Avoid Holiday Weight Gain with a BAILOUT Strategy (Flex Framework) | Ep 404
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The holidays don't have to wreck your gains!
Most fitness plans collapse the moment your routine gets disrupted (travel, family meals, late nights, packed gyms, etc.). You skip workouts because you can't do the "full session." You avoid holiday meals because there are no "clean options." One bad day becomes three weeks off track, and by January you're starting over again.
We break down a simple, resilient system called The Flex Framework that helps you keep muscle, strength, and momentum when your routine gets slammed by travel, late nights, and meals you didn’t cook.
Instead of betting on perfect conditions, we map 3 tiers for every pillar (training, nutrition, etc.):
Optimal for routine days
Minimum for busy days
Bailout for disasters
This multi-gear approach limits decision fatigue, preserves your habits, and keeps you out of the all-or-nothing trap.
Learn practical strategies for Thanksgiving, travel days, and holiday dinners.
By January, you'll pick up right where you left off instead of starting over.
Timestamps
0:00 - Why your plan fails during the holidays
2:45 - The Flex Framework
6:55 - The all-or-nothing trap
10:15 - How to build your anti-fragile fitness system
12:05 - The 3 levels: optimal, minimum, and bailout protocols
15:15 - Strength training and muscle building
20:30 - Recovery and sleep
22:35 - Nutrition and protein
28:45 - Reframe from "I can't" to "what level can I operate at?"
31:45 - Setting up your framework and finishing the year strong
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Philip Pape: 0:00
It's that time of year. Thanksgiving is this year in the US, and that means travel, family meals you didn't cook, late nights, early mornings with relative stain at your house. If you have a rigid plan, it's probably gonna break. You might skip a workout, you might avoid certain meals or foods, a bad day might become a bad weekend, a bad weekend becomes three weeks off, and then by January you're starting over yet again. The problem isn't you, it's that your system might only have one gear, and it's built for perfect conditions. Today I'm showing you how to upgrade your system so you can maintain strength and muscle through any holiday, even if everyone else is backsliding. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and today we're gonna talk about something that's probably on your mind as Thanksgiving approaches in just a few days here in the US. And honestly, this applies to anyone going through any holiday or time like this. How do you keep your progress going when your routine gets completely disrupted? This is a general principle of any time of year, but it really comes up during the holidays because most of us approach this time of year with one of two strategies. Either you try to maintain your exact routine and then inevitably fail when life doesn't cooperate, or you completely give up and you plan to start fresh in January. Both approaches have the same result, right? You lose your training progress, maybe you gain some fat that you didn't want, maybe you feel like you're back at square one or falling back, regressing when the new year rolls around. Now you're kind of reset more than you'd like to be. So what I'm sharing today is different. Something I came up with over the last few weeks. We talked about it in physique university recently, and it's called the flex framework. Very simple, based on a simple principle that a system with multiple gears, right, just to put the engineering hat on, can survive tolerance or variability better than a system that has only one setting, right? So we're talking about having flexibility in your system, but we're gonna be very uh concrete about it today and give you very specific ways to do this. So you're gonna learn how to create three versions of what you're doing, of your plan: an optimal version, a minimum version, and what I'm calling a bailout version, so that you can adapt to whatever the holidays throw at you without losing your progress. And of course, this applies beyond the holidays, as I mentioned. Anytime life gets chaotic, that could be work travel, that could be family emergencies, you know, just those weeks where everything seems to be going wrong. We know what those are, right? But real quick, I just want to share a couple quotes from our clients in Physique University who always like to share their wins. And it's super inspiring to those listening to the podcast. You said you want to hear directly from people who are doing this. So the first one says, My DEXA scan. Looks like heavy barbell training is paying off. Check out the spine increase. That's awesome, right? Because we've been talking about osteoporosis recently. So love to hear that. Another one, and this is I would file this under small but monumentous wins. I completed week one of the strength template I selected. That's a massive win to get through your first week of trained strength