The Tea with Tina
The Tea with Tina is going to be your new favorite weekly chit-chat that will feel like a good, juicy sit-down with your BFF. This podcast isn't your average (and boring) radio talk show-styled podcast. We dig deep, get personal, and have lots of fun along the way. Hear some relatable stories and a different perspective on various topics from health and fitness to pop culture. I am Tina Wieland, a certified fitness trainer and nutrition coach. Grab your caffeinated drink of choice, get comfortable, and be ready to hear the TEA.
The Tea with Tina
229 | Consistency Over Intensity: Unlocking Your Health, Fitness, and Life Goals
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Ever wonder why the tortoise beat the hare? It wasn't speed, but consistency that won the race. Join me as I break down the real secret to achieving your health, fitness, and life goals: showing up consistently. We'll discuss balancing workout intensity, listening to your body, and why flexibility is key to preventing burnout and keeping your motivation high. I share personal stories from my journey, including the challenges and joys of setting up a podcast studio and launching a new venture, Fitness by the Minute. You'll also hear about my experience managing Hashimoto's and how it has taught me to adjust my efforts according to life's seasons.
In another insightful chapter, we unravel why moderation is your best friend when it comes to diet and fitness. Occasional treats can actually support sustainable eating habits by preventing binge cycles. Plus, we talk about how to maintain healthy habits even in the busiest times, ensuring you're always making progress, however small. Using relatable analogies and anecdotes, this episode promises to provide you with practical advice and inspiration to keep showing up, consistently, in all areas of your life. Whether you're in a hectic period or enjoying a more relaxed phase, this balanced approach will help you build momentum and avoid setbacks. Don't miss out on these valuable insights!
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Hello friends, and welcome back to another episode of the Tea with Tina podcast. On today's episode, I'm going to be telling you, and sharing with you, why consistency in your health and fitness journey and, quite frankly, anywhere else in your life is far more important than intensity. Consistency is more important than intensity. Important than intensity. Consistency is more important than intensity. Learning to control your intensity, though, however, is also a wonderful, refined skill that we will be chatting about. But before we do that, I'm going to give you a little chit chat update. Feel free to check out the show notes and skip past this part if you want to get into the meat of the content, but without further ado, let's dive in. Welcome to the Tea with Tina, your favorite podcast, where we talk all things health, fitness, lifestyle and maybe a little bit of tea gets spilled. We chat all about this in a super casual environment, so grab your beverage of choice, sit back, relax and enjoy. Okay, so, like I said before we dive into things. I want to just give you a little bit of an update that kind of does relate to what we're talking about. Relate to what we're talking about.
Speaker 1:I am podcasting currently with my phone plugged in because it needs to charge because I'm in between classes right now. Today is my split day where I do some in-person training and classes. In the morning I have a little bit of a break three to four hours. I come home, do some computer work and then I go back out and then I'm going to the fair tonight hours. I come home, do some computer work and then I go back out and then I'm going to the fair tonight. So that's fun, but yeah, so that's a lot of chaos, right? Like me trying to squeeze in a podcast while my phone is plugged in and it needs to needs to charge up. And I think that relates to the fact of our messy action and I keep talking about how I want to have a kind of visual podcast setup, like I want to have the talk show style where we have a pretty background. I sit down, I video record this so I can edit some clips for you guys, and I would love to do that. I'm just trying to figure out how I'm going to make that work, because I have an apartment and I'm limited with how I can style things.
Speaker 1:It feels like very messy action, plus the time, which I don't think people realize, which I'm not complaining, but I'm somebody who always likes to know the how behind things, like I always love to see how celebrities do things and what goes into making a movie. You'd be amazed at what actors and actresses have to go through to prep for a role. It's like far more work than what you think it's worth. Like, like you know what mean and that's how I feel it is like with podcasts and editing. Sometimes it's like you know you're setting up ring lights and you have to, like, purchase an app that's usually cost money to you know, edit your videos and record your videos and you have to think about the camera and set up your tripod. You need to script things and then the editing process and adding captions and uploading to youtube. There's just a lot okay, um, and I enjoy doing it, but I'm just trying to figure out the efficiency of that, and that's also something else that I've been doing recently is I have been refining. That has been probably one of the most favorite parts of me owning my business and just being full-time in my own business. It gives me the time and space to truly just figure out like a routine that works for me, because I feel like I have a very creative kind of wacky brain and I'm learning. I usually do stuff messy and like the hard way first. It's very rare that I'm just like an efficient person, but I find joy in sitting down and figuring out, like how can we make this easier? Like I look at my client programming, like systems that go on behind the scenes, a check-in process, scheduling clients, just efficiency things, even social media, creating content, like how am I going to be more efficient? And I think you guys can do this, because this can apply to anything. This can work with your life and I do it in my health and fitness as well.
