How to Get More Fitness Results for Less Effort (The Pareto Rule) | Ep 189

What if doing LESS is the answer to more results overall...your fitness, training, nutrition, and anything else going on in your life?

Imagine achieving 80% of your fitness goals with just 20% of your efforts. Today is the first Wednesday episode where we apply engineering frameworks to evidence-based fitness. After all, engineers have made it their craft to optimize results with as few resources as possible through simple, elegant, and effective solutions.

One such framework is the Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule (not to be confused with the 80% whole foods "rule" for nutrition). This rule is a way to rebalance all the important but time-consuming things in your life so you can free up time, reduce stress, and STILL get the results you want.

This episode will guide you through identifying the most impactful actions you can take in areas like strength training, nutrition, sleep, and stress management, so you can break through plateaus and optimize your time effectively.

Join us as we kick off a new series that merges engineering principles with fitness strategies. We'll dissect how to evaluate your current efforts across various health areas, revealing where you might be overcommitted and how to reallocate those efforts for maximum results.

You can now book a FREE 15-minute Rapid Nutrition Assessment, designed to fine-tune your strategy, identify your #1 roadblock, and give you a personalized 3-step action plan in a fast-paced 15 minutes.

Click to book a Rapid Nutrition Assessment while there are slots open this week.

Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:00

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you're probably doing more than you need to do to get the results that you want in many cases. It's surprising, I know, because in some cases maybe you're not training, maybe you're not getting enough steps, maybe you're not getting enough sleep, and we talk about those a lot. But today we're going to focus on where you might be out of balance you might be doing too much in some areas for the results that you're getting and a way that we can rebalance that using a powerful principle from engineering, so that you can know where you're overdoing it and where you might need to step it up a little bit. And we're going to deep dive into how you can apply that to your fitness journey to work smarter, more efficiently and break through any of the frustrations or plateaus you've been experiencing because you're not sure how to fit it all in. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're kicking off our new Wednesday episodes, where we apply principles from engineering to health and fitness, something that I don't think you're gonna find out there very often at all. We talk about evidence-based fitness and science quite a bit. We also talk about applying psychology to health and fitness, but there's not really anybody taking the principles from one of the most important fields on the planet engineering, which I have a very long, rigorous background in and applying that to fitness. And so you're going to get a new angle on Wednesdays going forward and there will only be three episodes a week now, three higher quality episodes that I'm spending more time making sure to get you what you want and need to really take your results to the next level, rather than just quickly pumping out a bunch of episodes and overwhelming you. And we're going to touch on that principle today of how less is more and how you can apply a principle to your overall fitness and nutrition strategy and make it a little bit more efficient and less time consuming. That's what we're going to talk about today, and it's a principle called the Pareto principle. It's the 80-20 principle, but you might've heard 80-20 used in different contexts like 80% whole foods. That's not what we're talking about. I'm going to explain in a little bit and, of course, before we dive in, as always, if you enjoy these concepts, if you enjoy the show if you want more content on building muscle, losing fat, improving your health and physique, especially from a different angle, right where we're more intelligent about it. We want to take advantage of the limited time that we have so that we can really enjoy life to the fullest. I want you to hit the follow button right now to help more people find the show, but also help you never miss another episode. So let's get into it.

Philip Pape: 2:49

Today. This, again, is going to be a little bit less scripted on Wednesdays. Our Monday episodes will be the more traditional deep dives. For example, next Monday's episode will be on my stair step fat loss approach, what it is, how it compares to the traditional approach and how you can apply it to potentially make a fat loss phase much easier. And then on Wednesdays, like today, today's, the very first one you are going to hear me take something from engineering and apply it to fitness and nutrition. And then Fridays are our guest episodes, and sometimes we'll mix it up a little bit, but that's the general idea.

Philip Pape: 3:25

So here's the common issue that I want to address today that we all experience. We always fall into the trap of thinking that more is better, right? More sets, more exercises, more supplements, even more protein, whatever it is that more, more, more. And at some point we hit diminishing returns with some of those things. Right, we only have so much time in the day, we only have so many resources, we only have so much money, we only have so much mental energy and there's only so much of that energy you can put into any one thing, and I'm guilty of this. But there are certain things I like more than others, so I will spend more time on them, even if it doesn't produce much for the effort. Right, and as an engineer by background, I see this as a classic case of inefficient resource allocation. Right, in engineering, we're always looking for ways to optimize systems to get the most output for the least input, and if you can apply that principle to your life, it's going to make things a whole lot less stressful and a lot easier. And I'm going to break it down and make it simple. Even though I'm talking about engineering, I am not expecting you to, you know, deal with jargon or lingo or any of that stuff, but I do like to take frameworks that have already been rigorously built and tested over decades in an industry where people have to design products that keep people safe, like airplanes and cars, for example, and they've figured out ways to optimize resources. And we could do that with our bodies. Our bodies are these beautiful machines that can be very efficient, and our time is very limited. So when we combine the two, we can get something very powerful.