training sessions, excuse me, is phenomenal. And then one more says, I was traveling for work this past week, but I was able to get a couple workouts in, lots of meetings and late nights. Lifting seemed to have given me given me a bit of energy, embracing the new lifestyle. And the last one I'm going to share today is actually from one of many of the users who downloaded Fitness Lab, which is now out for Black Friday. It's 20% off for Black Friday. Just came out, our new AI coaching app. And this user says, I have it and I'm loving it so far, especially the AI feature. It feels like you are coaching me. Apple Health will be excellent once integrated, which this is Philip talking here, will be out within days, if not already, when you hear this podcast. But honestly, I like what it's making me do by not having it. I want to let you know this is exactly what I've been looking for. Good stuff. So the reason I share all these is because I'm super proud of what all of you are achieving every day, whether it's through the podcast, through Physique University, or now through the Fitness Lab app. You could check out all those resources in the podcast show notes. But now let's get into the topic. And the first thing I want to talk about is why having a plan that's a little bit too rigid or even very rigid, of course, why it collapses under pressure. And this is a lot more of a head thing, a psychology thing than anything else. And if we put it in context of this week, at least here in the US, where you've got Thanksgiving in just three days, if you're listening to this when it comes out on Monday, and then it's only a few weeks until Christmas and New Year's, and you're already stressed out about how you're gonna handle all of that stuff, family dinners, travel, the gyms are probably gonna be packed, you might have hosting duties, you're wondering about things like, you know, how do I deal with alcohol and stuff like that? And saying, hey, should I just accept that things are gonna be perfect and therefore I'm gonna backslide and then plan to get serious again in January? Well, I'm here to tell you that that those aren't the only options. Okay. No, things are not gonna be perfect. They never will. So that we just throw off the table. That's a fact. But the fact that you'll black backslide isn't a given. But I get it because the traditional approach to fitness in this industry can come across as very rigid. It's like, here are the seven pillars you have to follow. You've got to do your training for three, four, five days a week. You've got to have, you know, the these calories and macros. You've got to hit your energy balance and your sleep is being locked in. Got to keep your stress low, by the way. Make sure you get your steps in. All of that, all of that is fine, but it it really only works when the conditions are perfect. In other words, hitting a 10 out of 10 on all of those things. You know, when you're at home, when you're prepping your own food, when you've got your normal gym every day, when you control your environment, etc. But the holidays are maximum variability with minimum control, right? The travel schedules change. Family members have their own plans for meal times and what to serve at the meals. And, you know, you don't want to offend your relatives because they're gonna make all this great food that that's part of a tradition. The gym, maybe you're visiting and you try to go to a gym and now it's different and it doesn't have the equipment you need. And you normally try to get to bed at 9 or 10 p.m. Now it becomes midnight because everyone's still talking in the kitchen, right? So this is life, guys. And so your rigid plan is of course not gonna have an answer for this. So it breaks, and then when it breaks, you feel like you failed, and then you quit, and that's the all or nothing trap, right? We it's it's worth it's worth revisiting that because we all fall into that, even if it's it's small in a small scope. You know, I do as well. I fall into sometimes this thought of like, okay, here's my routine. I'm gonna lock it in, and then something happens, I'm like, ah, I get frustrated because I'm not, I can't quite hit that routine like I wanted. And by the way, I'm gonna have rotator cuff surgery coming up. So I could easily fall into that trap of, oh no, this guy's falling. I'm not gonna be able to train, I'm not gonna be able to this, not gonna be able to that. And I have to just and say, okay, that's the reality. What do I do? Like a good stoic, what do I do? And it's why January, when we talk about the holidays, why January is the busiest month at every gym. Because everyone's starting over, New Year's resolutions, after completely abandoning abandoning their routine for six weeks, if they even had one. And so the real problem here of why things break is because they're one-dimensional. They have one gear, they work under certain conditions, not necessarily perfect conditions, but let's say close to them, right? Nor quote unquote normal conditions. And