The Secret to Success is Obsession
Takeaway Points:
The secret to true success is that you have to truly enjoy what you’re doing - and if you do, you’ll sort out everything else along the way.
If you want to succeed, finding the enjoyment in the things that you do is often more important than perfectly optimizing your approach, and will result in better results in the long run.
Many people don’t need to be told what to do, when it comes to health and fitness - they need the motivation and guidance to follow through on what they already know needs to be done.
It’s a common joke on the internet: “oh, it turns out that when you exercise, eat more vegetables, sleep better, manage your caffeine, get sunlight, etc. you feel better, much to my disappointment”, and similar jokes are regularly made.
I’m a firm advocate that there are no “secrets” when it comes to fitness. Certainly there are some “advanced” bits of knowledge that you’ll learn over time with experience, but a lot of this is just in service of making the “basic” knowledge more useful. Fitness is really very simple, and a lot of the reason that it’s complicated, is because people needlessly overcomplicate it.
Recently, I got hate mail from someone who had started the 14 Day Unlearning Fitness Challenge, and angrily wrote in to tell me that this program wouldn’t help anyone, because it didn’t contain any advanced info, and was all such basic beginner info to the point of being useless even to beginners. That was news to me - effectively, in that course, I laid out the EXACT methods I’ve learned over 20+ years to maximize my own fitness and that of the 100’s of clients that I’ve helped over 12+ years of being a coach. I basically gave away, for free, my own exact training methods.
So what sets me apart from someone else who follows the program, but doesn’t get results?
I’m a lifetime natural lifter, and have never touched steroids, so it’s not that - though of course, steroids have a huge effect, and are a major consideration for why many people can get better results than others - they’re just willing to take some steroids.
Next is genetics. Genetics are the single biggest factor - some people will simply get significantly better results from the exact same effort input, while some people will simply get significantly worse results. I have decent genetics, but certainly nothing world-class. So, that’s certainly contributing to my success as well.
What’s the last factor? Here’s the only one that really comes down to immediate personal control: obsession.
The reality is that I’ve been training almost nonstop since around 2006. I’ve taken the occasional week off. A few times, I’ve taken an entire month off - once around 2012 when I had a bad injury, once around 2016 when I got very ill for a few weeks straight, and once in 2020 when I contracted COVID. Aside from that, I have been training in some form or another, nonstop, for longer than the lifespan of one of my kids, and over now half of my own lifespan.
The reason that I’ve been able to do this, is simply that I love lifting weights. I enjoy showing up to the gym, and if I take more than a week off, I start itching to go back in. Whenever I take a vacation, I get annoyed that I’ll need to take some time off.
Despite that, I’ve gone through periods of more and less. I’ve had some times when I had the time and energy to train 6-7 days per week for hours per day, and I’ve had times when I limited it to 3 days per week with a hard limit of 1 hour of training at a time. You don’t need to necessarily train hard in order to see progress - but you do need to be able to come back, consistently, week after week, and ensure that you continue to train all the muscles and movements that you care about consistently.
I’ve been able to do this because I’m obsessed. I’ve been able to progress consistently for nearly two decades, because it’s a huge facet of my personality.
I can’t tell you how many, even “advanced” lifters, struggle because they don’t have this fundamental principle down. So much of working with even advanced lifters, often boils down not to advanced techniques, but instead just doing whatever you can to ensure that you continue to nail the basics, day in and day out, for years and decades. Lots of people struggle with it. Lots of folks insist that they can train 5+ times per week, only to struggle to hit 3-4. That’s ultimately human nature - not everyone will be able to maintain perfect energy and focus on one thing forever.
I also can name so many instances of people who had poor genetics, but an AMAZING obsession with fitness. I’ve had many clients who were slow but steady types - they couldn’t progress very quickly, but they showed up and continued to hit their workouts consistently each week, and as a result saw much better overall results in the long run versus people who pushed it hard, saw early results, and burned out before too long.
It’s become cliche in the fitness industry to talk about habit forming and consistency as the key to progress, but I cannot emphasize enough how it’s the single most important factor in whether or not you’re going to get results. So many people think that they can get super advanced results from some kind of super advanced program, try it out, aren’t super consistent, don’t see the results they expected, and then burn out.
It’s certainly important to try new things, experiment, and find what works for you. Over time, you’ll certainly find it, if you continue to remain consistent. But many people become obsessed with the idea of having results sooner, or of being able to do things that isn’t in the cards for them genetically, and it ruins their ability to truly learn to enjoy exercising.
Exercise should be a common facet of everyone’s life. The fact that we needlessly overcomplicate it, we make it too confusing, we obscure the things that we really need to focus on - it does a lot of people a disservice. Fitness should be simple, it should be consistent, and it should align with your optimal life.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached thousands of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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