Why You Keep Falling Off (And How to Stay Consistent No Matter What)

Most people don’t fail their fitness plan—they fail when life disrupts it.

In this episode, Coach Mike breaks down:

• Why consistency actually breaks
• What pattern disruption is
• The 4-step LOF system
• How to rebuild momentum fast
• Why accountability is the real cheat code

If you’ve ever fallen off and struggled to get back on track, this is for you.

Watch the replay on Amazon!

💭 Thanks for listening to The Lifestyle of Fitness Podcast with Coach Mike Caulo - NBC-HWC health coach, retired pro Muay Thai fighter, father of 4, and founder of the LOF 100-Day Comback System, 

Transcript

You set a goal, you started it, you've even built up a little bit of momentum, but ultimately there's what we would call a pattern disruption. You got sick, you went on vacation, spring break is coming up, a holiday is coming up. Something has disrupted your system. What I want to invite for you for today is this isn't your system failing randomly. It is falling to disruption, a very, very vulnerable chink in its armor, which is a pattern disruption. And we've talked about this in the past couple of weeks. So I'm going to just keep building on this topic. And the idea here is it's okay if you notice that this comes up for you. It's important though, to recognize what are you going to actually do about it? That's the most valuable piece. It's not a matter of like, falling off because you're lazy. Yeah, that may be the case for these other pieces. It's not a matter of like, hey, I don't necessarily have a good plan in place or I don't have a system. It's just you don't actually have a plan in place for the pattern disruption specifically. It's a very key vulnerable spot that we get to account for. And that's what we're going to go over today and what you can take action on whether it's tactics tools a combination of it and even a little bit of anecdotal stories around that to support you guys because it's something i see time and time again i keep talking about it because this time of year really all times of year but specifically around when i'm filming or we're doing this live is spring break but this applies to winter this applies to all seasons all dynamics pattern disruptions are going to come up no matter what So first and foremost, let's go over a little bit of a system and a formula that we are going to implement and utilize. This is the backbone, pretty much all of my coaching, all of LOF's coaching and really anywhere I've seen have success in a coaching capacity. I've been coaching now for twenty years. I'm a board certified health coach, a retired professional fighter, WKA light heavyweight champion. I've traveled the world. I've coached everywhere from Phuket top team in Thailand with world champions all the way to New York and everywhere in between. I've worked for the UFC, the UFC gyms, their franchises, their corporate offices. And I'm telling you, seeing from elite athletes and performers to day to day, just everyday persons and individuals and parents, there's commonality in the formulas and coaching. Oh, what's up, Nick? Being able to see these four steps is key and being able to nail these four variables is going to dictate whether you're successful or not from my understanding experience and what I've seen on the data. Number one, having awareness, whether we're measuring something, whether we're auditing something, having awareness is going to be key. Number two, being able to have intention, having a plan. How does a GPS system works? Or how does it work? It works because you know where you are, i.e. awareness, and you have intention, you know where you wanna go. If you don't have those two things, a GPS doesn't work. Same thing with your coaching, your health and your wellness. Number three, action. Just like in the GPS analogy, you could even have the best GPS system. You could have everything laid out. But if you're not actually following the directions and taking the turns, you're not actually going to get to the destination, i.e. the results that you want. So these four things combined is really the formula in coaching. Now, where there's breakdown, there is going to be potential pitfalls to this. There's going to be potential breakdowns. That's what we're going to look at. And the biggest breakdown happens in the action and accountability. So I should go back with the formula. Accountability is really the fourth variable, the last layer. You need to have the accountability. So for example, let's say you turn left when you should have turned right. The GPS system is going to say, hey, calculating, hey, you made the wrong turn. Let's turn, go here and so on and so forth. That's where coaching and accountability is going to be key. And even taking coaching out of the equation. In general success, regardless of using coaching or not, accountability is going to be that last key variable. So you have awareness, you have intention, you have action, and then you ultimately have accountability. If you don't have all four of these things, you're not honestly going to see success in a scalable, reoccurring fashion in a sustainable way. So let's look at a pattern disruption. I'm gonna