Consistency Trumps Intensity

My son looked at me like I was a complete idiot.

He knew I had a job and could dress myself and could at least pretend to read but he couldn’t get over the fact that I failed to grasp a simple truth: Slow and steady doesn’t win the race, it gets its ass viciously kicked by fast and steady, seven days a week.

He was about five at the time and like his dad, analytical to an embarrassing degree so I probably should have known that he would take his own, uber-literal interpretation on Aesop’s fables. I tried to explain the principle in greater detail but he wasn’t buying it.

Here is what I would have said if he was 15 instead of 5: Of course fast and steady wins the race but fast and steady doesn’t fucking exist. Don’t pay attention to the “slow”, focus on the “steady”. Consistency trumps intensity.   

I’ve seen this first hand in numerous areas of my life. I’ve always recorded the details of my weight-lifting workouts (WGMGM). Looking back at this data in sequential order, I can predict when I would miss workouts or drop out of the gym entirely for months at a time because it always came at the tail end of an extended period of very high intensity. Obviously, I would be in better shape if I could maintain that high intensity level year-round but the point is that making it to the gym for a moderate workout 3 times per week for 52 weeks will produce much better results than busting your ass for 9 months and then working out once a month from October through December.

The doubled edged sword of devoting a significant chunk of your energy and focus to one endeavor is that if you keep pushing for too long, it starts to eat you up. You end up burning out and creating a psychological wall that makes it nearly impossible to return to the task, no matter how much you used to love it or how beneficial it was for you.

One of the most successful small businessmen I’ve ever met personified consistency to a nearly insane degree. He lifted weights three times/week at the local YMCA and oftentimes I’d cross paths with him at the gym. One evening I noticed that he was there at his usual time but was basically just hanging out, slowly walking from machine to machine, sitting down for a few minutes at a time. I asked him what was going on and I could barely hear his response because he had a hellacious case of strep throat.  Even though he wasn’t going to be able to lift a single dumbbell, he still made it a point to go to the gym to maintain consistency with his routine.

I love this example because it’s literally 0% intensity and 100% consistency from the standpoint of exercise itself but you can’t deny that it’s a bad ass demonstration of self-discipline.    

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you need to go all-out until your DadBod is history. It developed using that sly son of a bitch tortoise’s M.O. and the best way to get rid of it is the exact same way it came into being.