Are you constantly "falling off track" with your fitness or fat loss goals?

Life has a way of throwing curveballs at our carefully laid plans. Illness, work stress, family emergencies, or unexpected travel can derail even the most dedicated among us.

But what if you could create a fitness and nutrition approach that adapts to life's chaos instead of crumbling under it?

You'll learn why traditional "perfect" plans often fail in the face of real-life challenges and how the engineering concept of Risk Management can help you build flexibility and resilience into your routine.

Discover simple ways to identify and prepare for both foreseeable and unforeseeable obstacles, and the mindset shift that turns setbacks into learning opportunities.

Whether you're struggling with consistency or just want to "bulletproof" your current approach, you'll learn about a tool to create a sustainable, adaptable fitness plan that keeps you progressing no matter what life throws your way.

To master flexible dieting for fat loss, muscle building, and better health, download my free Nutrition 101 guide at witsandweights.com/free

Main Takeaways:

• Risk management in fitness involves planning for both known and unknown challenges

• Building flexibility into your plan is key to long-term consistency and success

• A resilient mindset sees obstacles as opportunities to learn and improve, not reasons to quit

• Regular assessment and adjustment of your approach ensures continued progress

Episode summary:

In today's fast-paced world, the challenge of maintaining a consistent fitness regimen can be daunting. Many embark on new fitness journeys with enthusiasm, only to be derailed by life's unpredictabilities. This episode explores how engineering principles of risk management can be the key to creating resilient and adaptable fitness plans that withstand everyday chaos. The traditional all-or-nothing approach often leads to frustration and inconsistency when life doesn't align with rigid plans. By incorporating risk management, you can craft a sustainable strategy that adapts to life's inevitable curveballs.

Risk management is a concept commonly used in engineering to foresee and mitigate potential disruptions. By applying this to fitness, we can anticipate both foreseeable and unforeseeable challenges. Foreseeable risks are those we can predict, such as work deadlines or planned travel, while unforeseeable risks are the unexpected events like family emergencies. The key to success is developing a plan that can adapt to both types of risks. This approach allows for flexibility, much like a shock absorber cushions a car from road bumps, ensuring that your fitness goals remain within reach even when life throws you off course.

One practical step is to identify potential risks by reflecting on past experiences and brainstorming possible future disruptions. Consider the likelihood and impact of each risk, then prioritize the top three to focus on. For each risk, develop contingency plans, or "if-then" strategies, to ensure you're prepared. For example, if work commitments often interfere with workouts, have a quick home workout ready as a backup. If social events tend to derail your nutrition, plan to eat a protein-focused meal before attending or decide in advance what you'll consume.

Flexibility should be built into your overall plan. For training, this might mean allowing your workout schedule to stretch over an extra day or two. For nutrition, consider using ranges for calorie and macro targets, rather than rigid numbers. Having multiple meal options available ensures you can adapt your eating habits even when your routine is disrupted. The iterative process of assessing and adjusting your strategies ensures they remain effective over time.

The ultimate goal is not perfection, but progress. Risk management shifts your mindset from seeing setbacks as failures to viewing them as opportunities to learn and improve. Each challenge becomes a lesson, and the process of adapting reinforces your ability to navigate life's unpredictabilities. This approach empowers you to maintain control over your fitness journey, transforming potential obstacles into stepping stones for success.

To summarize, a perfect plan doesn't exist because life is inherently unpredictable. Risk management provides a framework for creating flexible, resilient strategies that keep you moving forward despite disruptions. This episode is a valuable resource for anyone seeking to achieve long-term fitness success without succumbing to the rigidity of traditional plans. For further guidance, visit witsandweights.com/free for additional resources that support this flexible approach to nutrition and fitness.

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Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:01

If you've ever started a new fat loss phase or training program with enthusiasm, only to have it derailed by unexpected events like illness, work, stress or family emergencies, and you find yourself constantly falling off track and struggling to maintain consistency with your goals, this episode's for you. Today, I'm going to reveal how the engineering concept of risk management can help you create a bulletproof plan that adapts to life's chaos and uncertainty. You'll learn how to build flexibility and resilience into your nutrition and training approach so you can keep making progress even when life throws curveballs your way. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the podcast that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we are diving into a concept from the corporate world risk management. Hear me out, it is not as boring as it sounds. It's not just for big corporations and Wall Street types. This is an engineering principle and I've used it almost every day in my engineering career. That can be a real secret weapon for creating a sustainable, resilient, adaptable plan and in this case we're talking about your fitness, your nutrition and so on that will then stand up to real life, because, think about it, how many times have you started something new. You're super excited. You're entering a fat loss phase, starting a new training program. You're ready to go Monday? Right, I'm going to start on Monday. You're all fired up, ready to go, and then it falls apart, sometimes pretty quickly, when unexpected stuff happens. Right, maybe you got sick, maybe you had to travel for work, maybe some family obligations just took over your schedule. You know, 20 people visited your house, whatever. And suddenly that quote, unquote, perfect plan that you had mapped out goes right out the window, and so we're going to talk about that today. I'm going to show you how to use risk management principles to create an approach that can bend without breaking, no matter what life throws your way, because that's what we want, that is what is sustainable, something that you can just keep doing, no matter what, knowing that the default is life. Life is the default. Things that are unexpected is actually the norm. And before we dive into that, just really quick. If you enjoy the show, if you want to hear more episodes like this, hit follow in your app. It helps people find the show, but it also makes sure that you don't miss an episode. Just hit the follow button, make sure that you go into your podcast app you're listening right now and click, follow or subscribe whatever it's called.

