Why You're Not Seeing Results (You Keep Switching Goals)

Why You Keep Switching Goals and Never See Results

The reason why you're never actually seeing the result, the outcome that you were seeking, is because you're never working for long enough in order to actually see it, and that has nothing to do with the program being wrong, because you abandoned it at week six for a different one.

I see this constantly with guys who want to get bigger or build muscle or get stronger.

They'll come to me and they'll say, Josh, you know, my goal is to, I wanna get as strong as possible. That's the goal, as big and strong as possible, so I give them the meal plan and tell them to enjoy eating to discomfort because that's what it's gonna take.

A few weeks pass, and they come back saying the strength gains in the gym are coming, they feel good in sessions, everything is moving, but their abs are disappearing.

So we cut calories, and then two weeks after that: I'm so hungry, I don't feel good, and my strength is going down in the gym now.

It goes in circles, every time.

What's happening underneath is that building muscle and losing fat are driven by opposite signals, and you cannot send both signals at the same time with any real force. Muscle growth needs a calorie surplus, which just means eating more energy than you burn, because new tissue has to be built out of material you brought in from outside. Fat loss needs a deficit, which means the opposite. Every time you flip, you are not restarting the clock at zero, you are resetting it to somewhere behind where you started.

Motivation moves fast, but the body's adaptation lags well behind it.

Strength shows up relatively fast because the early gains are mostly your nervous system learning to recruit muscle you already have, and that can move in weeks. Building actual muscle tissue takes considerably longer. Noticeable fat loss, done at a rate that does not cost you strength, takes months. So if your longest uninterrupted stretch on any single goal is five or six weeks, you are living permanently inside the phase where nothing visible has happened yet, and then concluding the approach does not work.

Both complaints are true, by the way. You genuinely are getting softer in a surplus, and you genuinely are weaker and hungrier in a deficit. Neither of those is a sign something has gone wrong. They are the cost of the thing you asked for, showing up on schedule.

If you continue to just go how you feel, you'll continue to chase your tail, because how you feel is always going to be arguing for the opposite of what you are currently doing.

The fix is boring. Pick one goal and set the time window before you start, long enough that the adaptation can actually finish, twelve to sixteen weeks minimum for a muscle building block, eight to twelve for a fat loss block, and put a firm end date on paper so there's no renegotiating it at week five.

Then decide in advance what the acceptable cost is. If you are building, you are accepting some body fat, so pick the number ahead of time and say it out loud. If you are cutting, you are accepting that your top-end strength dips and you are hungry in the afternoons. Decide that while you are calm, instead of letting the mirror make the argument for you later.

And stop judging a slow process with daily feedback. Weigh in weekly, average it, and look at the trend across four weeks, because a single rough Tuesday tells you nothing.

The guy who spends four years running four clean blocks ends up somewhere. The guy who spends four years running twenty-six partial blocks ends up exactly where he started, with a lot more opinions about training.

Commitment to a direction is the training variable. Everything else is a detail you can get wrong and still succeed.