25 New Year's Ideas to Lose Fat, Gain Muscle, and Boost Your Metabolism (Lateral Thinking) | Ep 264
Join our FREE Wits & Weights Facebook group to get a downloadable PDF guide of the 25 creative strategies in this episode... and connect with like-minded people who use evidence-based principles to optimize their fitness!
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Are your New Year's resolutions already feeling stale? If you're tired of the same old fitness advice that ignores your lifestyle and preferences, it's time for a different approach.
Learn how Lateral Thinking, a powerful engineering concept, can give you infinite practical ways to lose fat, build muscle, and boost your metabolism without relying on willpower or motivation.
I'm giving you 25 creative strategies that adapt to your life, not the other way around. Whether you struggle with meal prep, workout consistency, or hitting your protein goals, these creative solutions will transform how you approach fitness in 2025.
Main Takeaways:
How to make healthy choices the path of least resistance using environmental design
Creative ways to gamify your nutrition and training for better adherence
Practical systems that work with your lifestyle, not against it
Why asking "wild questions" leads to better solutions than forcing conventional approaches
📝 Get the free PDF with these 25 ideas by joining our Facebook Group!
Creative Strategies for Fat Loss, Muscle Gain, and Metabolism Boosting in the New Year
New Year’s resolutions often fail because they focus on rigid, cookie-cutter approaches. But what if you could challenge assumptions and craft solutions tailored to your life? Welcome to a smarter, more sustainable way to approach your health and fitness goals using lateral thinking. This method, borrowed from engineering, challenges conventional wisdom and inspires out-of-the-box ideas to tackle the obstacles holding you back.
Below, we’ll explore 25 game-changing strategies to lose fat, build muscle, and enhance your metabolism. These ideas aren’t about doing more—they’re about doing things differently.
Why Conventional Thinking Fails
Most fitness advice takes a linear approach: eat less, exercise more, and stick to the plan. While these are technically correct, they ignore critical factors like your unique schedule, preferences, and rhythms. Lateral thinking turns these issues on their head by asking better questions:
How can I make nutritious food the easiest choice?
Can my workouts feel more like play than a chore?
What if late-night snacking could support my goals?
This shift in perspective makes resolutions stick by addressing your challenges creatively and personally.
So…What are the 25 Creative Ideas?
Just join the Wits & Weights Facebook group to get them totally free or listen/watch the episode.
📝 Get the free PDF with these 25 ideas by joining our Facebook Group!
Start Small and Stay Consistent
You don’t need to overhaul your entire life on January 1st. Instead, pick one or two ideas that resonate and test them out. Adjust, refine, and expand as needed.
Remember, the best solutions come not from working harder but thinking smarter. When you align your health goals with strategies that fit your life, success becomes inevitable.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
Let's be honest, most New Year's resolutions fail because people try the same approaches that didn't work last year. They restrict foods they love, force themselves through boring workouts and wonder why nothing sticks past January. But what if we took an engineer's approach and asked wild questions instead? What if meal prep could be fun? What if snacks could become a secret weapon? Today, I'm using lateral thinking, a powerful problem-solving tool from engineering, to give you 25 practical ways to lose fat, build muscle and boost your metabolism. These aren't just theory. They are battle-tested strategies that adapt to your life, not the other way around round.
Philip Pape: 0:50
Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, philip Pate. Engineers solve complex problems by looking at them from unexpected angles. Whether designing a bridge or optimizing a production line, we often find the best solutions by asking strange questions. Today, we're applying this concept of lateral thinking to your fitness, your training, your nutrition, to give you creative strategies that actually work. And before we get into it, if you want to connect with others who use these approaches to fitness, join our Wits and Weights Facebook group. It's totally free. Just search for Wits and Weights on Facebook or click the link in the show notes. It is a vibrant community of like-minded people who share ideas and support each other, and it is entirely positive and encouraging. So I encourage you to join our Wits and Weights Facebook group.