give you a real time example, and then we're gonna go over what we're gonna do about. This is just piggybacking on the last couple of weeks. We've talked about systems can fail, why they may fail, the pattern disruption, but we're really gonna iron out what we do about it today, especially with breaks coming up ahead and just dealing with a variety of things. So let's lay out pattern disruption. Let's just take spring break, for example. You have your routine, you started a routine, Let's even take new years. You started on new years. You have your routine. Cool. You've even been hitting it for three months. Let's even say you've been crushing it, but now spring break comes up and you're like, you know what? I even got the body that I want. I got the six pack. I got the abs. Cool. I'm going to go on vacation. Here's the catch. You go on vacation, you come back, you've disrupted your habit and you've disrupted your pattern. And then before you know it, One day has turned into one week, one week has turned into one month, and before you know it, you've not only not been able to maintain the results, but you've started to regress. And that happens because of the pattern disruption combined with the lack of adjustment and accountability. Ooh, thank you for the heads up, Nick, that you can't hear me. Let's see, can you hear me now? So with that being said, knowing that you are going to have a pattern disruption, first off, you could do your best to not have a pattern disruption, but reality is life is gonna throw you pattern disruptions. It's about what do you do when the pattern gets disrupted? That's the key gap for most people when they don't have success in a sustainable fashion. Being able to maintain the either routine or habit when things get interrupted. So you go away on vacation, you come back, you don't go back to the gym. Time and time again, that's something I've seen happen. I've seen people go through it. Now here's the key where they tend to fail is because they think they have to go back to the same exact routine and habit that they did before. But what we've really, this is the key actionable is how we're going to change the approach. Instead of trying to force what worked for you prior, you have to audit and adjust the action for your new routine and or situation. So, for example, you go away on vacation, you come back, and normally let's say you do chest and back on Mondays. You come back, you're like, dude, I have to unpack. I'm sleep deprived. I'm feeling heavy. I'm feeling lethargic. That's not the time to go back to your exact same workout on Monday, chest and back. You can even do chest and back. You can even go to the gym on Monday. But ideally what you want to do is cut your volume in half, cut the actual weight in half, and just get back into it. And then, hey, guess what? If you feel good and you can crush it, then go back to your normal routine. That's awesome. Then you've already got the habit, you've got the groove, and you don't need to make adjustments. But that's not what happens for most people. More than fifty percent of people, usually fifty to eighty percent of people, especially when they set New Year's resolutions, are going to run into this pattern disruption. And oh, hey, hey, what's up, Vanilla? I see you. So being able to know, all right, cool. I got to come up with a pattern disruption protocol. That's really one of the impacts we have on our hundred day comeback series and just our coaching in general. And literally just take this in your life right now. Whatever your plan is, if you get disrupted, just take the actual measurables and cut them in half and then do that. So for example, you go to the gym four to five days a week, go back to the gym two days a week. You do cardio three days a week, do cardio one day a week. You do a forty five to sixty minute workout, do twenty to thirty minutes of a workout. You do volume as far as like ten to fifteen reps. You're going to go with six reps. And if you normally do one hundred pounds, you can do fifty pounds. So again, the idea is maintaining your actual own pattern because of the pattern disruption that you have. You're trying to get immediately back to that pattern as quickly as possible. It's not about the work capacity. It's not about the load. It's not about any of that. It's about getting back to a adjusted intentional routine. It doesn't have to be the exact same thing. It's about just setting a baseline again, setting an actual intention and taking action on it. And ideally, having accountability. One of the things we've covered in past calls is a study from London University found that when a group of people had scheduled accountability check-ins, their success rate went up by sixty to ninety five percent. So you're sixty to ninety five percent more successful if you have a scheduled accountability check. And it could be with a friend, could be with a family member, could be with your doctor, could be with a coach, could be with your trainer, whomever could be online, literally just scheduling a piece of content, whatever it is. But being able to have reoccurring accountability check ins will increase your success rate from sixty up to ninety five percent. If