2927: Why 80% of Beginners Quit (And the 5 Things That Actually Fix It)

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MindPump. MindPump. With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded health, fitness, and entertainment podcast in the history of the universe, approaching over half a billion downloads. This is MindPump. Today's episode, why most beginners quit their fitness and how to actually stick with it. By the way, with this episode, here's what we did to help people out. If this is you, if you're a beginner and you don't want to quit, here's what we have. We have two workout programs designed for the beginner that require minimal to no equipment. You can do them at home. They give you great results. And you can buy one, get the other one for free. It's a BOGO going on right now for both workout programs. By the way, you combine them both, it's going to give you about eight weeks to ten weeks of workout programming all covered. If you're interested, go to MAPS BOGO. The programs are Starter and Anywhere. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Seed. This is the world's best probiotic by far. Look, you've seen the data on probiotics. We know it helps with digestion. We know it helps with inflammation. But did you know the studies are showing it helps with mental state? It helps with your skin. There may be some fat burning and muscle building effects. It's true. Probiotics may actually benefit athletic performance and fitness goals. Probiotics also have benefits for longevity, for reducing chronic illness. They're great. They're good for you. The problem is, what do I take? Which probiotic company has active bacteria, the best strains, and can they get those bacteria to where they need to go, or does it get destroyed in my digestive tract? Well, Seed handles all of that. They have patented capsules that bring live bacteria strains to your colon where they need to go. It's the best in the world. Go check them out. Get 25% off. Go to seed.com slash mindpump. Use the code 25mindpump for that discount. All right, real quick. If you love us like we love you, why not show up by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstore.com? I'm talking right now. Hit pause. Head on over to mindpumpstore.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. The stick rate with workouts is dismal, but 80% to 90% of people lose consistency with their workouts within a year. We have the solution. Today, we're going to talk about why most beginners quit and how to actually stick with fitness. Let's get to it. Whenever we talk about this, it always reminds me of the January rush. Best example. Yeah. Best example. Managing big box. All of us started in fitness in big box gyms. And if you've ever worked in a big box gym for over a year, you've seen the cycle. And the numbers are pretty consistent. You get about a 50% to 60% increase in traffic, meaning people come in. 50% increase in revenue, people buying memberships, signing up. And that stays up till probably February, March. Just a wave of motivation. And then after March, it's a very quick decline. And by the time you get to like April, May, you're back to normal. Yeah. So it's like three months. Machines are free again. It's wild. And it was super consistent. Like this was predictable. This is so predictable. Jim's will organize their schedules and their budgets around the January wave and the inevitable drop off. Yeah. January is what Black Friday is to the retail market. So what the retail market is familiar with in November and Black Friday and that whole month for retail sales, that's what the gym industry expects. So what the retail market expects is that the retail market is going to be a little bit more active. So what the retail market is going to be a little bit more active. And that just doesn't play out when you're doing this on your own is you're busting your ass, you're restricting like crazy, and the results are minimal to none at all, which results in most of these people quitting. Well, the average person, I'm glad you said people don't know what they don't know. So what's the magic? What's happening here in this particular scenario? So here's the deal. The average person, when they think of a workout or an effective workout or what makes up an effective workout, there's two things that they think. Knowing exercises and hard. That's it. If I know exercises and I work hard, and the way they determine if they're working hard is like how sore I get, how hard it is, how hard I'm breathing, then I should get phenomenal results. Now, here's the crazy part. That's not workout programming. Now, exercises done properly make up part of the workout programming into a workout program. Intensity is part of the formula that makes up workout programming, but so are reps, sets, rest periods, and how the whole thing is organized on a weekly, monthly, and then quarterly and yearly basis. There's actually a lot more that goes into workout programming that people realize. This is why there's a strength and conditioning science. This is why workout programming, this is why strength athletes, you know, athletes that compete in sports to see who can, you know, lift the most weights, let's just say. The difference between them is the programming. And you'll have schools or clubs that become famous for producing champions. And it's not because they're attracting the most genetically gifted or they have some special drug that they're giving people. It's their workout programming. And they get so good at it that people start to learn what that programming is or what they're doing and start injecting it and implementing it into other workout programs. So workout programming is a science. And here's what it looks like when you do it right. It feels like the results you get don't match the effort that you put in. And I mean that in a good way. I don't mean it in the bad way. So the bad way is I am putting so much effort into this and I'm getting so little in return. And oftentimes you'll hear people say, man, I'm working so hard. I don't even look like I work out. When workout programming is done well, the opposite is what people say. Man, I feel like I'm barely doing anything and I'm getting such crazy results. This is wild. What's going on? And the difference is you have a good workout. So one of the number one things you can do to help with your consistency is follow a good plan. One that is written and created by people who understand workout programming. One that actually has science behind