“All or nothing! Give your 100% in whatever you do! Reach for the skies!” These are some quotes that many people live by. You have to go all in if you want something. You have to push yourself to the hardest to get results. You have to aim for the highest if not there’s no point even trying. Or at least really close. Sometimes it isn’t distinct in the way that people verbalize it, but it is implicit in the way they discuss it.

It seems like that’s the hype now. And I can see why. I used to feel that way too. If I want to achieve something, in this case to build muscle and lose fat, I should make sure I am doing every single thing right. If I’m serious about my fitness results, I should clock the optimum number of workouts, eat the exact number of calories, protein, fat and carbs, wake up and sleep at the same time every day, and adhere to all the things I set myself out to do. And if I don’t, I’m just not maximizing what I can do and it’ll be a huge waste.

But is this really true? Do you need to give your 100% to achieve your fitness goals? If not, how much is enough? Read on to find out more!

*Do you need to weigh your food before every meal?*

What Might a 100% Look Like?

100% Diet Adherence

You can’t miss your scheduled meal timings. You can’t eat any sugary stuff or fatty stuff. You can only eat whole foods, chicken breasts, broccoli and water. If you have one extra almond from what you should have, you’re done. You’re cut off. You’ve failed.

100% Hard Training

You have to reach failure at every set. And that’s not enough. After failure, you drop the weights and continue to hit failure until you are unable to squeeze out another rep. You can never miss any training days. You can never push back your training. That is when you truly train hard enough.

Interestingly, many liken hard training to waking up early to run. They think that you have to wake up at 5am daily to clock your morning runs. And that’s the only way you can get in shape. And if you can’t commit to that, then you’re not cut out to be fit.

*“Make sure you’re up and running before the sun rises!” Something I thought was true if I wanted to go all-in to achieve my fitness goals.*

Why You Shouldn’t Aim for 100%

Results tend to lie on a spectrum and are scaled with effort. If you give 50% effort, you often get 50% results. If you give 90% effort, you often get 90% results. It isn’t all or nothing. Any effort is better than no effort, and 90% effort gets you almost the same result as 100% effort.

If that is the case, then why not just put in 100% effort? Well, as you approach 100%, things get exponentially tougher. In some cases, you can actually never hit 100%. This is true not only for fitness, but for any process. Using the analogy of cleaning a room, how much effort does it take you to take 90% of dust out of the room? Probably 1 hour of vacuuming, mopping and wiping off surfaces. What about taking 99% of dust out of the room? You probably need to take out all your furniture and clean them up more thoroughly using a more powerful vacuum and stronger disinfectants. This will probably take 4 hours and maybe an extra $200. That’s already an exponential rise. What about taking 100% of the dust out of your room? You definitely can’t do that. You’ll probably need to throw away all your furniture, remove all the flooring and tiles, and vacuum-seal the room so no foreign particles can enter while you’re doing an extreme makeover. And every time someone enters the room, they must be disinfected and washed down completely. And it makes no sense to carry this out.

So that’s the same for fitness. Following 90% of your plan will get you amazing results. But if you really want to get close to 100% results, you have to work disproportionally harder for not that much of an extra result. You have to leave early for the gym to avoid traffic. You have to weigh every single morsel of food you put in your mouth. And trying to get from amazing results to perfect will burn you out for no good reason. As a result, many are tempted to abandon their goals completely.

*Putting too much pressure on yourself will only result in giving up even before trying long enough.*

However, there are some grains of truth to aim for 100%. If you aim for too low a goal, it might result in slacking so much that you barely get results. Instead, aim for a high but realistic standard, like at least 90%. For example, if you just aim to go to the gym once a week for an hour, or once a fortnight, and expect to get good results, then it is likely too low an effort. If you do a very low amount of work, you might not even get any results. So just because you don’t have to give your 100%, that doesn’t mean you should just put in minimal effort. At least 90% is a good and possible number to aim for.

Another danger with this mindset is that although you have some leeway to make “mistakes” and go off track, sometimes going overboard can derail all your progress. For example, you might be hitting all the checkboxes from Monday to Friday, clocking in all your workouts and following your caloric targets for the week. However, on weekends you decide to let loose to the extent of eating 2 full pizzas and a tub of ice cream for dinner, then a burger and a bag of chips for supper after. You might think to yourself that this is just 2 out of 7 days a week that you’re not adherent, which technically is 86% adherent, but in reality, you might be in a caloric surplus which gives you zero results or even backwards results. And this is actually quite common! One full day of eating or even one crazy meal can derail all your progress for the week. So it is important to know what metric we are measuring our progress against - calories, not number of meals.

*Gymming once a week is not recommended if you are serious about building muscle.*

What You Should Do Instead

In terms of calories, it is really an all-or-nothing in the sense that if you eat at a caloric deficit, you will lose weight. If not, you will not. As simple as that. So what you should do is to get your calories into the deficit or surplus that you need, with no exceptions on a weekly average. You can erase all your progress with just one meal of eating too much or too little, depending on whether you are trying to lose weight or gain weight respectively.

In terms of training, train at or above your Minimum Effective Volume (MEV), which is the least amount of volume it will take to grow muscle. Recalling from my previous article, you’ll need about 10-20 hard sets per muscle group per week. If you train below that, you will not be getting any results. If you’re doing 3 sets of bench press per week and wonder why your chest isn’t growing, then maybe you should add another 6 sets of chest exercises, which will for sure be above your MEV!

After that, scale your effort according to your preference in result speed and sustainability. If you’re just training for fun and not expecting crazy results, then just hitting your MEV and eating in a deficit/surplus depending on your goals will give you results, but results might come at a slow pace. But if you want maximum results, obviously you have to put in more effort, more sets, and eat more/less. However, you’ll need to balance sustainability here. If you’re going to scale to a level that after 3 weeks, it saps so much mental energy off you till you give up, then you should be setting your effort below that breaking point. Find a level that you can come back week after week and you know that you can keep doing it.

*The more you train, the faster you’ll get to your goals. Simple as that? Not so fast. Remember to factor in sustainability too!*

Conclusion

I hope you have seen that all-or-nothing in fitness isn’t true. There is no sense in doing that because what will only happen is that you get burned out and give up halfway. Take your time, come in slowly, find out where your limits are, stay under them but push yourself bit by bit. With that, you’ll get the best results that you can possibly get.

P.S. - need more help with why your diet isn’t working and what to do about it? Get my free e-book by filling in your email in the footer below!