I gave you a pill, I said, hey, if you take this pill every day, you're going to be sixty to ninety five percent more likely to succeed. I promise you, you would take that pill. That's one hundred percent what you would most likely do. Right. So knowing that, that's how we get to focus on energy. And the whole theme here is, again, the pattern disruption. Now, maybe you didn't go on vacation. Maybe you got sick. Maybe you had an emergency situation come up. The same principle applies. The key here is how do we measurably approach that? Great question. This is the hypothetical or placebo, right? So again, I want to pause as we're transitioning. I'll pull up some data. I'm curious what questions you guys might have, like legitimate questions I'll get to. Also, I appreciate everyone just being silly geese here in the troll fun and all that fun stuff. comments and general help. And if you're not already, please follow, subscribe, all that good stuff. I'm going to pull up a chair. Actually, we're going to dig on in, settle in here for the next twenty ish minutes. And honestly, I hit the key stuff right out the gate. It's coming in pretty hot. So now I'm going to circle back, address questions and I'll pull up some finer points and some data related to this. And then we'll go into if you guys don't have questions live. I had some questions that came up in coaching sessions for the week and the last week behind me that we can look at as well. thrown back a little bit of yummy tea. So with that being said, I'm gonna hit you again with some metrics. where some kind of like at least data points that become helpful. And one of the other things when we talk about pattern disruptions is it doesn't have to just be like, again, vacation or getting sick. It could just be stress and sleep deprivation. Maybe you're having a baby because babies are beautiful. Obviously having a kid's like an amazing thing to bring into this world, but it can be extremely stressful and sleep depriving. So when you are stressed, your logical, rational part of your brain gets reduced. What does that mean for our health and our wellness? What that means, thank you, by the way, Vanilla, I appreciate it. What that means is you are going to make less logically oriented decisions. You're going to be more impulsive. You might be more inclined to have that sweet snack at night when normally in the past you wouldn't have. Same thing with sleep deprivation. When we are sleep deprived, Even if you're just getting under seven hours of sleep for one night, you can see the impact of that. It will drastically cut your self-control, impulse control, and logical thinking, not only with your nutrition, but also with your workouts. But specifically, we see it show up when I say we, I mean research studies that others have conducted that I'm just regurgitating, have shown that Being able to increase your sleep will impact positively your overall health as well as your impulse control. But on the flip side, when you're getting less than seven hours of sleep, you are going to be more impulsive. You're going to want to eat more than likely sugary carbohydrate latent things, have more caffeine oriented things to make up for the difference in energy. Knowing that you're probably going to eat more calories. And when you eat more calories, boom, you're going to see weight coming on. You're also not going to feel so good and you're going to repeat that program. So what we want to do is pattern disruption is what can kill our routine and habit. But on the flip side, we can take that same information and apply it in our system as like kind of a secret weapon. So if we started, let's say you got back from vacation, you interrupted your routine or you got sick, you got stressed, whatever. You had a baby. It interrupted your routine. You got injured. Something happened and you started picking up a habit or routine you don't like. Eating at night more than you would want to, not working out, being able to choose video games instead of exercise, whatever. And I like video games, so it doesn't mean don't play video games. If you're playing video games instead of exercising, you're probably going to gain weight, as an example. You're going to get weaker. You're not going to get stronger. Your performance isn't going to improve. More likely it's going to suffer. depending on what games you're playing. So the point is that's now a new pattern you're creating. So we can take that same principle of, okay, pattern disruptions are impactful. We use that same psychology and say, okay, cool. Now I'm gonna disrupt this pattern I don't want. The behavior I don't want, I'm gonna create a pattern disruption. And it may be cool. I'm going to journal. I'm gonna use my planner. to be able to jot down what I'm doing, what I'm feeling, what I'm thinking so that I'm going to potentially be less impulsive. I'm going to use another activity, ideally a joyful oriented activity or another thing, even being social, going for a walk, a baseline, pretty minimum friction, minimum effective dose activity to be your pattern disruptor. Maybe taking your dog for a walk. For example, Misha broke her leg. I have a German Shepherd. She broke her leg almost