Speaker 1:I recently, in this season of my life, I'm actually taking my own fitness classes with my clients At least two to three days out of the week that I teach Because I teach four days a week. Monday is usually free for all day because that's my work from home day, but I'll do two to three workouts with them, so it's, you know, knocking out a ton of things at once. Um, I stretch with my class on wednesday. I love that because my muscles are usually sore, and then wednesday I'll usually kind of do my own workout. Um, if I have the time, or sometimes I will take my own class like I'm teaching a class tonight. My muscles are are pretty sore, so we'll see, but that's an efficient way, at least for me to do things, and that's actually another reason I created my Fitness by the Minute subscription recently, which I don't know if the podcast has heard about that but Fitness by the Minute is a monthly subscription. It's only $25 a month. I made it low cost for everybody, easily accessible. They're workouts that are 30 minutes or less and require only a dumbbell or a pair of dumbbells, body weight and or bands. Okay, so it's meant to be done at home.
Speaker 1:I have fresh programs and themes coming out every month for September. At the time of me recording For September 1st, we're doing Back to Basics. I'm really excited about that. Back to School, back to Basics. I also made a really big commitment for YouTube. I'm actually filming, which is why I'm really sore. I'm filming the workouts for the whole month, so there's going to be 20 total workouts, five workouts a week, monday through Friday. I'm going to upload them every day to YouTube so you can follow along and get a taste of the program.
Speaker 1:If you want to join us, you can hop into the app to be able to track your progress. Plus, you get my on-demand workout library. So this is a structured program, but you'll also get the on-demand workouts where it's like, oh, you want to do, you know, a yoga stretch, or oh, you want to try out, um, a quick 10 minute ab workout. So I have follow along workouts in there as well, on top of, like the nutrition tracking, um, syncing up your smartwatch, tracking your stats. There's a lot of great stuff in there, but there was a need for short, effective workouts that can be done anywhere, and that's why I created that. So that's really exciting, um, and then the the YouTube commitment has made it even more exciting. So that's been a fun thing to do and that's kind of inspired that efficiency as well.
Speaker 1:Um, because I'm like, okay, I gotta film these, I gotta edit them, I gotta upload them. How can I be efficient and batch things? Because I've been really opposed to that kind of stuff. I'm more like a go with the flow kind of person when it comes to, uh, creating, but I'm learning to be a little bit more scheduled, but going with the flow when I feel pulled to do so. But it's always good to have a base and I think you can learn from that as well is always have a structure, have a plan in place to fall back on and to guide you.
Speaker 1:But maybe that day you had a workout planned and it was an hour workout but you had to cut it to 30 minutes. Like, did you deviate a little bit? Yes, but you didn't like go completely off. Like the likelihood of you falling through with a workout if you didn't have anything scheduled goes down considerably, right. So I keep drilling that into my brain as well. Like create a plan. Like for me posting on social media, like I'll create posts, but maybe one day I'll be like, oh, I don't really feel like posting this. This just doesn't feel like the vibe today, so I'll move it to another day and then maybe I'll create something off the cuff. But the other days, if I'm like struggling and I'm like, oh my God, what do I post, I have something to fall back on, right. So again, it can relate to you guys.
Speaker 1:And same thing with nutrition. This is super important. With nutrition, meal planning, how can you be efficient? Create a system for yourself that works for you. Create your grocery list. Plan out your meals for the week, prep what you need to prep. Look at your week and see what days are going to be busier. You know the busier days have food prepped. If you have a less busy day, maybe that's a day you can cook. You know, it's been a game changer for me. It's been life-saving. It helps with my nutrition.
