If you know me or my writing, you’ll know that I struggle with confidence. It’s been like this for as long as I can remember.
There’s often some type of self doubt, anxiety, or imposter syndrome hovering around me. Even when I’m at my highest point, I feel a black cloud in the background. I can be in the zone and feeling super capable one minute – only to feel like a complete fraud the next.
Recently a switch flipped in me, and I’ve been able to tackle these issues like I’ve never been able to before.
I absolutely smashed May with 80%+ consistency across the board. The goal for this month was exactly the same, as it would be for the rest of the year. You might have already guessed from the title of this post, I might be in trouble.
I spent at least fifteen years chasing specific goals and perfection . I knew in my heart that it was wrong and making me miserable, but I still kept doing it.
Over the last eighteen months, I’ve begun to think about things completely differently. I built a whole new mentality and mindset. This has helped me transform myself and achieve more than I could possibly imagine.
As I reflect on how I’ve changed, there are five things that stand out as making the difference.
My goal for May was 80% across the board for all eight habits. This was very ambitious for two reasons. I took a lot of April off, so I was definitely feeling a bit rusty with my discipline and routines. Also, 10K steps is a new habit I am building, and I only had one month at 68% under my belt (March).
I watch this video from Joe Rogan back at least a few times a week. When you get used to eating like this, you realise there’s a whole new way of feeling and living your life. I know that sounds hyperbolic – but it’s absolutely true. It’s night and day.
April was a very unusual month for habits because I was on holiday for most of it. I therefore decided to let go of any goals or expectations for the month. Here’s how it looked, and what I learned!
My goal for March was to keep all seven habits at 80% or over. This would make it the third consecutive month with all habits in the green. This would be an important milestone, because it feels like a sensible benchmark for knowing I’ve firmly established a habit. Let’s see how I did!
I read and listen to a lot of stuff every week (articles, podcasts, videos, books etc.). I like to think I’m good at finding content that helps shift my thinking in a significant way, and also gives practical advice. Things I can implement today, which immediately make a positive change in my life.
Technology has made it much easier to be fit and healthy. There’s no app that can make you exercise or put the right foods in your mouth – you have to do that yourself. But, there are now some brilliant products and apps that help to take some of the friction out of the process.
Here are seven health and fitness apps that, with the exception of one, I use every day:
Whoop
I’ve used Whoop for nearly four years. I use the app a handful of times a day and have referred many people to it.
It’s a wearable that tracks your sleep, recovery, and daily effort. It tracks all of the usual health markers – heart rate variability, resting heart rate, skin temperature, blood oxygen and respiratory rate. They also have proprietary recovery and strain scores which help you understand when to push and rest.
I love their sleep tracking. Sleep is a massive focus for me and I like to understand how long and well I’ve slept the night before. More recently, I’ve also been using their live activity feature for heart rate zone 2 training sessions.
One of the other reasons I love Whoop is because of the insights it gives you on your behaviours. Use whoop for a few weeks and you’ll realise how terrible alcohol is for your sleep, heart rate variability and resting heart rate. You’re almost guaranteed a red recovery score the night after a few drinks. That was a huge eye opener for me.
If I could only keep one of my health and fitness apps, I would choose Whoop – hands down.
MyFitnessPal
I’ve been using MyFitnessPal for the last six months or so. It’s a food diary that makes it super easy to track your calories and nutrients. You can scan the barcode of any food, or search their crowdsourced database.
I use it to track everything I eat. It helps me stick to my target calories and macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrates) each day. It also gives me a nice previous seven day trend of how things are going. Even for someone like me who has a very good understanding of what foods contain, it steers my decisions for food daily. Tracking my food intake more closely is easily the most impactful thing I’ve done for my health in the last 6 months. I’m making better choices. I’m also lighter, leaner and feel way better.
Apple Health
Apple Health has only been something I’ve been using for the past 6 weeks. The only thing I use it for is to track my daily steps, which has become a recent focus of mine. And it does that nicely!
Pliability
Pliability is one of two apps I use to take the guesswork out of mobility. It focuses on static stretching routines, combining mindfulness and breathing techniques too. Kinda, yoga’ery.
It has a mobility test you can do, which then personalises your experience. It also has a new session that appears every day, as well as a number of paths you can follow too (lower back, upper body, ready to run etc.). The standout aspect of Pliability is quality. The app is well put together and the videos and narration is super high quality.
I tend to just dip in and out of the daily sessions, but will sometimes follow a path if I get a specific injury.
GOWOD
GOWOD is the second of two apps I use for mobility. It works much the same as Pliability in that it has a mobility test, personalised experience, daily sessions and paths you can follow. But, it’s more focused around dynamic exercises, and incorporates some tools like foam rollers, massage balls, bands etc.
The other cool thing about GOWOD is it can build a personalised warm up for your training session. You can select what exercises you are going to be doing, and it will give you a personalised warm up for that session.
GOWOD is a great compliment to Pliability. Between the two, my mobility needs are nicely covered!
TrueCoach
TrueCoach is a platform / app that’s built for personal trainers. My personal trainer (Jamie) uses it to lay out all of my training sessions for the week. It’s easy to follow the workouts, record your results and look back on previous sessions too (super useful to remember last week’s progress).
You’ll only find yourself using TrueCoach if you have a personal trainer who is using the platform. But, I wanted to give it a mention, because it’s a really nice app.
Forth
I use Forth to get my blood work done. Their health tests and platform are very slick. I had my blood taken at a nearby SuperDrug and within 72 hours, the results of 44 biomarkers were available – with notes from a GP. Their platform (website and app) shows everything really nicely and there’s a lot of advice on how to interpret and improve your results.
With health as a big focus of mine, getting blood work done has become something I’ve prioritised in the last couple of years. And Forth makes everything super easy and affordable.
If you know of a good health and fitness app that I’m missing, I’d love to hear about it. Let me know 🙂
Consistency is by far the most important factor in achieving long-term results. Small actions taken consistently, really do add up to some very significant results over the long-term.
Consistency is open to interpretation though. Doing something 100% of the time is being consistent. So, what’s 90%? What’s 80%? Where do you draw the line?