so, what you need is a system with multiple gears that can adapt to imperfect and far imperfect conditions while keeping you move forward. Now, this does this might be like common sense, like, oh, okay, Philip's talking about flexibility, great. But I want to be very, I want to give you gears here. I want to give you three gears that are very specific steps that you can step down to if needed and think ahead for yourself what that looks like. Okay, and this is something that I'm introducing called the Flex Framework. Now, we talked about this in a workshop, or I should say, our monthly coaching call in Physique University. We just talked about it. And on that call, we went through, I'll say a lot more detail than I'm gonna cover today, although you're gonna get a good amount of it today. And we did a lot of QA and there's a guide and all this other stuff. And the community is working with it to get accountability along the way as we head into Thanksgiving. So if you want to get in for all of that, as well as the community support and the ability to say, hey, what do you guys think of my flex framework? Is it gonna work? How do I execute it? Join physiqueuniversity, physique.wits and weights.com. You could also go to wits and weights.com slash physique. Sorry to confuse you. The link is in the show notes. So go to witsandwaits.com slash physique. There's a special code in the show notes to get a free nutrition plan when you join using that code. And then you can get a head start on this flex framework. But it is built on a principle from I'll say reliability engineering. And that's the principle of redundancy. Right? When we design a system like the ones that keep airplanes in the sky or nuclear power plants running safely, they're super complex, just like life is complex, just like your body is complex, and they don't rely on a single component or gear. They're multiple levels of redundancy. So if things fail and multiple things fail, and sometimes multiple things fail at the same time, which seems unlikely, but it can happen in certain cases. Can things keep functioning or gracefully step down or gracefully shut down or whatever? And so your fitness system, your life system for your nutrition and training need the same approach. And I like to think of this in threes, three versions of all the important elements: an optimal version, a minimum version, and a bailout. So let me define each of these. Optimal is what you do when conditions are perfect for you. Nothing's ever perfect, but basically your normal week to week to week, the kind of boring life, hopefully, you have. Well, boring in the way that I'm defining it here, where it's predictable, somewhat predictable. That's where you have full access to your routine, plenty of time, energy, and resources available that you need, you know, within your given constraints. That's like your best case scenario, and which you're probably doing before you get to the holidays for the most part, if you haven't been traveling or something. That's optimal. Okay, not not optimal is not perfect for anybody. Optimal is good enough, close to perfect for you. Then minimum is your non-negotiable floor. Now, I talk about minimums in the past of like, okay, this is the bottom, but stay tuned because it's not going to be the bottom bottom. This is what you cannot skip without starting to lose progress in one of those areas, right? So this is the consistency piece. This is that, you know, the idea that maintaining what you've built actually does take far less effort than building it in the first place. We know this for volume when it comes to training. About an eighth to a quarter volume is necessary to maintain what you have. So your minimum maintains you've built and typically takes a lot less of your optimal effort, let's say 20 to 30%. So this is when we say no zero days, or being consistent, or making sure you have micro wins that you can do every day that are the minimum, but they'll still compound and give you progress as opposed to skipping it altogether. And then bailout, this is the new thing I'm in, I'm talking about today. This is your emergency protocol, is your lifeboat. What you do when everything goes wrong, right? You're sick when your schedule implodes, when you have zero control over your environment. You know, in my case, like I have surgery coming up. There's bailout protocols I'm going to be putting in place for things. Although when you can plan far enough ahead, you still could have a minimum, if that makes sense. But your bailout's what prevents total collapse more in your head than anything else. Let's be honest, more in your head than anything else. Meaning it's better than nothing, but it's not even your minimum, and it takes even less effort. So I'm adding an extra gear here to give yourself permission from a psychological standpoint to still do something that gets you a win that keeps you going so that the next time you can strive for the minimum or the optimal. Does that make sense? It's kind of like a bridge