Speaker 1:Me doing all this stuff, I've actually dropped about five pounds. I was like in maintenance mode, you know. I didn't feel like, oh my god, I need to lose all this weight, but I just wanted to tighten up my routine and I'm kind of now that I feel Good. Uh, because my thyroid meds were off a little bit, so I was feeling really tired and a ton of brain fog. I feel really good now, like a normal human, um, and I can think. So I'm like let's, let's push it a little bit right, let's turn the dial up. I was at maintenance mode, but let's turn that dial up and see what we can do. So that's been fun so far. Okay, I think that's kind of all I wanted to chat about before we actually got into the consistency component.
Speaker 1:For September, though, we have a lot of fun things if you're listening in real time. I'm running a seven-day reset challenge August 26th. I don't know if this podcast will be out already, but we're running that in the Facebook group, so that's going to be a fun little challenge. Then we're going to run into the September month of Fitness by the Minute with the daily YouTube uploads. So be sure to subscribe to my YouTube if you want to follow along. And then my six-week challenge, guys, six-week challenge for fall is going to be the end of September. September 23rd is when we're going to be doing that. Okay, so be on the lookout for that. And you know, I'm sure there's going to be a lot more fun things along the way.
Speaker 1:But September is the time the kids go back to school, it's time to get back into a routine, or, you know, winding down from the summer, and it's time to kind of like, stop taking 20 vacations and eating ice cream and all those crazy things and get back into a routine, right, right. So, anyways, transitioning into the episode today. What was I talking about? Consistency is more important than intensity. Progress, not perfection. I preach this all the time.
Speaker 1:But what does it mean? So, showing up consistently, which consistently? And consistency does not mean you need to be there every day. It's just saying, if I were to look at your reps over a period of time like out of 30 days. I would say consistency is like 70 to 90% give or take. Right, so you're consistently doing something. It doesn't mean you're gonna be there every day, but most of the time 80 to 70, 80, 90% of the time you are showing up for that thing, whether it's a habit, whether it's your workouts, whether it's hitting your nutrition goals, going to work, whatever it may be You're doing it consistently. Right, and think about work that way. You're consistent with work. You show up most days, but sometimes you get sick so you have to call off. Sometimes you have doctor's appointments, sometimes you take off for vacation. That's how your fitness schedule should look as well. Right, consistency, because if we focus on intensity, which a lot of us do, is we go, oh man.
Speaker 1:The best way to get results is to be optimal, which you're right, but it's not sustainable because you go in and you're like well, I need to work out six days a week and I'm going to be in this super strict calorie deficit. I'm not allowed ice cream, I'm eating perfect, and it's great. That will get you results. But the problem is, is it's very hard to maintain right, to be that perfect all of the time. So you inevitably fall off after a week, two weeks a month, if you're lucky and then you have no willpower left. You're tired because you've been eating no food. You're sore maybe you got an injury because you were working way too hard too soon and then you eat yourself. You eat your feelings away, you don't do anything because you're too sore to move, you feel guilty, you don't go back to the gym, and it's probably three months until you even think about restarting your routine again. Right, I probably described what has happened to you multiple times.
Speaker 1:So this is why it's important to build momentum and be consistent, because, even though your brain's going to fight you because that's just how we're programmed in this world your brain's gonna fight you and go. Oh, you know you're lifting and it doesn't really feel that heavy. It just feels you know, okay, you need to do more, but your other brain needs to tell you hey, if you do more, you're probably gonna be really sore and you're not gonna be able to walk, so let's keep it moderate. Same thing with eating. Oh, you're only in a little bit of a deficit. You're eating a Reese's cup today even though you did everything perfect like. Isn't that going to make you a failure? It's like, no, the Reese's cup is going to help with your cravings so you don't binge eat tomorrow night after dinner. So you gotta go at it moderate.
Speaker 1:It's like the tortoise and the hare. The torto tortoise was slow the whole race, right, but he was steady. He put one foot in front of the other. He kept going. What happened to the hare? The hare was running really fast but he ran into all these obstacles. He got cocky, you know. He thought he was going to win. And guess who ended up winning at the end? The tortoise, because despite, you know, the hare rushing through, he ran into wins.
Speaker 1:And that's exactly how your health and fitness routine is. And it's more of a mindset game, honestly, than anything else, because it's your brain's gonna keep telling you like, like I was saying before, push harder, do this, do that. And you just have to train your brain to think differently. And really, the only way you're gonna do that is by continuing to show up consistently, imperfectly, even when it feels uncomfortable, even when you're like, oh, I feel so gross and I'm like walking and I could be doing better and oh, I don't want to meal prep. And this because when you put the reps in, you're telling your brain hey, it's okay, you made it through, you can do this when times are hard, when you feel icky, when you know this and that happens and it gets easier every time.