Philip Pape: 1:45
All right, let's start by breaking down what lateral thinking is and how you can use it to solve your challenges when it comes to your health and fitness journey. Most people approach fitness with vertical thinking, straight line logic that says to lose weight, eat less or to get stronger, lift heavier. And while these are I'll call technically true, they are not only out of context, but they often lead to frustration simply because they're too simplistic. Lateral thinking is about challenging your assumptions and asking unexpected questions. So here's how that might work. Instead of asking how could I eat less, you might ask how could I make nutritious food the default choice in my kitchen? What if meal prep was a social activity? How could I make vegetables the most convenient snack for me? Or, instead of just thinking that I need to work out more, try how could my commute include movement? What if my training felt like playing a game? And could my kids' activities become part of my workout? These are just interesting little questions, many of which you can come up with a thousand times over that might apply to your situation.
Philip Pape: 2:57
The key is to break free from conventional solutions. So, when you hit a roadblock, ask yourself what assumptions am I making? What if the opposite were true? How would someone from a completely different field solve this? And what aspects haven't I considered?
Philip Pape: 3:14
For example, one of my clients struggled with late night snacking recently or often. It's a very common thing, right? And instead of just saying all right, stop eating after 8 pm, because a lot of people go to the first solution of I need to stop doing this thing. That's the vertical thinking solution. We instead use lateral thinking. We ask well, what if late night snacking could help your goals? Hmm, this then led to preparing a protein-rich snack I think in this case it was Greek yogurt with berries in advance, pre-logging it and actually incorporating it into the meal plan. Amazing, right Now. The problem wasn't the timing, it was the food choices, the portions, things like that.
Philip Pape: 3:53
Now the issue is standard advice and there is a lot of conventional wisdom. Isn't always that it's wrong Oftentimes it is, I will admit, but sometimes it's simply that it assumes everyone can succeed the same way. That is the big assumption in the fitness industry that everyone can follow an intermittent fasting. Everyone can do this one thing and it's going to work for them, and that's this classic square peg into a round hole situation where it's not personalized. And this becomes especially clear in January when the gyms fill up with people following the exact same plan, or they follow a plan that ignores their natural eating patterns, their schedule constraints, their food preferences, their energy and their rhythms, their circadian rhythms, their social lives. It just ignores all of that stuff, and it's no wonder that most resolutions fail by February.
Philip Pape: 4:41
So now I'm gonna give you the 25 ideas. Now, I know this is a lot. This can be overwhelming. I don't know how long this episode is going to take, but we will. Um, I I will include the entire list and the details in our Facebook group. They're not going to be in the timestamps because the show notes would get too long. They're going to be available, posted in the group, totally free. All you have to do is click the link in the show notes join our Facebook group and you'll get the printed out guide version of this. I think I'm going to make a PDF as well, just to make it super easy to get to Join our group and you'll get that, and then you can follow on in this podcast to hear them all.
Philip Pape: 5:18
So number one number one is always eat protein first within your meal, before you touch your carbs or fats. This might seem simple in terms of prioritizing protein and I talk a lot about making sure every meal includes protein but we're talking about a simple hack of just eating the protein first always. You might have heard in the past, like eat your vegetables first, they'll fill you up. I recommend eating your protein first. It will fill you up and meet your protein and this research shows it can reduce calorie intake and maintain your satiety. And then you can track how this affects your fullness levels and adjust your portions accordingly. But always start by eating the protein.
Philip Pape: 6:00
Of personal records for you in the gym, besides just the weight, in other words, many of us track what's our max squat or what's our max five rep, our five rep max squat. I want you to come up with something else that you can track that makes it gamified. For example, how many reps you got with perfect form, right, like so if you're doing a set of five and you know two of those weren't great, you only give yourself a three out of five, and next time you're going for a five. So come up with a way to gamify your workouts beyond just the weight lifted, and that'll give you more frequent wins and also ensure that you work on something like your technical mastery. Number three is using a scale to rate your fullness levels at each meal. You can use a scale of one to 10, and usually I tell people to track things like biofeedback, right, their hunger, their digestion, their stress and so on, but actually track your fullness level not your hunger, but your fullness level when you eat, and then you can correlate those scores with what you ate and when you ate it, and then, after about 30 days, you can see which combinations keep you the most satisfied. Isn't that cool? So that's a way to see what actually fills you up.
Philip Pape: 7:09
Number four this is about strategically setting up your kitchen environment, but I'm going to give you specifics. I want you to reorganize your kitchen based on nutritional hierarchy, the things that you think are most important. So protein sources and vegetables. Put them at eye level. Make your measuring tools easily accessible, including your food scale. Put calorie-dense foods in a place where it requires extra steps to reach them, including putting them in a box, within a bag, within a cupboard, for example, and this is applying behavioral science to your nutrition, in controlling your environment.