Philip Pape: 5:08

Okay, this is where the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule comes in handy. And the Pareto principle suggests that roughly 80% of the effect, the output, the result, comes from 20% of the causes or the effort, right? So in fitness terms, 80% of your results can come from 20% of your efforts. Now, this is just a rough guide, right? We don't have to actually be precise with the numbers, but the idea is this Think about this If you don't go to the gym at all, okay, what is your result?

Philip Pape: 5:45

Nothing, right, and sometimes worse than nothing. Like, you lose muscle mass and you get, you know, weaker with time. But if you went into the gym, even one day a week, you're going to move that needle up significantly from nothing to a meaningful something. Right Now, it may not be enough of a something to really push the growth like you want it, and that's where there's this threshold, where we say look, if you can get to the gym two days a week, you're probably going to start to grow your strength and muscle and be able to keep adding weight to the bar or reps every time you go to the gym. Right, and some people argue you could do it once a week if you train to the gym. Right, and some people argue you could do it once a week if you train super, super, super hard that one day. But there's some practical considerations here, like going one day a week. It's hard to be consistent. It may not be as enjoyable just doing it one day a week. How do you make it a routine, things like that? But besides that, I would say three days a week is where we see roughly 20% of your effort now is going to the gym and you're getting 80% of the results.

Philip Pape: 6:52

Right, and let's put that into hard, practical numbers. If you go to the gym three days a week and you do three or four exercises of, say, three sets, you're probably doing about 10 sets per muscle group per week, probably around seven to 10. And we've got to talk now about optimal versus good enough. When we talk about optimal in the industry, we talk about maximum output For you, the maximum output in terms of your muscle growth and your strength would be getting as much as 20 hard sets per muscle group per week. You'd have to be in the gym probably five or six days a week for 90 minutes. Do you want to do that? Can you do that? Does that make sense in your life? That's what I'm talking about. However, if you have as little as five hard sets a week and you go in three days for maybe 45 minutes, maybe not even that long, the research shows us that you can get significant hypertrophy, significant muscle growth doing that.

Philip Pape: 7:52

And so, when you think of the whole spectrum, when we think about resource allocation, if you're going to the gym five days a week and you're able to cut two of those days out and your results drop only by like 5%. You know they've gone from, say, 85 to 80%, but now you've saved two out of five days of your week. That's 40% of your week in the gym. Imagine now what you can do with that freed up time. You can get an extra hour, hours of sleep, right. You can get some other productivity, some things done for work. You can spend some time with your family. You could just relax right and recover, go for a walk, and the reason this is on my mind right now is the exact thing I told you about this podcast. We are switching from five episodes a week down to three, so very much like you can go from five days a week in the gym down to three days a week in the gym. My supposition, my assumption, my prediction, is that I'll be able to bring you more quality content in fewer days per week. You will be able to consume that content without feeling like you're falling behind or having to skip or delete episodes, and you will then get more out of it and your life will be changed for the better because of me going from five down to three.

Philip Pape: 9:06

I've had countless clients who were in a similar situation. They were doing too much, they loved to go to the gym and so they would work out almost every day. Maybe it was six days, maybe it was seven days. Now, it wasn't always strength training, sometimes it was a group class or a Peloton spinning, maybe they played tennis. And when we stepped it back and said, okay, let's first prioritize what's important and then identify the amount of effort you actually need to put in that minimum amount of effort to get all the results you really need and then save the rest for other stuff. So we're kind of applying two principles. Today we're applying the Pareto rule to 80, 20, where 20% of your effort gets 80% of the results. But we're also coupling that with the law of diminishing returns, like when you do more than that 20%, now you're only eking out a little bit more percentage. Right, they go hand in hand. So if you put in 25 or 30% of the effort now, you might get 90% of the results. Now you put in 40, 50, 60% of the effort, now you get 95%. And then you'd have to put in, you know, 100% of the effort to get the 100%. That's what we mean.

Philip Pape: 10:09

Same thing goes for cardio. We shouldn't be doing cardio to burn calories. We should be doing cardio for cardiovascular health, for our overall longevity, biomarkers, things like that. And for most people there's a certain minimum that's gonna get them a huge step change from not healthy at all, very sedentary, sitting around all day, high mortality rate, high disease rate, up to you're just fine. And that is not five hours a week of cardio, that might be an hour or two right Now. If you look at some of the recommendations, you might hear things like 120 or 150 minutes a week of cardio. That might be an hour or two right Now. If you look at some of the recommendations, you might hear things like 120 or 150 minutes a week, which again is only two, two and a half hours. And, frankly, if you're lifting heavy two or three days a week, there's a lot of that quote unquote cardio built into that. If you're walking a lot, you're also getting cardio.

