Imagine a wall in your home. (Super exciting, I know, but bear with me for a minute: it’ll get more interesting.)
This wall is a fine wall, but you think it could be even better and decide to paint it. So you buy a gallon of your favorite color and get to work. By day’s end you’re about half finished, the wall is looking great, and you’re excited for the project’s completion.
But the next morning you wake to discover that someone had put a giant hole in the wall at some point during the night. Putting aside the mystery of who would break into your house just to sabotage your wall, you spend half the day repairing the wall and the other half re-painting what you had completed the prior day.
Day two ends with you once again feeling excited about completing the project the following day. But on day three you wake to find another giant hole in the section of the wall that you’ve already painted twice.
At this point you have a choice: The first option is to just repair and re-paint the wall like you did the day before. The second option is to find whoever keeps putting the hole in your wall, stop them from doing it again, and then repair, re-paint, and complete the project.
Of course, any logical person would opt for the second choice in this silly example. Yet when it comes to more realistic examples (like our health), we often go with the first option. We set goals—perhaps to lose weight, become more flexible, or improve our overall health—but then keep “poking holes in our walls” by continuing with suboptimal habits even while adding more optimal ones. We unintentionally sabotage our own progress without realizing it.
And that’s the decent scenario.
In the not-so-decent scenario, we may feel too busy or unprepared to even begin painting the wall in the first place. Even though we might understand that learning and improving takes time and that we don’t need to know everything about making progress when we start, breaking the inertia of our status quo takes a lot of effort, sometimes more than we have readily available.
But here’s the key that moves both scenarios to a better place: The first step to improving isn’t about being the best painter. It’s about being the kind of person who keeps the wall in good shape to begin with.
And that’s the point of today’s tip: in fitness (and plenty of other areas of life), stopping or breaking the habits that hold us back is just as important—perhaps even more so—as starting or building the habits that will move us forward.
Putting it into practice
What’s “poking holes in your wall”? Maybe it’s something like:
- Drinking alcohol too frequently.
- Relying on processed foods like boxed cereal, deli meats, or soda.
- Staying up too late or using screens (i.e. blue light), which mess with your sleep and recovery, too close to bed.
- Coming home after a long day of sitting at work, only to sit even more in front of the TV.
- Training too much without allowing for proper rest and recovery.
Really, spend a minute thinking about it. Once you’ve identified the habit, take another minute imagining how much progress you could make if you simply stopped doing it—and how much easier things might feel without that roadblock in your way.
Of course, breaking old habits is usually easier said than done. But strategies exist to make that easier too.
One quick final note: This idea is similar to—yet not quite the same as—last week’s tip about prioritizing and deprioritizing. Both are helpful for moving forward, but stopping is more definitive while deprioritizing is more about shifting focus. Accordingly, you may want to be a bit more selective about what you stop compared to what you deprioritize.