win. And the power of this framework is the mindset shift, the psychology. Instead of thinking, I can't do my full workout, so I won't do anything. It's, well, I can't do my full workout. What's my minimum? Okay, I can do three out of my five exercises. Well, can I not even do that? What is my bailout? My bailout might be one exercise. It might be not even going to the gym, but doing something at home, like running up the stair and down the stairs for 10 minutes. Something that psychologically gives you that, dare I say it, checkbox on the streak that you you've now bridged to the next day or the next point where you do your normal habit. So in this case, you're not lowering your standards. You're actually building one more gear of standard that gives you an anti-fragile system that survives the most obliterated imperfect conditions that come across. That makes sense. All right. So having that in place, now what do we do? All right, let's apply the flex flamework framework to the big areas that we care about here, like nutrition and training. So with training, let's say use the holidays as the example, but this can work for any routine work that gets disrupted. Optimal, even during the holidays, it's just your normal workout. You have maybe still have access to your gym, maybe you're still at home, you know, and you're you're just you've got some different schedules and stuff going on, and you can still work in your normal full training sessions. You might have to shift the days around, but you're still getting all the volume and the frequency and the intensity in, right? Maybe it's at home, maybe you're visiting somewhere with a good gym and you can do it as well and still hit some optimal days. Remember, optimal doesn't mean every day has to be optimal. It's just on a given day, are you doing the optimal thing? And you don't have to be doing everything optimal. Remember, you're doing, you have different pillars that you're hitting, training, nutrition, steps, whatever. Each one of those can be at their a different level. All right. So just give yourself, it's like flexibility within flexibility. So just because it's the holidays doesn't mean you can't keep on with your optimal routine, right? And then minimum training is gonna focus on something like let me just do the main lifts, the big lifts, the compound movements. I've been doing this more lately because of all this medical stuff I've been dealing with, having appointments and extra meetings and having to drive places. It's cut into my time, but I've said, you know, I'm still gonna train, but instead of doing all five movements, I'm gonna do three or even two. And I'm gonna go really, really hard on them. I did that this morning. I did weighted pull-ups, neutral grip, I did T-bar rows, and I did a superset of lengthened partial lat raises and bicep curls on a cable machine. Now, though that last one, obviously it's not main lifts, but it does support my goals to support my shoulder health and also keep my biceps a little pumped. Okay. I just it's something I enjoy. So I decided what that was for me, my main lift. But the, but the but the main lifts today, which didn't include massive lifts like the squat or deadlift today, particularly for me, I still focused on the main ones. And there were a couple other small things that I didn't do, right? I think I don't know if it was like high rep shrugs or something that I cut out. All right, so you're cutting out the accessories, maybe you abbreviate the warm-up necessary as needed, but to still do it safely, and then hit your main lifts and get out, right? So main lifts could be all the variants of the main movement pattern, squat bench, deadlift, rowing, whatever your core movements are depending on your program. And you could even cut a set. You could even get just the main lifts, and instead of doing, say, three sets, you do two, and maybe do a top set back off set, right? Because at the very minimum, you're maintaining what you have, and surprisingly, you might find that you needed the extra little rest, and it might give you a little boost in performance. You never know. So I don't see this as a bad strategy at all. This is pretty good. That's a minimum. Now, bailout. Let's talk about bailout. So to me, bailout is movement based, not performance-based. Might sound sacrilegious, but that's why it's a bailout. This is not about hitting new numbers on your list. This is not even about progressive overload. If your bailout strategy is, damn, I can't even get to the gym. I can't even get to any of this stuff right now. I don't have a home gym. I just need to move my body and get some sort of stimulus on my muscles. This is beyond beyond walking. And this could be body weight stuff. I mentioned running up and down the stairs, you know, for your legs. This could be a brisk walk with weight on your back, like a rucksack or weight vests or something like this. It could be just push-ups, you know what I mean? All you're doing is just bridging the gap with some bare minimum. And