When you realise that good enough trumps perfect every time, you’ll make far better progress. Let me give you some proof and then tell you how I help my clients counteract perfectionism.

3rd October, 2023

Most of my clients don’t have the time or the inclination to optimise their exercise and nutrition targets like an athlete would. After all, they’re all busy legends who work hard in their day job, look after their family, run the household and hold other values in life that don’t solely revolve around food and exercise. Which means they have limits on the time, energy and headspace they’re willing to invest in their fitness goals. That’s fair!

When clients first start working with me, they may be trapped in the mindset that they have to do everything perfectly otherwise they won’t see progress. And it simply isn’t fair to aspire to this perfectionist way of thinking, it’s a trap that can lead to: not finishing a task, inaction, or giving up when you come up against barriers (barriers being very normal life events).

Starting off with step count, I’m going to use dose response to exercise as an example of just how much you have to gain from doing something vs doing it all.

Step count

There’s a graph I love (yes, I’m a nerd) - it’s about the association between number of steps and risk of dying from all causes. I wrote about this in a previous article - “Do you need to walk 10,000 steps a day to be healthy?”. But I’ll go into it again briefly here too.

Research suggests that the risk of dying from disease reduces with a higher step count except, there is actually the most benefit per unit of effort, from the first lot of steps you do.1

I’ll break down the graph with you.

The further up the vertical axis there is a higher risk, whilst lower down the axis is a lower risk of dying. The further to the right of the horizontal axis the more steps someone does. The trend of the line on the graph is not linear which suggests more health benefits come from the first load of steps! But there is still benefit from doing more.

What we can learn from this graph:

The first 4,000 steps you do lowers risk of death for all causes by 37%
Around 6,400 steps reduces the risk by 60%

That’s a jump of 23% reduction in risk for adding another 2,400 steps.

And 10,000 steps reduces the risk by 75%

That’s a jump of 15% reduction in risk for adding another 3,600 steps.

Doing more than 10,000 steps per day is generally better for health than doing 4,000 steps per day (of course there are exceptions) but you will get your biggest return per unit of investment, from the first 4,000 steps.

That’s a great reason to make sure you get your first 4,000 steps as a minimum. Something is better than nothing.

Overall Physical Activity

This is a similar story to our previous graph but this time it’s all about total physical activity, which involves all intensities of exercise. It’s an amalgamation of all activity essentially.

I’ll break the graph down with you again.

The risk of dying from all causes increases the further up the Y axis we are. Whilst lower down the same axis, the risk of dying reduces.

Along the X axis is the number of minutes spent physically active per week.

What we can learn from this graph:

Doing 300 minutes of activity per week is better than doing 100 minutes per week but the largest proportion of the benefit comes from the first 100-200 minutes. Remember, this is per week. The benefits start to level off at around 250 minutes and don’t get that much higher moving up to 500 minutes per week.2

Resistance training sets

This is a cool meta analysis. A similar message here about dose response but this one is geared towards resistance training where people completed 12 weeks of resistance training and the impact on muscle growth was measured. The results from several studies were split into three group - one group of people did less than 5 sets per week, another 5-9 sets per week, and the third group did 10 or more sets per week.

Let me talk you through the graph.

The Y axis shows the increase in muscle growth as a percentage. When the bars sit higher up this graph that means more muscle growth occurred.

The X axis shows the number of sets per week that each of the three groups of people undertook for the 12 week period of training. Less than 5, 5-9 or 10+ sets per week.

What can we learn from this one? :

Funnily enough, all groups saw muscle growth over the 12 weeks. The most benefit came from doing the first 4 sets (I know you’re shocked by this theme throughout this article). But was there further benefit to be gained by doing 5-9 or 10+ sets? Hell yes.3

The group who did up to 4 sets per week saw a 5.4% increase in muscle.
The group who did 5-9 sets per week saw a 6.6% increase in muscle.

That’s a jump of 1.2% muscle growth for adding up to another 4 sets per week.

The group who did 10 or more sets per week saw a 9.8% increase in muscle.

That’s a jump of 3.2% muscle growth for adding another 1 or more sets per week.

Muscle growth can still happen if you aren’t doing tonnes of sets per week, and we can expect a bit more muscle growth by doing more sets. Another reason to do some instead of nothing!

Remember that these are averages taken from a broad cohort of people across several studies, so exact muscle growth will vary person to person and depend on things including but not limited to your resistance training experience, your training quality and your muscle building potential (genetics).

What got you here (e.g. 2 years of consistent training with 5 reps per muscle group) might not get you there (more or the same rate of muscle building in the next 2 years).

How can you start moving away from all-or-nothing thinking?

Embrace imperfection, start to counteract that all or nothing thinking of yours.

You're not alone by the way. All or nothing thinking is a common thinking error, we all hold these thinking errors to varying degrees.

Here are a few things I use with my clients to help them actually start to overcome the perfectionist mindset…

Think more in grey than in black or white. There is a huge opportunity gap between 0% and 100%.
Opt for exercise targets that are ranges as opposed to a definitive number. For example, this could be “I’ll do a minimum of 5,000 steps and my optimum on a really good day will be 10,000 steps”. You could do a similar thing with nutrition too.
Start recognising and calling yourself out on perfectionism. When are you not taking action, when are you failing to finish a task and when are you giving up too soon? You have to get comfortable with things being ‘good enough’ or you’ll never make progress - in fact, by changing the way you think about your health and fitness targets, you’ll feel far less preoccupied with them and have lots more headspace for the other things in life that matter.
Prioritise consistency over intensity. High intensity action every now and again might feel attractive and meaningful at the time but in the long run you actually achieve less because it’s unsustainable. Regularly taking smaller actions over a long period of time might feel less exciting but it’s likely what will get you results ... and grants you the space to gradually add more as you go. Look what a whole year could look like if you don't mistake consistency for intensity!

It also helps to have someone on your team, who can help you recognise when perfectionism is taking over. If you’d like me to join your team and help you with all of the above, apply for coaching now.

Apply for Coaching

References

"Dose-response association between the daily step count and all ...."
Liu et al., 2019: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02640414.2022.2099186
“Dose-response associations between accelerometry measured…”
Ekelund et al., 2019: https://www.bmj.com/content/366/bmj.l4570/rapid-responses
“Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume…”
Schoenfeld et al., 2017: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27433992/

Why you don’t have to be perfect to get results!