it. And one that also has experience behind it. That makes such a big difference in terms of your consistency. Well, the truth is, I mean, this is what I meant by body composition is a science. If anybody just goes in and does exercises that they've seen on TV or they downloaded from Google and they just perform those, there's a bit of return you'll get from those. You'll get better at those exercises. Better than nothing. Yeah. And it's better than nothing. But most people come in to the gym because they want to make a change. They want to make a body composition change. Or they got some bad news from the doctor. Or they got some bad news from the doctor that says, hey, there's these health indicators that your health is poor, cholesterol is high, whatever the thing is. We need to go fix this thing. And so most people come in to make change like that. And more often than not, it's physical and aesthetic change. And making physical and aesthetic change in the positive direction, there's science involved. There's a balance of the appropriate amount of macronutrients that your body needs. There's a certain amount of stress that you want to apply to the body related to how much recovery that you get. Which is determined so much by your lifestyle. Right. There's a certain level at which you want to start and then slowly progress. This giving it all at once as much as you possibly can, while also restricting from all these things that you think you shouldn't be eating approach is a failing strategy that most people go into the gym thinking is the best strategy. And the unfortunate part to the point you're making is if they only knew that it would take less effort to get them to do it, it would take less effort to get them to do it. They would be more likely to stick around. But the reason why they don't is because, and I wouldn't either. It's like showing up to a job. You bust your ass off for eight hours a day and you get the paycheck and it's, they didn't even pay you a minimum wage. How long are you going to do that for? Just like, this is ridiculous. This is, I work for free. Yeah, no way. I don't want to do this. And so, but what, what if you could work a fraction of the hours and get paid 10 times the money? I mean, no brainer. Yeah. No brainer. And so I think that's what happens to so many people is that I want to be clear. Effectiveness does not mean hardest workout. No, it means best, most effective workout. Smart, smart workout. The you know, our producer here at mind pump, Doug, who's been, you know, we've all been doing this together since the very beginning. I met Doug when he hired me as a personal trainer and Doug had an extensive fitness history. He was not some guy that never worked out before. He'd worked out many, many times before. He'd follow many routines before he'd done bodybuilding routines and fitness routines. He'd run, he'd do play tennis. And I remember when he came to hire me, uh, it took me a second to convince him that we were only going to work out twice a week. He actually kind of didn't believe me. And thankfully I'm very convincing. So I got a little trust from him to try it by week three, there was no convincing required because Doug was seeing and feeling results by week three that were blowing him. I remember him telling me like, this is weird. How am I going to do this? You know, he was like, you know, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. And the difference was the programming. That was all the difference in the world. There's nothing else that was different. He was doing everything else the same as he'd always done. The difference was we're working out in an effective way, which takes us to the second point. And when you look at polls as to why people stop their workouts, one of the top reasons, one of the top five reasons is it's taking up too much time, or I don't have the time, which actually kind of communicates what we just talked about, which is when you're doing something so ineffectively, it takes a lot of time to see a little bit of movement. And so when you're going to the gym and you're working out four days a week consistently or three days a week consistently, which by the way, I got to be clear here because we tend to get a little distorted here. When people talk about working out, right out the gates in the conversation is every day. For some reason, we got to work out every day. That's not true. You should be active every day, but working out, no, very few people, very, very few people need to work out every single day. The vast majority of people, if you were working out three days a week, you're working out a lot. That's a lot of scheduled, consistent workouts. Most people less than that would be perfectly fine. So the problem is I don't have the time to do this ineffective crappy workout. I'm putting so much time in. I'm getting so little. I got a family. I got a job. I got these things like I'm not going to, this, this just isn't worth it. So the second point that helping you with consistency is the workout itself should not take a ton of time, period, end of story. If you can be super motivated, getting into something, making your decisions based off of that motivated state of mind, but eventually that motivated state of mind will fade because it does. Nobody can stay motivated all the time. That just doesn't happen. And now you've committed yourself to, I don't know how many days a week you're not motivated and go to the gym four days a week, five days a week, six days a week. It's like, ah, I'm not a fitness fanatic. I don't love this. I don't want to live in the gym. This sucks. I'm going to stop. It's overwhelming. I mean, it has to be effective. It has to be efficient. And I mean, that's the number one barrier for a lot of people. It's that time, you know, being able to, yeah, commitment, being able to fit that in. Everybody's busy. Everybody has something they could fill their day with and their time. And so the biggest hurdle is to really like condense that and make that time itself like as effective as possible. And to do that, you really have to structure it in a way. Uh, where you're selecting, you know, the best exercise you're, you know, applying the best, um, you know, methods for you to actually see some substantial gain. This is also how you can tell when you're talking to like an experienced trainer, because many times when, when the client comes in and they're either one just getting started in the gym or they're speaking to a personal trainer for the first time, they're