Sort out your Big Rocks first!

Have you ever

💊 watched an ad for a health supplement and thought that this little pill was it, the magic bullet to cure you of all your ailments?

🤸 been to the gym and seen some ridiculous well built guy or gal do a fancy looking exercise you’d never seen before, and thought you need to that that exact exercise to your training routine to get their amazing physique?

😴 felt the need to get the latest sleep gadget to finally cure your insomnia and improve your sleep quality?
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The bad news, if you’ve answered yes to any of these, is that you’ve fallen into the “sand before rocks” trap. The good news is you’re hardly the only one!

Source: https://behaviour101.com/2020/01/26/the-rocks-pebbles-and-sand-of-behaviour-management

Question: How do you fill a glass jar with as many big rocks, medium sized pebbles and tiny grains of sand as possible?

Answer: You put the big rocks in first, then you add as many pebbles as will still fit in the gaps between the rocks, and then - and only then - do you pour in the sand so it can fill up all remaining gaps and cracks.

Try it the other way around - filling the jar up to say half with sand - and you’ll find not as many pebbles and hardly any rocks will fit in.
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The answer seems obvious, right? And yet, when it comes to health and wellbeing, we often go try to go about it in exactly this wrong sequence!

Training

Instead of simply making sure you show up to the gym 3-4x per week and do the basics well, you are always looking for the new shiny object, the bicep-curls-standing-one-legged-on-a-bosu-ball kind of exercise that will magically give you great results after just two training sessions.

Doctors and serious coaches (like me) will always tell you that solid foundational habits such as eating enough lean protein and vegetables are the key to both health and optimal weight management, and yet you switch from one type of diet to the next quicker than you change clothes. Always in the hope that the next diet will magically melt the pounds off your body like ice in the sunshine.

Nutrition

Sleep

You have trouble falling and/or staying asleep, so you chug down melatonin pills, all while furiously staring at your laptop screen and plowing through work emails until you quite literally collapse from exhaustion, instead of allowing your body to “wind down” naturally and gradually.

Those things are the grains of sand, friends!

So, the next time you are looking for that magic bullet, that secret little extra, take a look at your jar first, and ask yourself if you've put all the big rocks in place already.

Not sure what those rocks should be? Or feel like you're doing it all already but are not progressing? Well, that's when you reach out to people like me!