Adherence is King

Adherence is king.

What does this mean?

It means that the best, most ideal program can be created specifically for an individual to meet all of their desired goals from training, however, if they can’t stick to it, it’s useless. I feel like it makes sense to people, yet when we set expectations for ourselves or try to set ourselves up for success, we tend to only consider the most ideal scenario.

Yes this ideal program and set of rules that you have set will technically work, however only if you don’t have to work for an extra hour and if you don’t fall for that extra serve of dinner and if you experience absolutely no stress, and, and, and….

The point here is that life is that, well, life get in the way. Things aren’t always going to exactly how you want them to so we can’t plan off of 100% perfect scenarios. Set yourself up for success by building habits which you can sustain long term.

This means that if you have fallen off of the wagon with your training, then start with getting your daily steps up and maybe training 1-2x a week. If it’s nutrition you are struggling with, then start by just making sure you have one salad a day. If you have missed a few sessions over the past few weeks because you aren’t feeling motivated to train, give yourself a few sessions that you know you will enjoy but will still have a degree of difficulty to them, then grit up and do them.

All of these strategies are just a few of the many that you can use to get on track for your goals. With any of these changes, there will be a surprisingly large change in the individuals life just by them thinking about it. If you get your steps up, you’re going to be more conscious of how much you move each day. If you have a salad, you’re going to be thinking about what else you eat that day. If you start training more because you’re enjoying it, you will see better results and also be more ready to take on more specific training even if you might enjoy the individual exercises a bit less, simply because you will have gained momentum.

We always start with the small habits and build up. If you add something and it becomes unsustainable for you (i.e. a 4th day at the gym) and there is no ground breaking reason why you definitely have to do that, then scale back (i.e. compromise with 3 days). This scaled back alternative is still going to give you benefits and set you up so that you are less likely to drop off long term.

With this being said, as we move through interventions which are being implemented there is a certain amount of just getting things done which may have to be achieved. For example, while we might start someone off with 2 resistance training sessions a week when they haven’t really exercised too much before, there will be a significant amount of resistance to this being achieved at the start. While you might say that the individual may not be able to properly adhere to this, I believe that it is more a case of it is difficult to start and rather they just need to get some momentum. If someone hasn’t exercised before, there is going to be a lot of resistance to this. However once they have started, the more they see benefits and start to enjoy training, all of a sudden making this 2 day a week target much more achievable and easy to adhere to.

Here are two examples on how we may build up interventions with someone starting fresh with little to no experience with nutrition and exercise.

Nutrition:

We may start by ensuring the individual eats 5 servings of vegetables per day. Educate what this may look like and track just the vegetables they eat. This is just to get them thinking about what food they are eating and increasing the amount of “healthy” nutritious foods they include in their diet. This is also likely going to make them eat less of the foods that are worse for them simply because it then becomes too much in a day.

We may then do this with fruit or other identified issues with their diet once they get this, or we can move on from there to tracking.

From here we can get the individual to track their calories for each day just to understand how much they are actually eating each day. If this is too much then you may even suggest just getting them to track protein or fibre. This still gives them information about their diet without being too much effort for them. We would also set a calorie goal based on their goals and current intake.

Once they grasp tracking, we may move on to having specific macronutrient goals for the individual to hit each day and focus on getting quite close to that target each day.

When we go through this there are two main points to emphasise. The first is that a majority of people won’t want to go past tracking calories and many won’t even want to do that for a sustained period of time. This is fine. As we have said here, it is about what healthy habits they can maintain. The second point is that throughout this whole progression there should be an emphasis on healthy habits with food and changing how they think about good/bad foods. I won’t get too far into this (it’s a discussion for another day) but when teaching someone to look after their nutrition, we should be encouraging them that it is important to have a healthy relationship with food. They should be able to eat healthy, enjoy to occasional treat and not have to binge because they are eating so little volume or so little of the foods they enjoy.

As we teach these things and find where that individual is comfortable, then we will be able to reach a lifestyle which the individual is able to adhere to.

Training/exercise:

With exercise, a lot of people tend to go on and off with it because they try to go all in all at once. Rather, we want to try to build up training and make it based on their goals.

For someone who is completely new to exercising, simply walking and trying to achieve 8,000+ steps a day should be enough to help increase their cardiovascular fitness pretty significantly. We can just encourage a brisk walk and then once that has been achieved increase from there.

After this baseline increase the rest is dependant on goals, but we should be aiming for most adults to be achieving 2-3 days of resistance training a week with 30 minutes of physical activity each day. This physical activity (depending on fitness level) can be anything from walking, to bike riding, to frisbee. Anything that you are doing at an intensity high enough to get your heart going a bit will do. That baseline should be achieved in a large majority of cases, then from there, depending on the individual you may build on that.

Just as with nutrition, there are those two points that we need to keep in mind. One is that there is a large majority of people who won’t need/benefit/enjoy 5 or 6 days in the gym a week, so there probably isn’t much reason to keep progressing them that way. The second is that we should look to help them enjoy training and exercise and build a healthy relationship with it so that it’s not something that they just need to get done.

Conclusion

As shown here, it is important to build strong habits in regards to training and nutrition rather than giving someone the “ideal” program which will result in them burning out. From there, we need to consider various variables which may affect how the individual may adhere to different interventions. Because of this, We should add new interventions with caution and progress in a way that will benefit the individual. It is also important to continuously check in and update how the person is going with the intervention to see if it is working and what needs to be changed. There is a certain amount of just getting things done in the beginning but this initial change should not be disheartening to the individual.

I believe adherence is the first thing we need to think about in training and nutrition and because of that, it is KING.