psychologically, more than anything, it gives you that boost that, like, I did it. And that means next time I'm gonna keep making progress when I go back to my minimum or my optimal. All right. That's all we're talking about. Now, notice what's happening psychologically. You have options. On a perfect day, you hit optimal, on a chaotic day, you fall back to minimum. Usually it ends there. But now on a disaster day, you can at least do your bailout. You're not stuck in the all or nothing trap at any of those levels. And that's how you maintain your routine through the holidays at some level. You may not try to make gains or PRs, but at least maintain what you've built, feel good about yourself, keep going, keep yourself in the mode of I'm doing this thing on a regular basis. And throughout all of this, recovery is gonna be super important, right? It a lot of it does come down to stimulus versus recovery. And if you're stressed because of the holidays, recovery is gonna be impeded as well. Now, for me, you guys know I love to talk about sleep a lot because it's something I am personally working on. And it's probably the biggest pillar of recovery. And when you're traveling, when you're staying in different beds, when you're dealing with family stress, irregular schedules, I would say quality sleep becomes even more important and often harder to get. And so, shout out to the sponsor of this episode, Cozy Earth. They have incredible bedding that I own personally, that I use. It is my favorite bedding of all. I'm glad I found them because it regulates temperature. You sleep cooler, you sleep more comfortably even when you're not in your own bed. If you could take your sheets with you. That's my tip for you right now. Okay. If you could take your sheets with you, you know how everybody has like their favorite pillow, it's kind of like that. If you could have your own sheets with you, which then you know they're clean as well, and you're not dealing with any of that stuff, and you could take them with you. I've been using the Cozy Earth sheets now for quite a few months, and the difference in sleep quality is definitely noticeable, both qualitatively and in my numbers, in my HRV scores, uh, my sleep quality scores, it just feels like something I want to, you know, drift away in. It just feels so good. I mean, sometimes I just want to get in the sheets just to like read a book. And so when you're dealing with holiday stress schedule changes, having something like that to anchor you when it comes to an important pillar like sleep, and that could be bedding. It could also be their pajamas and other things, other products that they have made with the bamboo-derived material that regulates the temperature. It's just one less thing that works against you and to worry about. So go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. Use my code Wits and Waits for 20% off. They have an incredible warranty and money-back guarantee. So you could try it. If you don't like it, return it. If you want to get better sleep during the holidays and beyond, this would be, in fact, this is a great birth Christmas gift, guys. Cozy earth. Sheets. If you're struggling to figure out a really nice, luxurious Christmas gift for your significant other, for a friend, for somebody who's in this space who cares about sleep, go to wits of weights.com slash cozy earth, 20% off. And trust me, the sleep is going to vastly improve. And that means better recovery, better training, more energy to enjoy the holidays and help your metabolism and all this other stuff. Wits of weights.com slash cozy earth. Check them out. All right, so that's training. Now let's talk about nutrition, because this is where most people really derail during the holidays. And I don't even like the word derail because I've said before I don't believe there is a rail if you have a flexible framework. Okay. But we're gonna assume that the rail is your general direction that you're trying to go. Maybe it's fat loss, maybe it's muscle building, maybe it's just maintenance. And for many of you who know me, I definitely recommend against fat loss during the holidays, unless you're using it as a test. You're using it to kind of push your comfort zone further during the hardest time of year so that you can handle any time of year. That's all that's up to you. But whatever it is, the situation changes quite a bit this time of year because you often go to family dinners or you visit family and you didn't cook the food, or there's a potluck, right? Or you bring one thing and they cook everything else. Or you're just cooking other things because it's the holidays, right? The pecan pie. I know people who have like 10 pies, okay? This is like an American tradition to have all these pies: apple pie, pumpkin pie, blueberry pie, cherry pie, you name it. And you're probably at restaurants a little more, you're getting out, you're going on parties, you're visiting friends, you might be traveling. Like the usual meal prep routine sometimes goes completely