Speaker 1:Right now, going on the other end of the spectrum, how we're talking about intensity, I said consistency is better than intensity, but in the fitness space at least, controlling your intensity is a very important skill, because I see so many people usually throwing themselves into workouts. Um, they want to go super hard for whatever reason. They feel like it's going to burn them the most calories. They're going to lose weight the fastest. Um, you know, there's so many reasons. They feel guilty about their bodies and, like I binged a thousand calories last night, two thousand calories, three thousand calories I need to do like a hundred burpees to work this off and two hours of cardio and it's like you know what happens.
Speaker 1:Like I said, you get super sore, you have a higher chance of injury. That's not sustainable to keep up with and you're just in this roller coaster, right, and you're probably gonna be super hungry because you just burned all those calories and your body's like please let me recover. You're probably going to be super hungry because you just burned all those calories and your body's like please, let me recover, so it's just, it's a disaster, right? So we have to learn to control our intensity, which is why you probably hear me talk about this. I tell it to my clients all the time View your fitness as a dial. We got to dial things up and dial things down, and this is also why it's so important to be in tune with our bodies.
Speaker 1:I think that's where a lot of us miss the mark. We're so worried about work and running around and our schedule's so busy and we're thinking about this and that that we're not really in tune with our bodies. We just do what we think we should do and we don't listen to the feedback of like oh, when I ate that meal, it didn't have any protein, so I got hungry. Like an hour later, instead, you just randomly feel like you're hungry and you think, oh well, I'm eating healthy. I don't know why I'm so hungry and I'm like well, it's actually because you didn't eat enough protein. Or like I'm doing all this cardio, I don't know why I'm losing not losing weight, and it's like well, you're doing like two hours a day. And then you're like way overating because all that cardio is making you hungry, like I can name a thousand scenarios, and being in tune with your body is one of the most important tools for controlling intensity. Now you may say, tina, how am I in tune with my body? It's a lot of. This is a process, if you can't tell, but everything kind of connects. It's a circle Learning to, like we were talking about, be efficient with your schedule.
Speaker 1:Kind of do a time audit, assess your things that are going on and think like what is just too much right now, what is not a necessity, what do I need to pull back from to gain some time, to gain some clarity? You know, have some time to decompress your thoughts. Journal out, do yoga, meditate. You know, have some time to decompress your thoughts, journal out, do yoga, meditate. Um, you know, maybe working out is a way that you clear your mind in a healthy way. There's so many ways that we can kind of bring our stress down, and it comes down person to person, um, because everybody's situation is a little bit different. But you do need to do the activities. That's going to allow you to kind of reach a healthy baseline so you can listen to the feedback that your body is giving you. And this allows us again to dial things up and dial things down, because then what happens is when we become aware of ourselves, we're able to assess our situations.
Speaker 1:Because this is what I'm doing I'm always analyzing where I'm at and you know a simple way you can do this is do daily, weekly and monthly check-ins with yourself. Take a couple minutes. That's why I give my clients weekly check-ins. It forces them to look back on their week and go, how was my water intake, how was my sleep, how was my stress? And they can think and they can go oh man, you know, I've been waking up in the middle of the night, or oh, I think my water intake slipped, or oh, I did really well with my protein. Like, do that daily, weekly, monthly, do little mini checks, because then this brings awareness to what you're doing, you can see patterns and you can assess, and this is kind of what coaching helps you do.
Speaker 1:So if you feel really overwhelmed by this and you're like I don't want to do this, it's kind of like me with like programming and computer stuff like a lot, like I'm pretty good with the computer but when it comes to like building certain things and like technical stuff I don't know, my mind goes blank. I have no desire to teach myself how to do it, so. So I'm like I will pay somebody to do this for me. And if that's you with like fitness and you're like listen, just tell me what I need to do. Like, obviously you need to do some work, but I will guide you and say, hey, this is where the direction we need to go and this is what you should be doing, based off of the feedback that you gave me. Then you need to apply for coaching. Check out the link in the bio or you can head to my website, tinawildandfitnesscom. I would love to work with you because I do love guiding people through this process and letting them see truly what it's like to live a sustainable, healthy lifestyle that fits their needs and their goals right.
