MAINTENANCE IS PROGRESS

WEEK OF 2/16/26

 

When I first staked out on this journey of gym ownership and coaching, I made wildly inaccurate predictions about the challenges of coaching.  I obsessed over technicalities in the subject matter, gym layout, schedule, and so on.  All of these are important, of course.  But what I didn’t anticipate is being locked in a never ending battle against quick fixes, procrastination, and a society that wants instant gratification… NOW!

And just to be clear, I struggle with these things just as much as the next person.  I am not immune to the negative effects of smart phone usage and readily available dopamine hits.

With that said, I think many people just flat out wrongly understand the formula for success in training.  It’s about consistent efforts made over big timelines.  That’s it.  That’s the backbone of growth.

As such, progress is hard to see because we are so zoomed in — on any given day it can feel like all of our hard work has been for nothing, or that we are actually getting worse!

But none of that is true.  Small consistent efforts over large timelines allow something as soft as water to carve through rock and form the grand canyon.  It’s a cliche example, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Even what we would consider as maintenance is still progress.  Because without maintenance, we regress.  Skills and attributes aren’t fixed.  They wax or wane depending on the attention (or lack thereof) given to them.  Maintenance is progress because the absence of maintenance is regression.  If the status quo is deterioration, then maintenance therefore becomes forward movement.

Think of it this way — the status quo of being in a large body of water is sinking.  If you sink, you die.  So treading water — although it may seem like it’s not getting you anywhere — is progress.  You are not sinking.  You are surviving.

There will be times in our lives where we may not have 5-6 days of hard training available to us.  It may only be 1 or 2 throughout a given period.  And that’s ok.

Because maintenance is progress.