Breaking the Yo-Yo Cycle

One of my clients, Elliot, would go hard every three months. Aggressive diet. New workout plan. The full deal. And it would work…for a few weeks. Then life would do what life does – motivation would fade, work would get stressful, there’d be a sick kid to take care of, a vacation – and the whole thing would unravel. Three months later, the cycle would start all over again. Only this time, everything felt a little worse. The scale would tick up, his knees hurt more, and he felt more out of breath going up the stairs. Determined, he’d say to himself: “I just need to try harder this time.” When I sat down with Elliot to build out his coaching plan, we realized that even though every previous attempt felt like progress in the short-term, in the long run, the system was failing him. As Steve Kamb writes in his upcoming book, “Trying harder at the thing that already didn’t work wastes energy we can use to figure out a better solution.” So that’s what Elliot and I did – we stopped pouring energy into the thing that wasn’t working. A lesson from the beach If you’ve been to the beach, you’ve probably seen the signs warning about rip currents. When one is pulling you out to sea, you’re not supposed to swim AGAINST it. You’ll exhaust yourself, and you’re not going to win. What you’re actually supposed to do is swim sideways. Parallel to the shore. And if you can’t escape the tide? Float or tread water. You’re not getting closer to the beach – but you’re not exhausting yourself either. Holding steady and staying afloat is the critical first step to getting back to safety. This is the P in the PACT framework Steve writes about in his book – Pause. Not a one-time emergency move. It’s a skill we can use again whenever required. And this was the exact piece that was missing from Elliot’s earlier attempts. When we rebuilt his plan, we didn’t start with what his “optimal day” would look like. We started with “how do we stay afloat when life throws you into a rip current?” This is the thing that most fitness plans miss, and what I’ve seen actually work hundreds and thousands of times with clients in Nerd Fitness Coaching. Progress isn’t about operating at our peak all the time, forever. It’s about learning how to toggle between periods of maintenance and periods of focused effort. Ultimately, that’s the strategy that gets us towards our goal. I get it! The allure of “continual optimization” and “just doing more” is easy to fall into. But it’s not the answer. By focusing on the pause, we can create a more sustainable approach to fitness and life.