out the window. So optimal, minimum bailout. Let's look at them. Optimal nutrition during the holidays is just your normal plan. You're hitting your macros and calories, you're hitting your hunger signals, you're, you know, using the same meal timing, good food quality for what you like to eat, you're cooking most of your meals or at least controlling what goes on your plate in the same way that you always have been. It's just your routine. This is very realistic on the days when you're at home, when you're cooking for yourself or your immediate family, when you have control over things, right? That's optimum. And by the way, if you're not even at optimum yet, don't beat yourself up. So the one of the missions of this podcast is to help you find that. And that doesn't mean perfect. It just means at a good place to make progress and to be sustainable. All right. Minimum, I will say minimum nutrition is about simplifying the tracking and the choice, the decision framework so you don't have as much cognitive stress. So I would the way I would simplify this is protein. Like your only non-negotiable is protein. Hit your protein target. And it doesn't even have to be in calculating the grams per se. If you have any experience at all tracking protein, you know that having like five servings throughout the day, you know, or having protein, a decent amount of protein at every meal or snack is going to get you where you need to be. And again, this assumes you've done this before. If you've never done it before, I still recommend trying to track the grams just to see where you stand. Have a rough awareness of calories so you're not massively overshooting, right? But but what that means is you should kind of feel good about yourself, like you're roughly in maintenance world, right? You're not getting stuffed all the time. Obviously, you're probably not on the other side of always feeling hungry during the holidays. Although, although I could be wrong, some of you were you're really stressed and you're shopping and you're doing all the things and you forget to eat. That's its own challenge. I get it. You know, the food timing here maybe doesn't matter as much because things are a little bit less predictable. Your carbs and fats can always flex depending on the situation. So the rule's simple: just prioritize protein all the time at every time you eat, and don't worry about the rest. And that's a good minimum. You may decide something else is your minimum. Like, I'm always gonna have fruits and vegetables, you know, fiber. It could be something else, but I would go with protein for most people. So at Thanksgiving dinner, that's easy. Turkey baby. All right. Like I actually find Thanksgiving kind of interesting because I feel like a lot of Thanksgiving dinners are actually pretty decent food options compared to maybe other parties and holidays, if you know what I mean. Like it tends to be a lot of home-cooked food for a lot of families. Now, that's if you celebrate it, that's if you cook it yourself. You know, some people go out to Chinese food for Thanksgiving, whatever, or don't celebrate it, let's say, or different country. But, you know, you want to enjoy the meal. You want to enjoy the experience and the family time. You don't want to stress whether mashed potatoes have the butter, the green beans are cooked in oil, all those little details, really. Just get enough protein, which usually comes from Turkey. And I love dark meat personally, but you might like the breast meat. And then all the other things, the sides, you know, have a little bit of everything that you enjoy. There's nothing wrong with that. If you're at a restaurant, always order protein forward meals, right? Steak, vegetables, chicken and rice, fish and potatoes, simple stuff like that. So that would be the minimum. The bailout is even simpler. It's like one anchor meal a day to keep your brain connected to the fact that there's this idea of nutritious, performance-enhancing, supportive foods that you'd like to eat. And you're gonna have that one experience every day that's yours and everything else is chaos, and you accept it. Maybe you're traveling all day, maybe you're dealing with a family crisis, maybe you're completely overwhelmed. Don't skip eating. Just make sure you make sure you get at least one great hit of protein in a fairly well-balanced meal. And if you can't even do that, your minute your bailout might be a protein shake. Okay. Some jerky in a protein bar. The other day I was in a hurry and I had forgotten to bring my prepped food. I stopped at a gas station and they had the barbells brand protein bar. I'm like, you know what? This is a good bailout compared to the alternatives. I'm gonna try it out. And by the way, it's pretty delicious, like cookies and cream. Now, I don't eat that stuff all the time, but it's pretty cool. And I couldn't pass up the fact that it said barbells, right? And I'm aware of that brand. I just was surprised they had it in the gas station. And then you get back to