Philip Pape: 7:44
The fifth idea I came up with is to film one set of a compound exercise every week that you are working on. You could do them all, but just to keep it simple, film one set let's say it's your deadlift and then you, on your own, compare it to a good form video, like the ones from Barbell Logic, for example. I have some in my own coaching practice and our Physique University, but film yourself, compare it to the form video and make one specific technique correction each week until you get to mastering the movement. This is just a way to, on your own, get your own self-form check by comparing it to videos. All right.
Philip Pape: 8:25
Number six I want you to track unique protein sources you consume each week. What do I mean? Well, research shows that varied nutrient profiles support better body composition, and I know after talking with, for example, dr Sarah Ballantyne, having more variety of nutritious foods in your diet are only beneficial, and I'm talking about protein specifically. So what I want you to do is, within a given week, I want you to not only log your food but look at how many different unique protein sources you consume. Now here's a cool hack for this If you use Macrofactor, export Macrofactor go to the data export where it creates a spreadsheet, and in that spreadsheet is a tab that shows all your foods as a flat list, and from that you might be able to see how many different protein sources you consume. But just pick a specific week and just list them out and try to get at least 10, at least 10 different sources of protein. So if you're always eating chicken breast, that's perhaps not enough variety and you might want to incorporate some other sources of protein.
Philip Pape: 9:27
Idea number seven creative lateral thinking. Idea number seven is what I call a recovery points system. I want you to assign points to different recovery methods that are important to you. For example, sleep quality could be a recovery method, your rest periods between your sets could be a recovery method, your rest periods between your sets could be a recovery method, the days between your workouts and just come up with a score system that has points and quantifies your recovery based on what you want. So what you can do is you can list the things out that you think are important for your recovery, give them points and say I want to get at least this many points this week and that way you can see are you objectively actually getting the recovery you want, as opposed to just going by how you feel.
Philip Pape: 10:11
Now my next idea hopefully it's not too confusing, but here's what I thought, here's what I came up with Create a fundamental take, a fundamental movement or lift that you're trying to work on. Okay, and again I'm going back to squat, because everybody has trouble with their squat and I want you to create a difficulty ladder. So, for example, I want you to identify three things about your squat that you want to nail and that could be getting below parallel. That could be avoiding too much knee slide and it could be keeping your back tight, for example. Those are just three. Just pick three things, specific objective things and it could be keeping your back tight, for example. Those are just three. Just pick three things, specific objective things, and then every time you do a rep, just note did you get each of those things? Now you could simplify and just do two or just do one, and the idea here is to see how often you get all of the cues that you're trying to get throughout your set and only advance once you've demonstrated perfect technique in a session. So I hope that makes sense. Basically, you're identifying the specific cues you want to make sure you get. Make sure you get them for all reps and sets in a session. Then you can advance, and by advance I mean go up and load, for example. All right, so hopefully that wasn't too confusing. That's what I was thinking of on that.
Philip Pape: 11:24
Number nine is Creating your own meal matrix, your own mix and match. So I have a guide that I give to a lot of folks and if you want it, just shoot me a message and it gives you example meal plans. But it also gives you list of foods by macro and then you can mix and match. But I want you to do this for yourself, based on what you like and based on what you eat a lot. So a customized grid, let's say, of protein, carbs, fats. You could even have a separate category for fruits and vegetables, whatever categories you want. Heck, I mean, if you're struggling to get your fruits, make a fruit category and then create mix and match of those to give you your meal plan. I mean, it's as simple as that.
Philip Pape: 12:08
But a lot of people don't even go to that step. They jump right to trying to create their own plan for what to eat. And then they get confused and overwhelmed with so many foods out there. Limit it to the foods that you know and love, that you're going to shop for. Create your own matrix, all right.