highly motivated and ready to go. And you, when you ask the question of, you know, how many days a week can you commit to working out? Uh, almost always they commit to an amount that's not realistic. And a really seasoned personal trainer knows this. And no matter what the number they say to talk them down, they talk them down every time. It's like, I don't care. The person says six, five, three, it doesn't matter whatever they, they, they say, why don't we just start with this? And that's when, you know, you've got somebody who's probably been doing this for a really long time because they know if they were doing nothing before and I get you started making better decisions around your eating, better decisions around your sleep. And stress management and getting you working out just one day a week, I can make positive change right away, start moving you in the right direction. And then I've got plenty more levers and time to play with, especially if you told me you could do three or four days a week. And so a really seasoned trainer knows this and we'll go, let's commit with this. Let's start here. Let's build on that. And then we'll go there. And that is the difference versus admittedly, uh, what the young personal trainer or what I did when I first started was somebody was like, tell me they can only do three days a week. I'm trying to convince them to do four or five. Yeah. You know, can we do more? Yeah. I'm trying to, I'm trying, I'm thinking in my head, I'm trying to move the needle as fast as I possibly can. So this person will continue personal training with me. And I, every day that I have control of them, have a better shot at that and it was such a failing strategy uh thinking thinking that way instead of thinking i'm just consistent and this is because the experienced trainer has lost uh many clients uh over the years of doing it the wrong way they're like no no that's not going to work let's do this the right way you know type of deal here's the next one and by the way gyms know this because they have good data on this uh these days one of the uh number one reasons why someone will cancel a gym membership is it's inconvenient. By the way, the numbers are astounding. It's like if you don't live or work within a few miles of the gym, then your odds of canceling go through the roof. Very high, yeah. It's literally like the neighborhood gym. So unless you work there or you live by there, it's probably not going to work. The only people that drive 20 or 30 minutes to a gym are fitness fanatics. These are people that you don't need to motivate. Diehards. They're just going to, no matter what, they're going to go to the gym. They'll drive as long as they need to to get there. But the average person, if it takes longer than 10 minutes to get there consistently, that is a barrier that starts to become a larger barrier when motivation fades, life starts to become challenging, and then it's like, yeah, I'm not going to do this. So convenience is very important, and there's two ways to tackle this. One, which I just said, have a gym that's very close by. Here's the second one. This is a big one. This is understated, but it's very powerful. Very important. Have a workout you could do at home without much equipment. This was a game changer for my clients. Now, my clients were motivated. They love coming in. They love seeing me. They love training with me. But when I had clients that didn't live nearby, which sometimes started to happen towards the end of my career because I would have clients referred from friends, and they would speak very highly of me, so they were willing to drive 30 minutes or whatever. When they wanted to do extra workouts, I would give them things they could do at home. And the ones that they could do at home or the clients that did stuff at home and then train with me here and there were the most consistent people I have. This is one of the ones that you guys have shifted me on completely. I remember when we first started this podcast, I was an only-go-in-the-gym guy, and now I can't tell you the last time I was in a gym because I trained from home. It's just, and I get it now, the convenience of it. And I always knew it with training clients because that was a lot of times the reason why it was hard for me to get the client to come to the gym consistently multiple times a week was because if it wasn't for them, they wouldn't be able to come to the gym. Because if it wasn't right on the way home from work and that was the perfect time for them, getting back in their car and coming to the gym, even if it was close, was crazy how, what a barrier that was. And so it was then when I figured out as a trainer, like, oh, I need to put together, and I always did this, was I always had routines that my client could do if they didn't make it to the gym. And so I think having a strategy or a plan like that and also understanding too that it's not lesser or you're not losing because you didn't go. Like there's this myth that if you don't have all the latest, greatest machines inside the gym or you don't have 500 pounds worth of weights in there that you can't get this incredible. Especially for beginners. Right. Right. Like a pair of dumbbells, a physio ball, or maybe some bands or your body weight done properly, you've got yourself a phenomenal workout. You can do anything. Weights, especially heavy weights, don't really start to become a factor until you've been consistent for a while. You've progressed for a while. You've already progressed for a while, but especially if you're a beginner, not only is it not necessary, but if you push it too hard and get that person to do the inconvenient thing, the odds of them stopping make it just totally not worth it, which kind of takes us to the next one, which is the workout needs to be safe. Okay. So injury will stop any fitness program. I don't care how advanced you are or consistent you are. It'll stop you. And injury happens for a couple different reasons. One, very obvious. Bad technique, bad form. When you start to treat exercises as a means to an end, in other words, I'm doing this exercise to get my legs really tired and sore, or I'm doing this exercise to make my shoulders really tired and sore, versus this is a skill that I need to learn. This is an exercise I need to learn how to perform. That's the approach. The approach is here are the skills I'm going to practice and perform today, not I'm going to make my legs tired, I'm going to make my back tired, I'm going to make my chest tired, but rather