sharp, P.S. What's your workout 57? Hit reply and tell me where it usually falls apart for you. I read every email. Friend forwarded this?
Bart Cagara Helping founders get in shape one last time. | |||||||||
