We all spent last Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday trying to predict exactly when Snowmaggeddon would fall and how inconvenienced our lives would be.
Experts from the Met office have very sophisticated Programmemes calculating millions of pieces of data to try and give us their most accurate prediction, but even they can only guesstimate. Why? Because of so many seemingly small data points add up to big changes in the results we see.
And this leads us onto our fitness. We can predict that eating right, getting sufficient sleep, and exercising will make us fitter and healthier. But we can’t predict exactly how much weight we’ll lose, how faster we’ll get at running, how many kilos we’ll put on our lifts, and whether we’ll get our first pull up this year.
This is why we give a range of what healthy fat loss is, anywhere between .5 and 1Kg every 2-4 weeks. So this could mean you “only” lose half a kilo in a month, or you might lose two.
Your genetic predisposition to fat loss and fat storage, your age, your “training age”, your psychology, how accurate your macros are, your gut health and rate of absorption, your energy output, your sleep… ALL play a small role in determining how you’ll respond. And that’s just on a personal level. When we look at competition, we’re now factoring in our judge, the atmosphere, the timing of workouts, the structure of the competition, and other athletes, of which we’ve no control.
The take home point is that all these seemingly little things add up. That one Mars Bar, 30 minutes less sleep, missing one day of training, a little low on your protein goal etc over the course of the weeks or months do make a difference.
How much is hard to pinpoint, but it all adds up. Pay 1% more attention to the factors of your health that you can control, and you’ll maximise your chances of achieving your goals.