Speaker 1:But what I was saying was the intensity. Going back to the intensity of when we can assess our situations and we're doing our check-ins with ourselves, we can say, oh, like, look at your time in your life, because we automatically think that if we cannot give 100%, we are failures. This is not regulating our intensity right, and that also affects our consistency, because we're like, oh well, if it's not 100%, I don't want anything to do with it. And what in life? What in life are you constantly giving 100% for Nothing? Your relationships, your job, nothing you are giving 100% for okay. You are giving 100% for okay. So you know, why should you expect anything more from your? You know, workouts and your nutrition.
Speaker 1:Now, it is important that we always strive to be better and show up, just like we strive to show up for work and show up for our relationships and everything else in our lives. But sometimes we miss the mark. We're human, we're imperfect. Things happen and I think that's important to acknowledge and just to give ourselves some grace and not beat ourselves up and let a less than you know perfect day hinder our progress, moving forward, thinking that we just, you know, ruined everything and why even continue to go forward? Okay, um, but yeah, assessing our situations and you know you might be in a busy, like, what is, what season in life are you? Are you in a busy season? Maybe you're working more, more work, or, um, you're dealing with an injury or a sickness and, like you can only maintain, that's where I was at for a long time and, um, I've been kind of weaving in and out of that.
Speaker 1:I would say it's progressively getting better as I'm navigating my hashimotos. But yeah, it was frustrating. But I did what I needed to do, I took control over what I could, but my workouts didn't look exactly how I wanted them to. They still don't, but I'm getting better. A lot of things didn't look like how I wanted them to, but I showed up the best that I can. And then, of course, on the other end of the spectrum, there may be times maybe you're a teacher that's home, you know, during the summer your schedule's free, so you're like, yeah, I can dial things up in the summer. I love working on my fitness in the summer and really prepping my meals perfectly and doing all this, and that's great.
Speaker 1:If you are in a season where you can give more, give more, take advantage of it, right. And then you know there's seasons where you just kind of coast and you sit in the middle. But you know, being consistent and creating momentum and showing up whether it's bad, good, neutral allows you to maintain momentum when you do decide to take a break, whether you're sick, whether you go on vacation, whatever it is, and that's why we continue to show up and put in the reps. Because again, it's not like these drastic things happen where it's like oh, I lost 30 pounds, oh, I gained it back. And then some, oh, I lost 10 pounds, I gained it back. No, it'll be more.
Speaker 1:Like me personally, when I'm in maintenance, I'll be, I would say, plus or minus five pounds in my maintenance phase. You know so. Sometimes you weigh five pounds less, sometimes you weigh five pounds more, sometimes you're in the middle. You know you go on vacation, but then you know I'm coasting and I'm in a happy place with my weight. You know I'm not shredded, I'm not hitting any PRs in my training, but I'm fulfilling my healthy habits and my lifestyle. Right.
Speaker 1:But if I'm ready and I'm in a season where I'm like you know what, I'm gonna tighten things up, I'm ready to go. You know I have the space to do that. But then again, on the opposite side, if things do happen where they slip, if I were to gain weight or lose muscle or whatever it may be, I still have my habits to fall back on. Like, maybe I'm only giving 20% because that's all I can give, and yeah, I'm still going to gain weight, still whatever. But instead of gaining like 20, 30 pounds, maybe only gain like five or 10. Right, so I want you to think about that. Right, think about how you're dialing things down, dialing things up, controlling your intensity and managing things. Things down, dialing things up, controlling your intensity and managing things.
Speaker 1:Sorry if my podcast abruptly cut off because I heard like the loudest slam and there's like a dog barking and there's a child crying and I was like what is going on? So I had to look outside and I have no idea what it was, but I just need to pause to make sure, like nothing fell in my house or something like that. But yeah, so I kind of wanted to wrap up the podcast here, just a topic that I thought was interesting that I wanted to dive into a little bit in a more casual way to give you some perspective. So I hope that this helped. Again, remember, it's a process, it takes time, but the fact that you're listening to this podcast shows that you want to learn and you're training your brain. So keep on chugging forward and thank you for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next one. Bye.
