Did you know that when it comes to strength training, longevity, and endurance, there is a hierarchy of efforts to get the best results? It’s so easy to step over dollars to pick up pennies. Where should you focus your effort?

There is a very important order of priority to your efforts.  The below applies if your goals are strength, longevity, weight loss, endurance training, overall health, or really anything.  Think of this like a “fix this first” list.  It is the FOUNDATIONAL habit stack.  If you prioritize your efforts the way I have outlined below, you will get further with less effort.  Some details will change based on your individual situation, which is why we only do personal training in my gyms. The fundamentals will be universal.

Authors note: the below concepts are helpful if you are new but they are concepts that you can come back to over and over again no matter how experienced you get.  I’ve been strength training over 20 years and I still come back to these.

Here is the hierarchy as I see it:

1. Show up consistently to your workouts. You need more than fitness, but not much else matters until you can consistently show up for yourself at least twice a week.  3 strength training sessions a week is ideal for long term strength and longevity.  You could argue that nutrition is actually more important to your overall health, and I would agree. That said, If you don’t have the discipline to get out of bed and show up, you’ll never have the discipline to improve your nutrition.  Nutrition is weirdly way easier when we work out regularly.  The way you move your body also changes how you digest the same exact food.  So show up to your workouts first and when you get to nutrition, everything will be easier.  A daily planner can radically help with consistency.
2. Show up and work hard at your level. Consistency has to come first. I’d rather you show up and give only 80% effort for the first 3 months than give 110% effort for a week and then bail. Once you have consistency down, it’s time to work hard at your level. I keep saying “at your level” because we have a bit of a Goldilocks situation. Go too easy, and you won’t have enough stimulus to elicit the response (results) that we’d like to see. On the other hand, push yourself too hard and you will injure yourself. To make things more complicated, your optimal level of intensity is a constantly moving target in an effective program, because you get stronger over time. So how do you know if you’re working hard enough while still avoiding injury? Helping you work as hard as you can without injuring yourself is the MOST important function of a personal trainer.  I would rather you move slower, more deliberately (i.e. with near perfect form), with more challenging load (as appropriate).  This means your last couple reps are a challenge to complete with near perfect form, you’re breathing, you need a little rest between sets, but you aren’t racing.  Speed is not how we get better results, load is.  This requires rest between sets.  Without experience and without an extra set of trained eyes constantly evaluating how you move and how you’re progressing, it’s very difficult to hit this sweet spot of optimum challenge. With the help of an expert personal trainer, it’s easy!
3. Get your steps done.  10k steps a day is the common rule of thumb.  That’s good for most but may be too high of a target depending on where you are starting.  Here’s how to personalize this to you if 10k steps is too many.  Check what your average is (your smartphone will have this info if you don’t use a smart watch), add 3k to that average, and now that is your daily target for steps. I think this is the number 1 most powerful lever most of my clients could pull since they are already doing 1 and 2.  When you consistently get your target amount of steps in, nutrition is way easier.  Lifting regularly combined with steps makes it so you only need passing nutrition and fat will still melt off your body.
4. Drink alcohol 2 days per week or less.  Not much else matters nutritionally if you are consuming alcohol multiple days per week, even in small amounts.
5. Eat on purpose, not by accident.  You know what to do nutritionally, you just aren’t doing it.  This is the most common problem I see nutritionally.  What to eat is not rocket science anymore.  You are educated.  Give your knowledge base some credit!  Eat high quality fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats.  Keep ultra processed stuff, refined sugar, and alcohol to a minimum.  The reason most people struggle to do this consistently is that they eat by accident.  If breakfast, lunch, and dinner are always whatever is expedient or convenient at the time because they weren’t planned out, you will struggle to eat the way you know you should.  Use a daily planner and do some meal prep so that more meals are on purpose.  The heart of most nutrition struggles is not a lack of knowledge.  It’s logistics.  When you are regularly lifting and getting steps in, we just need passable nutrition; not perfection.
6. Sleep 7-8 hours every night.  You may be surprised to see sleep so low on this list.  It’s not because I don’t believe sleep is important.  Its because sleep is much easier if you are nailing regular physical activity and doing decent nutrition.  As I type this, I literally just got a client email telling me how much better her sleep has been now that she’s a couple weeks into our program.  If you nail the previous steps, sleep improves for physical reasons as well as logistical ones.  Once you have disciplined yourself to do those things above, executing the sleep hygiene stuff I outline HERE will be easier to get done.
7. Hydration.  There are various ways to calculate “exactly” how much water you should have in a day.  I think most of these calculations are an exercise in false precision.  Here is a better rule of thumb: drink at least 8 oz of water as soon as you wake up, and keep a water bottle with you at all times all day.  You’ll naturally drink more when its hotter and dryer or when you’ve exercised more rigorously.  Urine should be clear and copious.  Bonus points: use a reverse osmosis filter like ClearlyFiltered, add some electrolytes, and wait an hour before you have coffee.  Mineral water (in a glass bottle) can be great too.  (I linked to what I use but I don’t have any affiliation or relationship with those companies.  Just sharing what I use : )
8. Supplementation.  Food first, supplements second.  Supplements play a role, but try to avoid going supplement crazy.  I take a multi vitamin, vitamin D, and probiotic with breakfast.  I use a protein powder with a small dose of creatine after my workouts.  I drink some powdered magnesium in the evening to help with sleep.  That’s all fine but remember, if my diet consists of beer and doritos, those supplements are still helpful but I would really need to clean up that diet.  Food first.
9. Advanced Blood Testing.  Again order is important here.  I’ve done advanced blood testing through Ways2Well. (HERE is a referral link for 10% off.  Full disclosure I will also get a discount if you use that.  I’m otherwise not affiliated with them in any formal sense.  There are many great options in this space.  This is just who I use).  Your annual check up with your primary care physician is not going to give you the total picture.  If you are already nailing steps 1-8 but still don’t feel 100%, taking a more detailed look can be tremendously beneficial.  My blood work revealed that I was deficient in some vitamins.  These were vitamins I was supplementing from a high quality source, so I then did a gut micro-biome test.  This showed inflammation and disbiosis that could explain poor vitamin absorption.  They also recommended a couple other supplements and one peptide to help with sleep optimization and to help my body naturally optimize hormones.  A stern word of caution: do not go down this route if you aren’t doing well with steps 1-8.  Ethical practices will tell you to do the things in steps 1-8 as prerequisite anyways.  Unethical providers may immediately hop you on TRT or GLP-1s without properly informing you about the long term ramifications of those choices, because they’ll make more money if they turn themselves into a TRT/GLP-1 mill.
10. Little rocks.  Sauna, cold plunge, red light, crazy supplements, and other new trendy bio-hacky stuff.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a fan of a lot of things in the health optimization / wellness space that are becoming more popular.  I have a sauna and a cold plunge.  That said, my sauna and cold plunge will help me very little if I don’t workout, don’t get steps in, and drink too often.  These are good or cool things to look into, but trust me: I have been seriously strength training for over 20 years, I’ve done it for a living for 15 years, and I STILL bring myself back to the top 3 items on this list all the time!  Don’t major in the minor and minor in the majors.

This is the rough framework we use when we sit down with clients and talk big picture.  We do these check ins every 90 days and that lifestyle coaching is included in our memberships.

When you’re ready to talk with a personal trainer about your goals, fill out the form at the top or bottom of this page and I will take care of the rest 🙂

Our first location serves Portsmouth, Kittery, and the broader Seacoast community. Our new location serves Kingston and the broader southern New Hampshire community. We help people strength train, walk daily, and eat real food.