Philip Pape: 12:18
The next one is pretty cool. This is number 10. You know how different foods of different calorie density will have much more or much fewer calories for the volume. So, for example, a tablespoon of peanut butter is going to have way more calories than a tablespoon of popcorn. So I want you to create your own reference of calorie equivalent portions. So take some different foods that you like to eat and, in macro factor, whatever food logger you're using, just log the same calories and see how much volume you get for those calories. In other words, see how much you're able to eat for those calories. And the idea is then you can compare what's more calorie dense versus what's more high volume nutrient dense and then you can decide. Okay, here are the swaps that I can make to focus more on usually protein and high fiber and high satiety things, but sometimes you might be surprised. For example, people are often surprised that potatoes are like the highest satiety food in terms of volume and calories. So create your own personal reference of calorie equivalent foods. All right, I'm going to continue here. I've got 15 more. This is a long list and again, I only want you to pick one or two that really stand out to you and you can review this and you can go to our Facebook group and I'll give you the entire guide for free.
Philip Pape: 13:38
Number 11, I want you to take your current training program and for maybe not every movement, but for some movements where there might be sometimes an equipment availability issue at the gym or maybe it gives you a lot of fatigue and sometimes you want to swap it out For whatever reason, I want you to identify a swap exercise, a swap, a different lift that can swap in for any given lift in your program where you might have to do that, so that you have a backup plan so that you don't make an excuse, so that you can still do the movement pattern but allow yourself to adapt to equipment availability and other factors that may cause you to need to switch it out Again, like low back fatigue or something like that. All right, just have something, so you have no excuses. Number 12, this is kind of fun. This is really about cooking methods. I want you to prep your protein sources. Number 12, this is kind of fun. This is really about cooking methods. I want you to prep your protein sources using different cooking methods than you're used to. So if you always cook the same way, I want you to find a couple other ways, whether it's grilled, baked, sous vide, boiled, stewed, whatever. Find a couple cooking methods and I want you to prepare your protein sources differently and then see how it affects your satisfaction, the experience. You might just find that there is a new way that you're going to want to eat certain proteins by doing this. Just experiment with different cooking methods, but just pick one thing that is a protein heavy recipe.
Philip Pape: 15:10
Number 13 is a shopping cart strategy for the grocery store. So check this one out. Try this one out. I want you to divide your shopping cart into three sections. Now you can do this by maybe using your own bags and just have the bags ready to go. Some grocery stores allow you to pre-check as you go along. Whatever allows you to do this, maybe visually One section's for protein, one's for produce, right fruits and vegetables and one's for everything else, and they're evenly divided. I want you to fill the protein first and the produce first before you do the third section. That's it. I don't even want you to shop anywhere other than the protein and the produce and fill those up all the way to those full third and third before we do the third section, just to see what that does for your mindset on prioritizing those types of foods.
Philip Pape: 15:59
Number 14 is about tracking. I want you to track a non-scale measure and I talk about this a lot on the show right Progress photos, performance metrics, energy, hunger, digestion, sleep but I want you to just double down right now on one thing that you think is low-hanging fruit, that you have not been tracking, that is affecting you. For a lot of people this might be, for example, sleep quality and say I am going to track several measures of sleep quality starting today. Now you could use it if you have like an aura ring or a sleep tracker, for example. Or you can just keep it very simple and say when I wake up in the morning, I'm just gonna give myself a one to 10 rating on my sleep quality and I am going to track that to understand my patterns. What am I doing that affects sleep? What can I change, how can I update my sleep routine, and so on. That's just one example. You can pick any non-scale measure you want, whatsoever that you're maybe neglecting, and I want you to double down on it right now and create a little portfolio of that one thing that you want to track and decide other measures that might relate to it. If that helps, all right.
Philip Pape: 17:03
The next idea I had is about meal prep efficiency, because a lot of you will prep on the weekends and I hear complaints sometimes that meal prep takes too long, which is insane. It shouldn't be the case. It should be that meal prep saves you time during the week, but some of you may be doing it inefficiently. So I would take your meal prep, which should be pretty systematic. You want to focus on batch cooking right? Batch cooking some proteins, vegetables, maybe starches, and time yourself and see if you can't get it under an hour. And if you're already under an hour, see if you can't get it to half an hour and really set yourself a stretch goal. Not I don't want you rushing through the kitchen and like potentially injuring yourself, but think of meal prep efficiency as its own process related goal in and of itself. Now, if you enjoy meal prep itself as a stress relieving activity and you want it to take time, ignore this one. But if you think you don't have enough time and you want this to be more efficient, then you've got to track the efficiency and see what you can change and look for ideas to make it more efficient. I mean, I meal prep in like 20, 30 minutes, and that doesn't always include cooking time, but while things are cooking I'm doing all this other stuff anyway, all right.
