Week of December 29th – Closing Out the Year Strong

Resolutions feel great for a week, but momentum comes from something quieter: simple systems you can repeat even when life gets messy. I’m closing the year with a candid look at how to turn big goals into small, non-negotiable actions, why time audits beat motivation hacks, and how to set timelines that match real human progress instead of social media promises.

We start by reframing the whole New Year energy. Instead of chasing a perfect 30-day streak, I walk through the habit-stacking approach that actually sticks: pick one behavior you can win every week, protect it on your calendar, then layer the next. You’ll hear practical examples—three training days you truly keep, a weekly prep window, a simple breakfast plan—that create sustainable fitness, better recovery, and less mental churn. I also break down how class signups and capacity caps protect safety and coaching quality. When a session includes barbells and gymnastics, planning matters. Respecting the system isn’t red tape; it’s how everyone gets a solid, safe workout.

I share my own goals for the new year too: making myself more available to our community through a streamlined calendar and WhatsApp, building consistent media and newsletter systems, and investing deeper in coaching development now that we’re all under one roof. On the training front, we map the next block: a five-to-six week focus on the clean and jerk and the bar muscle-up, with progressions that meet you where you are—mobility, stability, strength, and skill practice baked into smart conditioning. Expect approachable GPP now, Sweat sessions returning January 5, and a push toward meaningful skill milestones without sacrificing joint health.

If you’re ready to trade willpower spikes for winning systems, this one’s your playbook. Subscribe, share it with a friend who needs a reset that lasts, and leave a quick review to help more people find the show. Then tell me: what’s the first non-negotiable you’re putting on your calendar?