two months ago now, or a month and a half ago. And she had to get surgery. So it was extremely stressful. And it was obviously impacting sleep. It was financially stressful, all these things. But guess what? That doesn't mean that just because I'm not walking my dog means I don't go for walks anymore. I can find substitutes and different ways to do it, as an example. So that is a little bit on, again, the plan of attack and where systems to recap all this. So let's take our formula. We have awareness, intention, action, and accountability. This is the four-step formula that delivers results. We've created a plan from that. We've even implemented a routine. That routine's maybe even become a habit. But we've had a habit disruption, a pattern disruption come up, being sick, being stressed, going on vacation, whatever. And now we are struggling to get back to it. Instead of trying to force the same thing, you just cut everything in half, cut your volume in half, cut your goal in half, being able to do less of it and just bridging the gap. And ideally you're working with a professional that is strategizing with you because you can try and do it yourself, but probably what got you there is having a plan. And maybe you have all the knowledge. That's the cool thing with technology now, live streaming, social media. You have so many experts. We have more access to information than ever before. So you may not feel like you need a coach. This is where coaching can be impactful, but just being able to leverage your knowledge isn't enough. It's the built in accountability and action oriented planning and then being able to take action, right? So we know, okay, cool. The process is I'm going to go to the gym or I'm going to move my body for even three to five minutes, two times this week. If you don't know where to start, start with that. Move your body for three to five minutes, one to two times this whole week. Then from there, you progress each week until you are no longer able to do it anymore. If even in the first week you weren't able to get three to five minutes of movement one to two times per week, we even get more conservative one to three minutes per week as the example for movement. And saying, okay, if you can't do that, then you really get to seek out a support mechanism because there's something going on, not even just physically, but psychologically that you get to look at and offer up accountability. And that's where tagging in accountability, scheduling an accountability check-in with a friend or a family member becomes important. Or on the flip side, let's say you don't like eating. So let's say you don't feel good, right? You got sick. I've had that happen when I get sick. I don't want to eat anymore. And for those that are trying to particularly gain muscle and performance, if you're not eating enough, enough protein, enough energy and calories and fuel for your body, you're going to see a drop in performance too. So being mindful of, okay, what do you enjoy? That's a key component. Yeah, and that's why I'm bringing that up because I think that's a good point, you know. Being able to look at what does feel good, what feels accessible. We start with that, we build from there. And sometimes that's a smoothie. Oh, what's up, Johnny? Being able to say, hey, I'm gonna start with a smoothie, for example. Or hey, maybe I'm gonna look at... a meal that i really enjoy that feels accessible but it's not overwhelming starting with those accessible pieces so again i'm going to pause there i'm going to see what questions we have and then i'm going to reference a little bit more on the data side especially when it comes to habits and where people tend to drop off and then i'll go into some other questions that even some of my clients have brought up as well um yeah that's great getting outside Love it, bro. Okay. So let's look at where habits might even be dependent. So a lot of times as we're forming habits, specifically routines, and as they're turning into habits, they are going to be cue dependent. And for ADHD and neurodivergent people, that's going to be even more so the case, specifically visual cues and prompts. But all of us have cue dependent habits. There's a pretty much anatomy protocol to how a habit's formed. First, we have a cue. Maybe our alarm goes off in the morning. Our body tells us we're hungry. Our baby is crying or our body is feeling like it's got a lot of energy and it wants to move. We have a cue. Or we're tired and we want to go to sleep. That's a cue. Then we have after the cue something that we actually want to solve or something we want to address. If there's not actually like an intention behind that, something we're addressing, you can have all the cues you want. But if the cues don't actually feel connected to a deeper why, you're not going to take action on it. So being able to be clear on again, Q, I'm hungry. Hunger is going to solve a problem if I'm eating. So that's the second stage of it. By eating something, I'm going to address the Q. That leads into then the action, the action of actually eating. And then lastly, the reward mechanism that reinforces the loop. The reward is I'm no longer hungry. So we go again, I'm hungry. What