your minimum tomorrow or your optimal, whatever makes sense. So the psychological shift here is the same as with training. You have multiple gears. On days you have control, or I should say on days you have some control, but not all, you hit the minimum. And days where you have lots of control, you push toward optimal. And then on those disaster catastrophe days, you got your bailout and you don't feel guilty about it because at least you're not a zero. Don't be a zero, be a hero. All right. And here's the thing about protein specifically: we know how important it is. It's also very satiating and it helps you not overeat. So even on the bailout days, that strategy is really important. And again, if it's not protein, maybe it's fiber. Both things can help with the hunger signals. I went out to dinner with a friend of mine the other night, and we went to this place where they used to have this big barbecue plate, and I was so disappointed they didn't have anymore. They had a new owner. The barbecue plate was like six different types of meat and all these great sides, but they still have the same chefs, the same cooks, and the cooks do everything from scratch, even like blue cheese dressing, things like that. Which, when when something is made with love like that, with pretty fresh ingredients, you notice a difference, you enjoy it, and all that. Anyway, we we each ordered a salad along with some wings and some other things, and these were the biggest salads I've ever freaking seen. They were massive. They were probably the equivalent of like six garden salads. Now it was mostly just raw vegetables. It was like iceberg and romaine lettuce, some carrots, some cucumbers, maybe peppers, maybe tomatoes, right? Just just like that. And then, of course, dressing on the side. I'll tell you what though, halfway through that salad, I really didn't want to eat much more of anything else. And I know I hardly had any calories. And the ironic thing was at the end of the day, I said, you know what, I had planned to eat like almost 2,000 calories because of the barbecue dish. And I probably ate like 900 or 1,000 because of the salad. So it's just, it's just an interesting idea of how you can almost like trick your body, let's say. You're tricking it with eating good food. I get it, but fiber can be helpful, protein can be helpful. Okay, enough rambling. Let's talk about the it's just setting this up very simply. It's more about reframing than anything. So the old way that you would think is I can't do my full workout, so I'm not gonna do it. And maybe you'd say in your head, maybe I'll do it tomorrow. Maybe I'll shift out, maybe I could skip this one. You get all these maybes in your head, and then of course you end up going for the worst choice because you don't have a plan. The new way, the new way to think about it is I can't do the optimal. That was my plan. What is my minimum? And then let your brain figure it out. Nope, can't do that either. Can I at least do my bailout? And that way you have a second gear and a third gear. Or I should say, uh, if you go like in a car, you're going down to second gear and first gear. Okay. In this case, first gear is the bailout, you get it. Okay. Now you might be thinking, oh, but if I just do a bailout, like what's the point? Am I still aren't I still losing progress? Two things. First, the the minimum is designed to maintain progress, and the bailout is designed to be better than zero. And the idea is not to backslide. So psychologically, it keeps pushing you forward and keeping the routine in place. The goal is not to come off your habit. That's that's the goal. So, how do you set this up? It's very simple. You're gonna write down your optimal for the different buckets. And I just talked about training and nutrition. We talked about a few other buckets on the workshop in physique university, and you could add your own buckets as you need, right? Sleep, stress, recovery, whatever. And then identify your minimum. What's the least you can do without losing progress? So for training, we already talked, we already talked about that stuff. And then define your bailout, which I would say, what can you do in less than 10 minutes when everything else is just chaos? What can you do in less than 10 minutes? Have that in your backup plan. Write it down, put it in a notes app, send yourself an email, put it on post-note, whatever makes sense. Write them down. Please, write them down. Don't just let this fly by you in your ears as you're multitasking right now, listening to this podcast. Or, Jonathan, you know who I'm talking to. You just got your home gym, buddy. You reported how the home gym now gives you extra time and you control the environment. Now you can listen to a podcast while you live. Love it. Anyway, shout out to you, Jonathan. When chaos hits, you have to know your options. So this is still having a plan. This is still a plan. That's the cool thing about it. It's kind of like you're tricking yourself into doing something that's a plan anyway, that