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Transcript

Resolutions Versus Sustainable Progress

Time Audits And Weekly Planning

Defining Non-Negotiables

Why Challenges Fail And Habit Stacking

Open Office Hours And Coaching Offers

Work Goals: Community, Media, Systems

Family Balance And Boundaries

Holiday Programming And Training Focus

Class Signups, Safety, And Capacity

Final Reminders And New Year Send-Off

SPEAKER_00 0:01

All right, what's up, everybody? Happy Monday. Actually, it is Saturday, but I'm being so proactive right now, getting this done before I head out of town, so that you guys get to hear my annoying voice and my thoughts and notes this coming week, and we don't skip a beat. All right. So, week of December 29th, last week of the year. Congratulations, you yet again made it another year. It's always nice. Um, at a certain point, you get to where when you wake up in the morning, you're like pretty excited about that. Like it's a win. So, guys, we made it another year. I hope all of you uh made some progress. Actually, can look back on your year this year and um think, yeah, I did some things, made some progress, and you know, various aspects of my life. Obviously, for me, my driver to you guys is to make sure we are making progress on our health and fitness, long-term health. But um, I also know there are goals outside of that, and I hope you guys made progress. That's what I'm getting at here. And that you can look back on this year as a successful year for yourself. If you can't, well, let's take a look at that. Let's uh let's do something about this this next year, right? I know New Year's resolutions, right? On today's educational session for the week, we're gonna talk about New Year's resolutions a little bit. And you hear it. People are like, what's your resolutions? What's your resolutions? Do you got any big plans for the year? And I get it. It's a natural calendar restart, reset, right? It's January 1st, New Year, New U. Okay. I get it. I get where it comes from. I'm all for it. It's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing, but what makes it a bad thing is when every single year the damn goal is the same. So we want to make sure that we are making progress consistently. Now, different chapters of our life call for different goals and outlooks on what progress looks like. Right? When you're 20 years old, your goals and aspirations are, I mean, they should look different when you're 40 years old, 60 years old. You know what I'm saying? So if we got our new year's resolutions and we're looking at those, whether they be health, fitness, personal, family, work, whatever they might be. I just want to implore you, implore to you, does that even make sense? I just want to reiterate that consistency, regardless of the goal, is the most important aspect of making progress. Right? Taking small, consistent bites at this goal, whatever it might be, every day, every week, every month for the year. And that is where momentum happens, and you create um, well, momentum, but a nice flow to accomplishing your goals. And make sure that the goal that you have makes sense in the time frame you're setting it. I'm a health and fitness coach. One thing I would like to make sure I do, and people want to set like most of the time it's weight loss goals, that I paint a realistic picture of what it's gonna take to get there and how long it's gonna take to get there. You know, we live in a get it now, right now, I want it today society. We're used to just quick, quick, quick, whatever the goal is. And it's not like that. For most things, not just health and fitness, but for most things, there's no lottery tickets to big goals and big aspirations. So it takes consistency, laying out a framework, and in that evaluating your calendar, your days, where are you wasting time? You know, there's a lot of time wasted in our everyday life. I'm still guilty as all hell of it. You know, social media, lingering between, you know, this scheduled event and that scheduled event, not planning out action in downtime. And don't get me wrong, sometimes you need actual downtime, but there's a lot of wasted time in our 24-hour day. And if you can go through and isolate that and clean that up, it can be extremely powerful. Start sitting down on Saturday or Sunday, look at your calendar, plan the week. And in that, when it comes to your goals for the new year, I think you need to make your um what is it called? What am I thinking of here? Non-negotiables. You need to make your list of non-negotiables that are gonna happen either on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. What are these non-negotiables? You know, is it non-negotiable for you? I'm gonna work out three, four, five days per week, whatever it is. Set that as a non-negotiable, like it's in the calendar. Hell has to freeze over before that thing gets um skipped. You know, is the non-negotiable I'm gonna go on date night with my significant other once a month? Is that a non-negotiable? Um, is the non-negotiable gonna be I'm gonna spend 15 minutes playing with my kids every day? No, whatever these goals are, make reasonable settings, like calendar settings for yourself that you can achieve. And then when you make it a non-negotiable, hell has to freeze over before you don't do it. All right, I mean true life death situations. That's how you have to think of that. You know, is it gonna be meal prepping? Whatever it is, you get the idea. I don't need to ramble on. So when you come up with your New Year's resolutions, your goals. I said this many times in the past, I'm not a huge fan of challenges. Like, we're gonna do a 30-day challenge, people. We're gonna do a 90-day challenge, whatever. Like, if challenges worked, well, you see a lot more of them, but they don't work. No, everybody goes hard for 30 days, but they create no sustainable habits. I've seen it for 20 years in this industry. Okay, I'm talking about challenge in relationship to health and fitness, but you have these 30, 45-day challenges, weight loss challenges, whatever. They don't fucking work. I've seen it over and over and over again. People go hard, they do what's not sustainable for them and their life, and right back. The number of people I've seen do the 75 hard challenge and revert right back to baseline blows my freaking mind. Right? So find bits and pieces of things you can make non-negotiable and add them and stack them. Start simple. January, whatever that simple might be, whether it be three times, four times a week of working out, whether it be I'm in a meal prep breakfast every day, start simple, start small, and win consistently before you add on another layer. Once that becomes a habit, then you add on another layer. That becomes a habit, add on another layer. Stacking wins. All right. So create that momentum this new year's. You want to pick my brain about it? I'm happy to do it. Very happy to do it. So, by all means, reach out, book an appointment. I got some appointments. They've been coming in. You guys have been booking them. So we got some nutrition stuff coming up with a couple people. We got some joint injury prevention uh with a couple people. So, yeah, calendar's looking good. People using it. Let's talk about my New Year's resolutions. Shocking. Health and fitness really isn't one of them because we just do that all the time. It's my damn job. All right. So, two things. One of my big ones when it comes to work is making myself available for our community. That starts with a calendar and working through WhatsApp. I think that's going to be the centralized location for me to be consistently engaged with people and using my calendar efficiently so people have freedom to go in there and book when they need help with extra things. So that's one of my big goals this next year. Another one of my big goals uh is to get consistent in process and systems when it comes to this media stuff. Whether it be Instagram, the weekly newsletter, these video updates, just really working to make sure that I'm creating value for you guys, but that I'm also learning an efficient system to keep this long-term sustainable. Because that mindset translates into everything. Learning something new takes a long time, but if you can create a system to keep it consistent, you're setting yourself