should I do? Oh, I should eat. Oh, guess what? I'm actually going to eat. I then reinforce that by feeling full or satisfied. And then we are creating a habit pattern. On the flip side, let's say at night, I'm tired. I'm stressed from work. You need, um, you need some quote unquote downtime, right? You need to be able to get some rest and recharge time in. Now you can do that with sleep or you can say, Hey, I'm going to stay up and I'm actually going to play some video games. So the cue is I'm tired. I want to have dopamine. I want to feel motivated. I want to have some me time. Boom. I'm the, uh, What we want to address is the discomfort related to that. And then we're going to use the actual action of playing video games. And then what's the reward? The reward is the dopamine or the signaling to you enjoy this. I'm going to see if I can pull up a habit, a visual for you guys for this actual habit loop. Because these four checkpoints, I think it'd be really helpful when you actually see the visual related to it. So this is less of a loop, but I'm going to still give you the checkpoints here. And the visual I think will become helpful because it's still using the same four checkpoints of we have our cue, we have a craving we want to address from the action, and then we have our actual action itself, i.e. the response, and then we have the reward. Ooh, what are habits? question we have a whole breakdown on that but for that question first let's look at we have q then it goes to craving response reward so again we have a q we have something we want to do to address with a why the craving why do we want to address that then we have the action and then we have the reward and it feeds into itself so let's go into our breakdown of you can again look all this fun stuff up let's actually Pull up our fun definition of habit, those of you that want it. Really, it starts with routine. Routine is where after enough period of time, you have a habit formed, which is something that really, to put it simply, I'm not going to actually, it looks like they don't have the habit broken down here, but the real simple version of it is a habit is something you don't have to consciously think about. It's something you do without having to put a lot of energy or conscious thought into. A routine is something you're more intentional about. You have to put bandwidth and energy. It takes more processing bandwidth. Yeah, and also to your point, we're live on YouTube, Twitch, all that fun stuff. So you may see me talking to people, but they may not be on the platform you're on. And yeah, if you guys want, Venmo me for this stuff. You can give me a little tip. I got you guys. You can check the link tree. I actually have my Venmo in the link tree wherever you're watching this. Or if you're appreciating and enjoying this, just make sure you're following, subscribing, liking, all that good stuff, commenting, sharing. It's very helpful. And the cool part is we're live on Amazon and the TikTok shop as well. On Amazon Live, you can see all the things that I tend to utilize, whether it's my... like weekly and monthly planner, whether it's my day-to-day planner that I break down all my stuff and stay organized, whether it's my journal, all these things and tools, my supplements, our fitness routine, our bands, all this stuff is in there if you want to check it out. Okay. With that being said, that's pretty much the clear action goals. I really don't, I'm not going to take a long time on today. I just want to make sure I hit it with you guys, go into it and see, it doesn't look like we have any questions. So I want to hit you with a couple of more just data points and facts, then we'll move it on from here. So where do most people quit by the way? People quit early. Fifty percent of people drop out of exercise in six months. I mentioned that. So at this stage of the game, we're in what, March? Some people may still be going from, let's say, January. But by June, fifty percent of people will drop off up to eighty percent by the end of the year. So fifty percent of people will drop out of exercise in six months. And it's because even if you did lay a habit, there was a pattern disruption. A pattern disruption is the key variable to the sustainability of this. Even if you have formed a habit, it is more than likely going to have some sense of a pattern disruption. And that's what's going to dictate if you're going to quit or not for most of us is how do you handle the pattern disruption? Okay, lastly, tracking will increase your success. And what do I mean by tracking? Tracking your actual progress. That goes back to awareness and being able to take action with it. So if you have awareness of what your body fat is, if you have awareness of how strong you are, how many pushups you can do, what your calorie intake is, that goes back to your progress and how that impacts your outcome. Ultimately, your process, your progress, and your outcome. If you can't change anything, something it's more than likely because you're not measuring it so the cliche goes you can manage what you measure so if you're not measuring it more likely that's probably why you're failing because you're not actually having