TLDR
- Think about the 100 hour a week concept on how little time fitness is actually taking
- Use the event sandwich if you’re having trouble doing a specific gym session / mobility routine / etc
Overview
Forming habits and getting to work is another life topic that’s been researched and written on ad nauseam beyond the confines of fitness. If you are interested in further reading the classics are always a good place to start – such as the book ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’.
We’ll only be able to touch on a few key points that are more fitness-adjacent; otherwise it would be an entire tome by itself.
The two points highlighted here are the 100 hour rule and the event sandwich.
100 Hour Rule
Let’s say you’ve established your goal hierarchy. You know the actions that you need to do (go to the gym, eat reasonably well, etc).
If you’re having trouble actually doing it, there may well be a disconnect in how far you prioritise fitness.
Here’s a simple test – ask yourself what your key priorities are in life and how many hours a week you’re distributing to each one.
There’s 168 hours in a week. Minus 9 hours a day for sleeping and mundane activities such as showering, you get 105 hours. Round it down a little and we end up with 100.
So we have 100 hours a week where we’re awake.
Your priorities may look something like this:
- Health
- Family
- Friends
- Work
For you fitness may be a 5th, 6th, or heck a distant number behind it all.
Sure, perhaps you require 40 or 50 hours for work. Family time might take a large chunk out as well. Maybe your hobbies take out another 5 or 10 hours.
But we all know the benefits of fitness – long-term health, higher quality of life, improved mood, the list goes on.
Do you really think 1 hour out of 100 hours is excessive? Perhaps 2, 3 or 4?
I don’t know about you, but I reckon for most people 2-4% of their time for all these benefits is a pretty good deal – just do the maths.
In other words, the 100 hour rule frames your time with a simple number for you to ask yourself if your goals are aligned with your priorities.
Event sandwich
If you’re having trouble setting up a productive action to be a recurring event, whether it’s a full gym session, eating a healthy meal, or doing your daily mobility work, consider this.
A quick recap. Habits are actions that are triggered automatically, in response to contextual cues that have been associated with doing said habit.
We know that having repetitions of an action consistently after a contextual cue leads to a habit being formed.
Why is this important? Motivation to achieve a goal, both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, will dissipate over time. Building up habits allows us to keep doing productive things about this conscious motivation (temporarily) fades.
Simple habits are easier to attenuate our routine; more complex habits may take some more repetitions. One particular study suggests an average of 66 days as the figure where subjects reported a reasonably strong habit strength. Missing a couple of days over this period didn’t seem to seriously impair habit forming.
With that out of the way:
Simple steps
First, make sure you’re starting small with the action. If you can set something to be 2 minutes and not 10, start it at 2 minutes. You can increase the scope of the action over the duration of the habit forming.
Second, make the action have as specific a time and location as possible.
This is all probably pretty obvious so far.
Third is the namesake of this section, the event sandwich.
Fix the event to be both before an event and after an event.
Fixed event before
Here are some common suggestions:
- As soon as I wake up
- Right after breakfast
- When I get to work
- When I go on my lunch break
- When I shower
- Just before bed
Positive event after
Here are some common suggestions:
- Watching Netflix
- Listening to music
- Eating a low calorie snack
The structure is:
fixed event – exercise – positive event
For example, you might set yourself a rule:
After I brush my teeth in the morning, I will immediately exercise.
f I don’t exercise, I don’t get to watch my Netflix show at night.
Finally, pull out all the stops and use any short term motivation and enthusiasm to try to stick to it for 10 weeks straight. There’s nothing magical about 70 days per se, but some habit formation research does suggest that general ball park to be on the right track for habits to stick.