Philip Pape: 2:50

All right, let's talk about the main reason that most plans fail, and this this is really any plan right, whether it's in the corporate world, engineering or with your fitness. And the biggest culprit here is rigidity. We create perfect, ideal scenarios in our heads, and I do this as well. Our future self is going to be perfect. I'm going to work out five days a week, I'm going to meal prep every Sunday, I'm never going to touch food after 7 pm, I'm going to get my 12,000 steps a day and it's just going to work out Right. Sound familiar, even if you think you have the discipline and willpower to do it. And the problem is, life doesn't care about this, life doesn't care about your plan. Life is messy, it's unpredictable, it loves to throw wrenches even to the best laid schemes that we create. And then what do most people do when this happens? They think they failed, they beat themselves up. They oftentimes just give up like, oh, I just can't be consistent, I can't stick to my plan because this happened, and that is the all or nothing mentality that leads to frustration and inconsistency. And this is where risk management comes in.

Philip Pape: 4:00

In engineering, risk management, sometimes called risk and opportunities management, is about planning for the known and unknown risks to get to your outcome, to achieve your objective, to get the product out the door on time, on budget, meeting all the requirements, and it's not about creating a perfect plan. It's about creating one that is resilient to all the things that you may not foresee, and there's two types of risk we deal with. So this is really important. There are foreseeable risks. These are the known unknowns. Okay, these are things we can predict that might happen, based on our experience and based on common sense. It's the things that you know are going to happen, but you're not sure when like getting sick, like having to travel for work, like dealing with holidays, social events. You know they're going to happen. They're known unknowns. That's foreseeable. Then there's unforeseeable risks. These are unknown unknowns, things that you don't know. You don't know the curve balls that you could not have possibly anticipated, like a family emergency that pops up or you suddenly have to move, or a global pandemic hits right, so sound familiar. And those are the. So there's the what we know, we don't know, and what we don't know that we don't know. And the thing is, we know that all of that is going to happen. We know that the unknowns are going to happen and we know that the unknown unknowns are going to happen.

Philip Pape: 5:31

So the key is to create a plan that can adapt to both types of risks. And instead of a rigid and flexible plan which guess what? Hint, that's what diets are like the keto diet or vegetarianism or whatever it is rigid and inflexible we want to build a strategy that's more like a shock absorber, right? It can cushion the impact of the bumps of life and then just allow you to keep moving forward, like a really good suspension on a car, you know, not like a finely tuned sports car trying to go off road, right, but actually something that can handle all the bumps. So how do we actually do this? So I'm going to give you just a few practical steps here. The first one, of course, is we have to identify what those risks are and this is reflection, this is brainstorming Anything that could derail your plan.

Philip Pape: 6:15

Go through the list, take a piece of paper out and think about your life and, over the next six months, what could happen Work deadlines, family commitments, do you get sick on a regular basis, or your family or your child gets sick and it could make you sick. And it's not like you're trying to predict when exactly these are going to happen, although in some cases, like social events or the deadlines, you know when they're going to happen. And then you're basically leaving room for the things you know are going to happen. You're just not sure when the things you know you're going to happen and when they're happening, and then even some things that you may not have a clue they're going to happen, and then for each of those, you want to identify how likely it's to happen and how much it would impact your plan, because some things may not matter that much, right, like, okay, you have a work deadline. It creates stress, but if you know for sure you're going to schedule in your training in the morning and work doesn't start till later and it's not going to matter, then maybe it's not going to impact your plan as much. But it might impact your food plan, right, having having more stress or having a situation where you have to go into work more frequently or something. So for each one of these, you want to know is it how likely it is and how much will impact your plan, and then you can prioritize the ones that you want to focus on the most, and I would just keep it simple and literally just, you know, circle the top three that you want to focus on for this exercise.

Philip Pape: 7:36

Now step three develop strategies to deal with each risk. This is develop strategies to deal with each risk. This is contingency plans. These are what I've sometimes called if-then strategies. If you often miss workouts due to work, then have a 20-minute home workout ready to go as a backup. If a social event is going to come up for work let's say you get invited to a happy hour and you're going to go because it's good for business or whatever and it normally derails your nutrition then I'm going to eat a small protein-focused meal before I go out or I'm going to have a plan ready to go to choose what I eat and drink at any event. Right. So if, then, eat and drink at this at any event, right. So if then, if unexpected travel comes up, then I'm going to research nearby or the hotel gym in advance, or I'm going to pack my bands or my blood full restriction training cuffs for a in-room workout, right. So again, it's if this thing happens. I don't know when it's going to happen. I don't know how long it's going to be. I'm going to have a then strategy, a contingency plan for it.