doesn't even feel like a plan because it's a bailout. Right. So, like for nutrition, what does that look like in Thanksgiving? Load up on your turkey, take reasonable portions of sides. You're not tracking macros, you're just prioritizing protein. You get full. That's the minimum. There you go. It works. All right. So if you're thinking, okay, this makes sense. I really want help implementing it and coming up for. Myself, what all this looks like for all the different pieces. That's what we did inside physique university, and we continue to do with our students. We taught the Flex framework in our last coaching call, and we're actually going to connect that to a challenge at the end of the year. It's going to start December 10th and go right to the end of the year. It's a three-week strong finish challenge. Now you're probably listening to this episode a little before around Thanksgiving, which is a couple weeks before the challenge starts. Totally up to you if you want to come on in and get caught up on the flex framework ahead of time, because we did give everyone a six-week roadmap. And the second half of that roadmap is the challenge. So the challenge is going to run through the hardest three weeks of the year. And that's designed to help you practice pivoting and maintaining that floor, that bailout floor through this maximum chaos. And we did create some training programs for travel that you can use, some training templates, I should say, body weight, as well as if you have access to some basic hotel equipment. We will be posting daily check-ins to keep you accountable. And we have a ton of resources. A lot of them Coach Carol put together. We have decision trees for your training. Carol put together what to do at a gas station, at an airport, a hotel, a visual meal guide. What else? There's a lot of stuff in there. So when it's that time of year, you could literally go to the reference during the challenge and say, what do I do for this? So you can join now. I would encourage it and get caught up on the flex framework and start doing our onboarding and then meeting the community, meeting me and Coach Carroll, and really starting to build momentum now before it gets too crazy. Or, you know, I get it, not everybody wants to do that. You want to just do the challenge? The challenge, we're going to talk about it some more as we get closer. But it starts December 10th. We're going to kick off on December 8th. So that's a Monday. Monday, December 8th, we're going to kick off. Anybody who joins Physique University or joins through the challenge link, which is live.wits and weights.com. Live.wits and weights.com. You can join anytime now until then. You will immediately get access to physique university, become a member, and be part of the challenge and get all those resources. And for those of you who join at live.witsandwaits.com, I always throw in a free custom nutrition plan when you join as well, which accelerates the process even further for you. So again, the challenge kickoff is December 8th. It starts a couple days after that. If you want to finish the year strong, instead of starting over in January and use and learn this flex framework, go to live.wits and weights.com right now. Link is also in the show notes. So whether you join us or not, take today's episode and start setting up your framework right now. Define your optimal, your minimum, and your bailout at a minimum for nutrition and training. But also think of the other buckets that you care about. Write them down, test them if you have to before you need them. And then when Thanksgiving hits in a couple days, you're ready for that. When Christmas chaos comes in a few weeks, you're ready for that. If you join physique university, you'll be in a challenge. You'll get super accountability and support there. And then by January, while everyone else is starting over, you're going to be at least where you left off, if not better. And if you didn't make gains, that is fine. It's still far beyond where most people are because you didn't lose ground either. Maintained your strength, your muscle, your momentum. That's how you build lasting progress. That's how you make this sustainable over the long term, over the 12-month period. Because if the holidays are generally the worst time for you and you're maintaining now, that's a huge win, isn't it? Because now the rest of the year, you're going to make a ton of gains and then keep them year after year after year. All right, that's it for today. Go set up your flex framework, define those three levels. Have your strongest holiday season yet. Enjoy your holidays if you're celebrating Thanksgiving. I know we will. We're going to be enjoying all of the delicious food and the family and being grateful. I am grateful to you. I'm grateful for this platform to be able to share and have these conversations. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the best systems do have multiple years. I'm Philip Pape, and this is Wits and Weights. Talk to you next time.