up for much more success. So really diving into the media stuff in the realm that I live in it in. I'm not trying to be fucking Hollywood producer here, right? The goal is just to be able to create consistent content education for you guys through the year. Uh here at the gym, I'm guilty as all hell of it. We'll do this stuff and then, you know, disappear. So I'm trying to get to where we're doing it ahead of time. Like, for instance, I'm doing this video right now before I go on my trip. So that we're being consistent with it. And then another one of my goals is to make sure I'm investing more time and energy into helping grow my coaches and being there for them. So now that we're all in our one building, one location, it's a lot easier for me to wrap my head around making myself more available to you guys, but also being here helping my coaches grow and develop in the best way that I can help them. So, and helping each other, you know. There's all of these coaches here, everybody's got so much knowledge and everything. And I want to get to where they're sharing, they're learning. We're all growing, and we're we're putting a little more effort in that. So when it comes to New Year's resolutions and goals, I still got them. Those are kind of it. Those are kind of my topics for this next year that I'm gonna focus on when it comes to work. All right, when it comes to work, I got a few other things for outside of work, and um, that's none of your damn business. Now, for real, just uh making sure I am being there with my family, that I'm not obsessing about work 24-7, things like that. Uh, it's always a balancing act that I struggle with because it turns out I love my job, but also the gym, this business, it it does. It takes a lot. So just making sure that I'm doing my part in both sides of my life and putting equal efforts into both, arguably should be putting more effort into my family. But turns out my gym life is also my family life. I work with my brother, I work with my wife, my kids are here, you've seen them tearing it up. So I can mean we're all one big happy thing. So just that's my goal. That's your educational piece for today. So, as you already know, I'm out of town next week. Coaches will be holding it down, brother's here, he's holding it down. Programming next week, uh, or this week, you know, you guys are gonna be getting this video on this week. So, this week programming, there is no sweat workouts. I don't want to hear any crying and complaining. The workouts are sweaty. Okay, it's just general physical preparedness for this last week of the year, simple, effective workouts to coach that can handle class sizes and so forth. So, starting January 5th, sweat workouts will be back. Just normal, Tuesday, Thursday programming, so forth. Also, starting January 5th, we're going to be focusing on the clean and jerk and bar muscle up as our two topics for about five to six weeks. And all things with those two movements. You know, some people might get their first kipping pull-up, some people might get their first bar muscle up, some people might do 20 unbroken bar muscle-ups. The goal is progression of skill, strength, and stability, and joint health through these two movements for a block of time. All right. Obviously, we'll still have our METCON, we'll still have conditioning and all the funsies. All right, but those are going to be kind of two focal points that you will see in the programming and the skill work and mobility, stability work will be supportive of those. Yeah. Last thing to touch on New Year's Eve, December 31st. The last class is 3:30 p.m. It is a holiday that a lot of people do take off work. Chances are 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. classes are gonna be full. And if you're at 11 a.m. class this past 12 days of Christmas, Christmas Eve, you saw me get a little bit sideways. And I loosely apologize for that. Loosely. We've been talking about this for months. Class signups, class caps, and I said quite a few times that holidays and around holidays is when classes are gonna get a little weird. Some are empty, some are blowing out the seams. What drives me nuts as a coach is not knowing how many people are coming to class and then having to wing it. Now, 12 days of Christmas is extra special. There is a lot of shit going on. So when I had around 30 people show up to 11 a.m. on Christmas Eve, and pre-signups were only about 16 people, I was a little bit sideways. A little bit. And the biggest reasons I am one, we can't plan a safe and effective workout experience mentally. Granted, we're experienced coaches, we can pull off some pretty cool stuff. But when we know how many people are coming, we can plan. A lot of this comes down to safety, right? A workout like 12 Days of Christmas, there's a lot of things going on. And the last thing I want to see, especially when there's barbells, burpees, handstand push-ups, there's a lot of head and barbell close proximity. I do not want to see somebody taking a barbell to the dome. I've seen it happen before, not in this gym, thankfully, but I've seen it happen. And it's not good. It's not a pleasant experience for that person. So when somebody's dropping a barbell from overhead, and there's somebody doing a burpee, and you're not paying attention, and your barbell smacks them upside the face, it's a bad day for that person. And I don't ever want it happening in this gym. Our gym is set up for 25. You might be like, well, Derek, you go over 25 in your morning class. Well, let me tell you, 5 a.m. is dialed. We know what we're doing. It's a group that has agreed on what we're doing. They understand what we're doing. The gym is laid out. I get here almost an hour early to set up the gym to pull off that class in an effective, safe, efficient manner. So when these other classes pop off going over capacity, I'm sorry, but not sorry for losing my shit on you guys not signing up and helping the coaches out and making it a good class experience for their fellow class mates. Right? So those of you bummed that I didn't let work out, even though we did, a couple of them volunteered to move to 12 because they knew I was a little bit upset. I'm also making the people that signed up for class and planned, I'm disrespecting them. I want to make sure that we are treating everybody equally and fairly. And signing up for class is the only way to do that, especially when we know it's gonna be days of holiday season, where some classes that aren't normally going over capacity are gonna go over capacity. And I don't like going over capacity, especially if we're not planned for it. If we're planned for it, yes, the gym can accommodate up to 40 people, maybe more, depending on the workout design. If we're planned for it. Okay, if we're just winging it, it's not great, and it is not how I like to run this gym. So don't pull any fast ones this coming week, please, people. Sign up for classes, use the app. It takes no seconds. Some of you guys that aren't signing up for classes, I see you on your damn phone all the time. It's literally in your hand, in your face when you walk into the gym. You're talking on it, you're texting on it. Some of you guys are recharging your phones here. Like you're on it all the damn time. It takes like five seconds to book your class. And granted, you don't need to do it all the time because not every class is blowing out the seams all the time, but there's these instances that they are, and you should just sign up for class, reserve your spot. Because I'm not you guys might get away with some shit next week because I'm gone. But don't do it. Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. I'm gonna shut up right now before I get because we're supposed to end the year happy, and I want to end the year happy. Okay. But let's it's a safety efficiency thing, and I really, really, really want to make sure we're providing a good, safe, quality experience for everybody that is planned for the class. Have a great week. I'm planning on having a great week on a trip with my family, so I will see you the week of January 5th. I'll be back in the gym on Tuesday, January 6th, and I'll probably crank out next week's videos from the sunshine. All right. Love you guys. Peace. Have a wonderful, safe New Year's, and let's uh kick some ass in 2026.