Philip Pape: 8:47

The other thing that complements this, that supports this, is building in flexibility to your whole plan in general. By default right Now it depends on what we're talking about. So, for example, training, training sessions Instead of saying I'm absolutely going to work out five days a week, you can say I have a plan for a five day. You know five days of training. But because I know sometimes I'm not able to do that, I'm okay stretching out my week by a day or two and still getting in on my workouts. I just might have an extra day there or I might shift them back and forth, right. So either the number of training sessions can kind of spread out beyond that week or I know that I have flexibility in the days that I can train right. If you're only training three days a week, you probably have more flexibility to do that than, say, if your training program is five or six days. So that's some flexibility on the training side.

Philip Pape: 9:40

For your food, I love ranges, right Minimums and ranges for calorie macro targets. So again, it depends on what you're going for. But let's say you're in a fat loss plan, you have calorie and protein target. I would want to hit the minimum protein but then kind of get within 100 or 150 calories of the calorie target, either direction from fats or carbs. Right, like, create the amount of flexibility you need to know that it's sustainable.

Philip Pape: 10:08

Another flexibility is eating throughout the week, right, when you do meal prep and when you have quick options to go to in your pantry and you are smart about your grocery shopping ahead of time so that you have your fridge, your cabinets, your pantry filled up with multiple options. Then, if something throws you off during the week and you can't stick to your normal meal plan, your normal routine, even if you have prepped it, you'll at least have a second, third or fourth backup that you can go to and you're not just reaching for the candy jar or reaching for the vending machine, right, or just you're not sure what to do. So you stop in a grocery or you stop in a convenience store and you grab, um, you know a muffin, right. Or uh, you know calorie dense hot dog or something. So, building in flexibility, compliments, having the backup, uh, contingency plans.

Philip Pape: 10:58

And then, because you have all this flexibility built in, you always want to assess uh, is it working for you? Is one of these things not actually solving the problem and mitigating the risk? Let's say you are invited to a happy hour and you go and all of a sudden, the same thing happens, as always happens. You have the nachos, you have the three margaritas and you overconsume and before you know it, you've gone way past your calories for the week, despite having your risk management plan. Well, that plan obviously wasn't effective, so you just have to come up with a different one that's actually going to work. So that doesn't rely on you having too much discipline or willpower to do it.

Philip Pape: 11:42

And that iterative process is part of the flexibility of risk management and is key to, again, sustainability. And then, underlying all of this is, again, we are not trying to be perfect, we're not trying to have a perfect plan, nor are we trying to execute perfectly. We're trying to just make progress from day to day. Look at every challenge that trips us up as a lesson to adjust our plan rather than a reason to quit and we'll be fine. And so the power of this approach isn't just helping you stick to your plan. It's in transforming the approach, in the relationship and thinking like a risk manager, not seeing setbacks as failures, but really data points, opportunities to learn, to adapt, to improve the system.

Philip Pape: 12:25

Right, that vacation that used to derail your diet for weeks because, well, you know, I ate whatever I wanted on vacation and I can't get back to it now. I'm off track. I might as well just enjoy myself for a while. Now that is a chance to practice the flexible strategies, the flexible eating and nutrition strategies. That busy work period that would have meant skipping the gym. Now it's an opportunity to test out either the home workouts or the flexibility you built into your training days. And that is now taking the power back into you, an internal locus of control. You're not trapped now by some external rigid rule, some unrealistic expectation. You actually have power to navigate the unpredictable nature of life which is the default and make progress, and that is the key to sustainable long-term success.

Philip Pape: 13:18

So if we were to just recap this episode number one, a perfect plan will fail because it can't adapt to life. There's no such thing. Number two risk management principles are a way to create a flexible, resilient strategy, both contingency plans and building in flexibility, which then number three, allows you to make consistent progress even when life gets chaotic, and not just quote unquote, stick to your plan, which now is really a wide range of flexible options, but changing your approach to it in the first place, which will serve you well forever. So your goal is not to create a plan that worked perfectly in ideal conditions, because that doesn't exist. It's to create a system that keeps you moving forward no matter what life throws your way, and that's really it when it comes to risk management.

Philip Pape: 14:06

So if you found value in today's episode and you want to learn more about creating a flexible, sustainable approach to nutrition, I do have a guide that I think you're going to enjoy, called the Nutrition 101 Guide, and it's geared toward body composition with this flexible approach. Just go to witsandweightscom slash free or click the link in my show notes. Again, witsandweightscom slash free or click the link in my show notes and I'll send you the guide for free. It'll help you master that flexible dieting.

Philip Pape: 14:34

Whatever your goal fat loss, muscle building, improved health. It covers everything from calculating your ideal macros to optimizing your nutrition for your workouts, and it's a really good companion to today's episode, because today was a little bit more high level about the risk management in general, but then this helps you dig one level deeper with some practical tools for this resilient, adaptable strategy. Again, go to witsandweightscom, slash free or click the link in the show notes. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights, and remember, in fitness and life it's not about avoiding obstacles, it's just being prepared to overcome them. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.