Philip Pape: 18:11
The next one number 16, is for folks who are still struggling to get enough whole foods in their diet. Maybe they're a little bit picky, maybe they just have too much processed food laying around, whatever. And this is to give yourself a points system and I'm not talking about Weight Watchers here. Okay, I'm not saying points for all the different foods, not talking about Weight Watchers here. Okay, I'm not saying points for all the different foods. Just give yourself your own simple point system related to the minimum amount of whole foods you want to eat every day. And this could be as simple as every time you pick an ingredient you know, like your main protein, your main side, whatever that you give yourself a point if it's a whole food, and every time you choose a processed food, that is either a negative point or just no points. So just keep it super simple and the idea is you have a minimum score every day. So I would take how, look at your food log and if you're like, hey, I don't need enough whole foods, I wanna have at least two more servings or meals or snacks or whatever that have whole foods, set yourself that point difference as your goal. Right, like I want to get up to this level and that's a different way to take your food log and get value out of it, from the awareness to see am I eating nutritionally what I intend to eat, Not just calories and macros? All right, the next one is super important.
Philip Pape: 19:29
I call it movement integration. This is where we make excuses that we can't get enough steps during the day because we don't have time, and I always say, well, can you get steps while doing something else? Can you systematically add in steps without disrupting your workflow for the day? For example, if you're on calls, if you're on Zoom, if you're on your phone, if you're scrolling social media, if you're watching Netflix, can those things be incorporated along, you know, stacked along with movement? So, movement integration. I want you for this idea just identify points throughout your daily routine, sit down, look at your schedule, say, okay, this point, this point, in this point, I could potentially add some movement in, and I'm not going to disrupt anything. I'm not going to disrupt anything. It's really great. Two for one to stop making excuses on getting more movement, all right.
Philip Pape: 20:13
The next one is a little more nuanced. It has to do with hunger and satiety. What I want, what I thought of here for this idea this is number 18, is to give yourself a score for your meal size. Now, this is this. This might sound a little tricky, but, and it could be just based on calories. But the problem with calories is it doesn't account for volume. So you could make it based on grams, if you're weighing everything, for example, and what I want you to do is say, okay, my lunch was 300 grams of food, my snack was 150, my dinner was 700. And what you can do is just give that a simple relative score of meal size, right, and then, based on that meal size, see how it correlates with your hunger levels. Now, this might sound a little bit complicated, but it's. It's an objective way to tie volume and timing with your hunger, especially if you're like, oh, I always get hungry at 3 pm. Well, just do this for a few days. Document your meal size as just you know. It could be a one, two or three. It doesn't even have to be super granular. Just say that this a little tiny snack is a one, this is a two, this is a three. Now again, be careful If you eat a Hershey's bar that's not that maybe isn't a one, that might be a two because of all the calories and then you correlate it with your, your hunger levels. So that that's what I had there. I don't know how helpful that idea is, but I had it on my list. All right, number 19,.
Philip Pape: 21:40
It's going to sound a little similar to the previous one I had about filming your lifts, but this is what I want you to do is take one accessory or isolation movement. So forget about the compounds. This is more for the smaller lifts, and I want you to focus on one technical aspect of that. You can film yourself, you can compare it to videos, whatever, and I want you to focus on progressing that thing. So, for example, a bent over barbell row I recently worked on that and said I need to focus on the angle that my back is bent over and to truly do a proper row where I'm pulling it up to mid back, as opposed to kind of a cheater row where my back angle is up high and I film myself and I watch and I'm like my back's still too high there. What do I? I watch and I'm like, oh, my back's still too high there. What do I need to do? Oh, I need to stand on a pad right A three, a two inch pad so that the bar doesn't touch the ground, so I can bend over enough right. Just take one of those accessory lifts that you're like, ah, I don't quite have this, and really dive all into it. Go watch videos, look at different videos from different people explaining it Long explainer videos and just really dive in and become an expert at that one lift, ask for questions, talk to your coach, et cetera, and really systematically develop that one thing as a skill and then move on to the next one after you've mastered it. Okay, number 20.