Philip Pape: 10:56

So you see, where I'm going is we're trying to balance all these things or, more accurately, integrate them into your life, and you can't go all out on everything. You can go all out all out on perhaps one thing If you are super passionate about it, like we talked to Ben Lewis on the podcast and he gets in 60 miles of running a week, plus he lifts weights, but he is super passionate about endurance training and competition and he loves it, just like I'm super passionate about nutrition science. But I don't expect all of you listening to this podcast to just be spending hours and hours and hours learning about it. Hopefully you just have to listen to a few podcasts, including this one, and I'm hoping that it's number one on your Spotify playlist or that you gave it a five-star review on Apple, but either way, you might be just doing too much and need to scale it down. So, whether that's cardio or training or exercise variety or your meal planning strategy, are you overdoing it somewhere? And I'm going to tell you how to apply this principle to your life so that it's not just theory. All right, so how do we apply the 20% of your effort to get 80% of the result and not going past that and getting diminishing returns and just wasting time?

Philip Pape: 12:09

I suggest you make a list. Get out a piece of paper or do this in your, you know, like a Google doc or whatever. Make a list of the five things that are most important to you for your health and fitness. Really, the sky's the limit, but I'm going to give you some ideas, all right, that are probably going to be on the list Strength training, tracking your nutrition or your macros. Right, eating enough protein could be its own category. Eating enough fiber, getting enough steps you know enough walking in, getting enough sleep or high quality sleep, or both managing your stress you can definitely.

Philip Pape: 12:47

There may be other specific things on the list for you. For you, it might be emotional eating. Specifically, Write down five things that are the most important for you right now. And then I want you to, next to that, write down how much effort you're putting into it every week. Imagine that zero is zero and a hundred percent is. You're obsessed about it, you can't stop thinking about it, it's all you put, it's all you spend time on, right, most of you are not going to be at. You might be at zero, I don't know, but you're probably not going to be at a hundred percent. But you might be at, let's say, 50% or 75%. If, let's say, you strength train five days a week or you go to the gym six days a week, I would put that at like 75% effort right, it's most of the week. And then look at the one that has the highest number and circle it. That is the thing where you could potentially reduce the amount that you're doing down to the 20% mark, still get amazing results. And now you've freed up that resource, which is probably time for something else. So again, it's very simple.

Philip Pape: 13:53

Let's recap. Number one identify the areas that are important to you. Number two identify the area where you're doing too much. And then, number three reallocate the time and energy from that to another area. Right, the goal is not to do more of everything, it's to do the right amount of the things that matter most. And if you could rebalance your efforts, because we talk about balance, but balance doesn't mean doing everything all out in equal parts. It means integrating it into your life in a natural way that's enjoyable. They still get you the result. So if you can rebalance your effort, based on the 80-20 rule, the Pareto principle, you don't just change how you approach this, you're actually changing your mindset to allow yourself the freedom and the time to do other things and still get the result All right.

Philip Pape: 14:38

So I said it would be a little bit unscripted and it was. If you enjoyed the episode, let me know if you didn't or think I can improve Again. This is the first one. I'm going to continue improving on these. You know this is. This is step one. This is like when you go to the gym the very first time and you try a squat you've never done it before time. And you try a squat you've never done it before. You're clumsy, you're imbalanced all over the place. That's like this episode for me.

Philip Pape: 14:59

Granted, I have some other foundations, having done, you know, 300 episodes at this point, but I want these to be very helpful going forward If you want help engineering your strategy using this principle. I've got something new going on, so I used to do these 30 minute calls. I'm now doing something that's shorter and more fast paced and it's a 15 minute rapid nutrition assessment. It's not a sales call. I've said this before. I'm not going to sell you anything, trust me. I'm not going to mention my coaching at all.

Philip Pape: 15:27

What I like to do is meet people and help you identify where you might be overdoing it and how to rebalance your efforts. We're going to come away with the one thing that's really holding you back that you can change and a quick three-step action plan to get you results quickly. That's really all it is. So to book your free 15-minute rapid nutrition assessment, click the link in the show notes or go to witsandweightscom and click free call at the top. Actually, there's a link now at the top of the website, on the top right, a big button that says uh, rapid nutrition assessment. So again, click the link in the show notes or go to my website, witsandweightscom, click the big button at the top right and we'll have that discussion. We can say hello, we can meet and come up with that quick action plan for you. Until next time, keep using your wits, keep lifting those weights and remember, in fitness as in engineering, it's not about doing more, it's about doing right. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.