some measurable components i got you thanks for making me laugh by the way i appreciate it so keep in mind six months is an interesting checkpoint for more than fifty percent of people And then the interesting thing, the last piece of this is an if-then protocol. The if-then plan will increase your follow through. So being able to have an intention will increase your success rate. So that's where the intention comes in. So what I mean by that is not only having a clear direction with intention, but an intentional adjustment. So, okay, when a pattern disruption comes in, if I get disrupted in my pattern, then I will cut the volume by fifty percent and try it again anyway. And I will keep doing that. I'll keep cutting the volume and the goal by fifty percent until I can do it again. And then once I can consistently do it for two to four weeks, I will then increase the goal and the volume by thirty to fifty percent until I get to a place where I'm no longer able to do it. For example, that's a good example of an if then statement. And again, this is backed by just behavior change studies that will show you. you will have a higher success rate if you have intention. And instead of saying, okay, not I'll work out, but if my routine breaks is, or for example, if I can't go to the gym for minutes, then I'm going to use my LOF bands for minutes and do an at-home version. That's a perfect example of the, if then, and again, having a pattern disruption backup plan. So most people, again, don't fail when things are hard. They fail when things change, when your environment changes, when you don't have the same cues. We, again, have habit dependent cues or really habits are dependent upon the cues. So if our environmental cue changes, we're more than likely going to fail. Or if a stress component impacts our cue or our environment, goal and our system, then we will fail. So being mindful of all those things, you can even anticipate it. If you know you're going to travel, be prepared for having a pattern disruption protocol. Have this in the bank. And that's what we do with our coaching is being able to anticipate hundreds of scenarios at this stage. We've worked with literally over thirty thousand people, myself included, and the entire team has worked with over thirty thousand people over the last almost twenty years. So we have data on I can't even tell you how many different scenarios. It's fascinating to observe how many different things can go on and being able to just truly be able to like lower the bar in the beginning, especially. So this fits nutrition. It fits your training. It fits your sleep. It fits recovery. All these pieces come into play. So again, that's the action rules. Just to recap of all this, we have on Amazon, on TikTok, we have books, we have our bands. The biggest thing I would say is if you don't know where to start, go to our website, go to lifestyleoffitness.com. We have an intake form. You can jump on a free call. We'll chat with you, myself or my team. We'll go over. And at the end of the day, we'll send you in a direction that's going to feel helpful. Even if it's not with us, we will send you in a direction either through our own programs or we will refer out or give you a clear plan of attack. I literally, before I jumped on this live stream, I had a call with someone and she's a nurse that has back herniations. She wants to get into boxing. She has in the past. She doesn't know how to, she doesn't know how to make it sustainable, how to realize her goals. We're putting her on a diagnostic program and we're going to take her from there. I know we're going to be able to transform her life. That's what we do. Now, if for whatever reason it doesn't work out, I already have a backup plan on where we're going to send her and the support systems and some free resources that we have. So the point is start with that. If you don't know where to start, start with that. All right, y'all, that's pretty much it. I'm going to bring it home from here. I'm going to send some follow-up. Speaking of the person I just talked to, I appreciate you guys. Again, we'll be back next week for our office hours. It's six Oh five Eastern standard time, every single Tuesday night. The only thing we're gonna do is probably for spring break. It's probably actually gonna be the same time. I'm going to have some more guests lined up in the weeks ahead. So stay tuned for that. If you guys have questions again, you can go to our website. You can submit questions for talking points. And the next time we have someone submit an actual talking point, I'm going to do a cash giveaway. Also stay tuned coming up in September, this September, twenty twenty six. It is LOS fifteen year anniversary being in business. So we're gonna have something really big planned for giveaways and for support. So make sure you're staying tuned. We're gonna have some events planned around that. That's it, y'all. I'm going to get to it. I'll let you guys get to it. Again, follow, subscribe, like. Your insight's appreciated. I appreciate you guys. Vanilla, thanks for hanging. Johnny, good to see you. Nick, I want to say, Reini, what's up? Ski, all you guys. Catch y'all on the next one. Later, y'all.