Philip Pape: 23:02
Now you guys are going to love this, because you listen to the Wits and Weights podcast and I am bombarding you with constant information and knowledge. Are you doing anything with this and do you even know how to do something with it because you don't even have the information. What do I mean is I want you to build a personal database of evidence-based nutrition information. I want you to have your own. It could be simple. It could be a notes app in your phone. It could be a notes app in your phone. It could be a Google Doc. It could be an email to yourself that you keep adding to Whatever makes sense for you as you're listening to this show and any others. I want you to add one new research-based fact every week. I mean you could add more. I don't want you to go crazy where you're like every day listening to 10 podcasts and adding 100 things. I want you to add like one per week and think about how it practically applies to you. If it doesn't seem like it's relevant or you don't really care whatever, don't add it to your list. Put something on there that you are going to take action on. I'm not even talking about the action taking right now. I'm just saying keep track of those things all in one place so that you can go back and re-review them, get it fresh in your mind, and sometimes that can be a catalyst for taking action. All right, we're getting to the end of the list. I have five left for you. I know this is long.
Philip Pape: 24:12
Number 21 is to create a structured recovery routine. So we talk about having a training routine. We talk about sometimes even having a sleep routine, although very few people do that. I'm talking about creating a recovery routine, and so what this would look like is just like you have your workout logs and you're you know you prep for your four workouts a week or whatever. I want you to have a time dedicated to your recovery, or at least a review of what you're doing for your recovery that prescribes for you specific actions you are taking. So this could be your recovery training routine could have reminders for when to get ready for bed, for wearing your blue blocking glasses, for cutting off your Wi-Fi, for doing your breathing exercises or your meditation. Heck, it could even have going for walks in there, and it's like having a workout routine that's not focused on working out but instead focused on recovery. Does that make sense? This may not be for everyone, but I thought it could be helpful for those of you struggling to recover to actually put it down on paper.
Philip Pape: 25:18
All right, number 22 is a rest period tracker. Now a lot of you struggle with recovery or not being able to get all the reps because you're not resting long enough between sets. You know who you are. For those of you who get your three, four, five minutes or more between a lot of your exercises, or as little as two to three on isolation work, you're probably good. You don't need this one. But for those of you who know for a fact you probably only take 30 seconds of rest or 60 seconds of rest, I want you to put together a way to track your rest periods and ensure that you're doing them. Now, for many of us, this is our workout app or notebook, and some of our workout apps have rest timers, but even then, there's not really a good way to track the rest periods. Some apps I've seen actually do have them built in, but most don't. So you've got to come up with a way to effectively check off the fact you have your rest period. So one way you can do this is take your workout for the coming week and put down on paper how long you are going to rest minimum between every single set. I know it takes work to do this, but just put it down on paper, put little check boxes and then when you go to the gym, have that along with your workout log and make sure that you are actually, you know, not lying to yourself that you're doing the rest and you're checking it off. And I'd recommend at least three minutes between big lifts and at least two minutes between smaller lifts, just to start there. And now you can track your rest periods as their own training variables systematically and make sure number one, you're doing them and number two, that isn't the reason you're not getting your reps or not recovering. All right.
Philip Pape: 26:51
Number 23 is for those who always have trouble getting enough protein, and the easy answer is well, you simply need to have enough servings of protein throughout the day, enough meals throughout the day that have protein to get it in. Another simple strategy is to make sure you are day that have protein to get it in. Another simple strategy is to make sure you are starting with protein early and getting it through. What I'm going to tell you here for number 23 is to meal plan just your protein. So some of you you hear meal planning. You're like I don't want to do that. Okay, I get it. All I want you to do is meal plan, just your protein. What that means is you're going to sit down and for tomorrow, right now, for tomorrow, you're going to say what protein am I eating, how much, and when? That's it? Okay, just very rough it, rough, rough, ball rough, park it. I can't even think straight here, ball park it, ball park it and say, okay, I'm going to have my turkey and eggs here, and then I'm going to have my protein shake here and it's going to be one and a half scoops. I'm going to have my chicken for lunch and it's going to be 125 grams, and so on and so forth, and really just do that. And if you can't hit your protein, doing it ahead of time, without emotion, from an objective sense, then you've just discovered your problem. It's simply a matter of logically getting it in there in the right places, the right amounts with the right frequency. So that's a protein meal planning idea. All right.