I'm going to get good at this exercise and skill. That's one of the best things you could do to reduce risk of injury. It's also one of the best things you could do. Such a different mentality to take on. And it's so important. And along those lines too, where it gets distorted a lot is in the group setting. And so we see this a lot with that motivation too, in the beginning, it's like, well, I don't really know necessarily some of these movements. I'm going to join a class. I'm going to, you know, get motivated and kind of feed off of that. A lot of times, you know, it's really hard to as an instructor, even to, to pay attention to everybody's form and correctness, and you get hyped up by it, you go a little more intense than you probably would have otherwise. So it's just one of those things to consider in that setting, you know, it has a propensity to kind of push you a little too far. You know, I have a new found perspective on this point in my mid forties. Now, you know, this I've known this stat for a really long time, that this is one of the number one reasons why people we've known this in the gym industry, for a long time of why people quit is because of the injury through my twenties and even thirties. I assumed it always was because bad form and technique. I just figured like, oh, there's a lot of people that just don't know how to exercise properly. They do. And there's some truth to that. Right, right. And there is that. And that's why I've thought of it for, I thought that for so long, my newfound perspective in my mid forties is I actually think a lot of this happens from people, maybe even people that know how to work out. They're just overzealous. Yeah, they overdo it. And I, and I feel that I have this newfound perspective because I know all this stuff, I'm aware of it. And yet I still have done this to myself coming back after a layoff. And it makes me go, wow, I wonder how many of these people of that, that fall in that injury category that we're all aware of. That is one of the large categories of why people fall off early on is actually not just people that don't know how to work out and haven't lifted her, but actually people that have, and they've just haven't trained for 10 years or haven't, haven't been the gym. They start working out, they get excited, and they progress really. They start doing things that their body isn't ready for, but their mind goes, oh, I used to do this when I was in, they know what they're working. Yes. And so they think that they're going to get there pretty quickly when in fact it's too much. And I have to think since I've watched myself do this with all of my experience around this, that I can't be alone, that this is probably happening. Uh, this, that that's probably a greater percentage of those people than I thought before, before I assumed it was just mostly really bad technique and form. And people, people that don't know what they're doing is hurting themselves. It's like, actually, this is probably a lot of middle aged people that are coming back to working out who have had, you know, years of laid off, put on some body fat, coming back and decondition and starting to feel good and momentum and be able to do this. Probably not. I mean, listen, I know all these things yet. I didn't properly progressively load myself and actually scale appropriately. I should have scaled back and been following one of our beginner, like type of programs, even as advanced as I am, until my body was ready to progress. Instead, what did I do soon? Oh man, good week. Oh, PR week, PR week, PR week. Oh, injury. And so, you know, that's probably happening to a lot of people and cannot highlight enough how important it is that just because you deadlifted or did a bunch of weight or were strong 10 years ago and you're feeling in a rhythm and good right now, probably should follow some appropriate programming to get you to that place again before you just jumped to it. Yeah. If number one, if the number one cause of injury is poor, technique, the close second is over training. In fact, one of the hallmarks of doing too much, right? Too much can be too long. It can be too hard, right? An inappropriate amount of stress for your body. And what's what determines an inappropriate amount of stuff, your current fitness level, your lifestyle, your sleep, your diet, right? All those things play a role in that, right? One of the hallmarks of overtraining is injury. It's actually one of the number one things like the coaches know, like, oh, repeated injury. Maybe we're overtraining. And so you don't want to overdo it. You want to have good technique. And then the last point that always comes up in every poll and every, uh, every time you look this up, like why do people stop? Why do we, it's, it's, it's typically number five, which is the cost, like the cost of the thing that I'm doing, especially when you combine it with all the other things, I'm paying this money. I'm also not getting great results and I'm also spending all this time doing it. I think I'm just going to save my money. So here's what we did. Here's what we're going to do to help solve this for people. We have two programs that are perfect for beginners, both of them can be done at home. Both of them have expert workout programming. Both of them are safe because the exercises and techniques in there, you can watch, you can follow and are appropriate for the beginner. And then to cover costs or to make it less of an issue, you're going to buy one and you get the other one for free. So that's what we're going to do right now. So we have a combo here. It's maps starter and maps anywhere, but you're only paying for one of them and they require minimal to no equipment. So you could do them at home. You can do the mid gym as well, but you can also just do them at home. So it's map starter maps anywhere by one, get the other one for free. And if you're interested, you go to maps bogo.com. You can also find mind pump on Instagram. Just look up mind pump media. We'll see you there. Thank you for listening to mind pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance. Check out our discounted RGB super bundle at mind pump media.com. The RGB super bundle includes maps, anabolic mass performance and maps aesthetic nine months of phased expert exercise program. designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam, and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes, and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support, and until next time, this is Mind Pump.