Philip Pape: 28:14
Idea number 24. It might sound a little bit redundant with some of the others regarding training, but this is a simple way to do this. This is a movement quality score. So when you're in the gym, what you can do in the note in your app or your notebook is rate the movement quality for the exercise and I would just suggest a one to 10 scale. Now you could get you can get crazy with this you could like break it down into all the different cues, like we talked about before, but I would just keep it simple and say, okay, overall for this exercise today, all the sets that I just did, what was my movement quality? And then you can decide am I going to use that to hold me back from progressing next time or, more likely, I'm going to use that to decide which movements need the most focus? That's really the whole point of this one. It's mapping out your movement quality across all your movements and finding out that, oh, my barbell good mornings have pretty low quality, or my push press or overhead press is pretty low quality compared to others. So that's the one objective that I should probably focus on. The problem is, if you don't do that, it's hard necessarily to know after the fact which one you were most or least happy with, because you've done all these movements. And then the week goes by and you've done 20 different movements. So track on a scale of one to 10, the movement quality and then use that to decide which ones need more work, all right.
Philip Pape: 29:29
And then my last idea is really about thinking of nutrition as a thing that you want to plan for on a weekly basis, kind of like your budget or your work schedule, your meetings, the activities for your kids you know kids, your grocery shopping, it's all part of that. And so what I'm suggesting for this last idea is could you create a weekly ritual that combines all the things you need to do all in one to be really efficient? So meal prep, food preparation, optimizing your environment, your kitchen environment, and then planning for the week with whatever ideas from today or any other ideas you want for your meal planning. So what I'm saying is meal prep, environment and meal planning kind of all in one, say, hour-long session. That's super efficient. So while the chicken is in the oven roasting, you are organizing your pantry and then you go ahead and plan out how that chicken fits into your plan for the week, just putting it down in your schedule with yourself as like your weekly nutrition ritual. Does that make sense? Sometimes we think of these as a whole bunch of different things I have to do. I'm so overwhelmed. I just want you to think of it as one combined thing that gets you a three for one or four for one with your planning for the week.
Philip Pape: 30:47
All right, those are the 25 creative ideas and some key themes you're going to notice if I haven't put you to sleep or lost you by now is making choices that you want, whether you call them healthy choices, nutritious choices, making those the path of least resistance. In other words, those are the default things that are the easiest thing for you to do. That's number one. Number two is turning these things into fun games. I mean, you notice how much gamification and logging and strategy with numbers I'm talking about. Now. If that's not for you, great, it's not for you. But if you want to, you can turn your nutrition and training into a game in so many different ways. Number three the third out of four themes here that I noticed is using the environmental design to your advantage, your system. That's what we're doing. We're setting up your system to work for you, reduce friction. And then number four is building those systems that then work for your life and not thinking you have to follow someone else's plan if it's not for you.
Philip Pape: 31:45
So the power of all of these is you can just start small, pick one idea that resonates with you and again, the whole guide is gonna be printed out in a PDF downloadable. I'm going to post it in the Facebook group. All you have to do is join totally free, and you can find it there. But pick one thing, see how it feels. See how it fits you. One thing See how it feels, see how it fits you, adjust it and, if you like it great, talk about it. Tweak it. Come up with your own ideas, talk to people about it, share it. Right. We're not trying to overhaul your entire life on January 1st. We are trying to find clever ways to make fitness fit into your life forever. Now.
Philip Pape: 32:21
One last thought I had is about lateral thinking, and I know this episode's getting long, but lateral thinking will make conventional approaches also work better, because when you start looking at problems creatively, you develop what engineers call solution patterns. Right. You become better at solving all kinds of challenges, not just the ones related to fitness, and so this could help you everywhere in your life. All right, as we begin 2025, I challenge you to think differently about your fitness goals Instead of forcing yourself into someone else's systems. Use these strategies, these creative ideas, to build an approach that works for you, and remember, the most sustainable solution is rarely the most obvious one.
Philip Pape: 33:00
Don't make excuses. Don't say you can't do something. Say how can I do it? And what if it works a different way? Sometimes you have to look at things sideways to move forward. All right, so again, join our Facebook group. I'd love to see you in there. I'd love to hear from you, I'd love to hear how you're applying these ideas. Or if you just want to join and grab the guide, that's fine too, and you can connect with others who are using these strategies as well. Happy New Year. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights, and remember sometimes the best solutions come from asking the craziest questions. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.
