The 24-Hour Rule: Why You Keep Falling Off (And How to Fix It)

Most people don’t fail because of food or workouts. They fail because of their mindset.

In this episode, we break down the 24-hour rule — a simple strategy to stay consistent through holidays, stress, and life disruptions.

If you’re ready to actually apply this:

👉 Join us here

If you want the full breakdown:

👉 Watch the livestream replay here

For tools I personally use:

👉 You can find them all here

💭 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

Happy holidays. Most people don't fall off because of food, because they missed a workout. They fall off because of their approach. Realistically, their mindset, even maybe the identity tied to that. What we're gonna go over is how to actually utilize one simple strategy around the holidays, but overall, anytime there's a pattern disruption, and how simple it's going to be. It's simply called the twenty-four hour rule. Now I'll give you some context where it came from, how we're going to apply it, and how effective and why we use it. So number one, I want to just go over the actual problem the twenty-four hour rule is going to address. It's realistically the all or nothing mindset that falls around, and I'm talking about this especially around the holidays. we have whatever the holiday is right now we have passover and easter coming up but this applies to christmas fourth of july you name the holiday this mindset and basic principle is going to come into play which is basically i'll start after the holiday then we find ourselves in a guilt experience we spiral and then we have to restart the whole system we feel like we've lost everything So the key here is you're not necessarily struggling with discipline. It's realistically you're missing a system. And specifically when a pattern disruption happens, what you are going to do when the system and pattern disruption is impacted. So right there, that was a pattern interrupt, right? I was talking, I stopped, I took a sip of water. We can use that same principle. What exactly is being utilized is a more or less pause. I'm going to go over how the twenty four hour rule applies to that and really what the twenty four hour rule is. But before that, I want to kind of help give you somewhat of an identity shift here and just something to mull over. okay especially when it comes to my martial arts practitioners out there my fighters out there this is going to be something probably that resonates with you quite easily but all of us i think when you're watching this whether you're watching this live or the replay this will click if you just hear me out so The idea is we won't just stop because life happens when it comes to a fighter mindset. That's why I originally called my first company Life of a Fighter. I was documenting my fight journey, but also it was a mindset I wanted to invite for all my health and wellness clients was we're all fighting for something. And having that fighter mindset can be impactful. The trick is sometimes if we have too much of an identity attachment to one particular version, it can hold us back or it can accelerate us. We want to, again, invite an identity shift right now. What I want to invite for you guys is leveraging your inner fighter. Being able to reframe how you look at yourself, how you relate to that idea of being a fighter. You're not just fighting in a ring, in a cage, you're fighting on a day-to-day basis. And what I mean by that specifically is being able to recognize a lot of times when we associate fighters, there's an identity that they're resilient, they're disciplined, they're tough. These are all true things. We're actually quite vulnerable. And actually really what makes a fighter in my experience is how they show up, not in times of smoothness, but specifically how they show up in times of adversity. Not even if you're perfect. Like this is something I honestly fall into the all or nothing mindset quite a bit. I get to constantly rework this. I work with my own coach on reframing the all or nothing mindset. So let's tag this into the twenty four hour rule. We actually pull something I go over with my fighters. I've talked to Johnny Buck about this, the owner of Road Combat Club. He's talked about this in his own content. And many years ago, I invited this concept of the twenty four hour rule. And again, it's not I invented this. This is something I regurgitated from my experience working with others. And the basic principle here is whenever one of our athletes will compete, a fighter would have some form of competition. I would invite the twenty four hour rule. And what's up, y'all? I see you guys in the chat, in the comments. Again, please feel free to say, hey, I will have moments where I'll go into the Q&A. I'll go to the comments. I'll check in. But if I don't get to it right away, I promise you I will. I'll have different checkpoints along the way. And if you're not already, please follow, subscribe, all that good stuff. Share it. With that being said, though, getting into the twenty four hour rule with our fighters, when they would compete, whether they win or lose, they have a devastating knockout or they have an amazing victory. We would implement what I call the twenty four hour rule. So they have twenty four hours to cry, to celebrate, to party, to mourn, to do whatever, to eat whatever you want, to do whatever you want, to just live. Within obvious reason, within moral reason. But being on the twenty four hours where you can like eat, drink, party, sleep, not train, train, whatever. You can do twenty four hours or whatever you want. But then usually fights would take place on a Saturday. So you say, OK, twenty four hours on Saturday. So all day Sunday, you do what you want. Monday morning rolls around. You are back to the system. we are back into our routine. And again, we may adjust that routine. If a fighter's injured, we are going to say, hey, you're not gonna have the same training load, but you're gonna be back in the gym. Even if you can't train, if you're injured, you have a concussion, I wanna see you back in the gym. Even if you're just watching, taking notes, studying. Now the caveat is if they're concussed, they don't want to be out in lights with loud noises. So we would slightly adjust this, obviously given the severity of injury, but the basic principle applies. And basically the idea of the twenty-four hour rule is to have a little bit of release. And the point of that, where that applies to even the holidays, is the holidays can be the pattern disruption that we want to create a twenty four hour rule around. So let's say Easter Sunday or Passover, which is obviously tomorrow or being able to have Hanukkah. That's multiple days or holidays. I have one day or many days. You have your holiday experience. And also during this holiday experience, you're simultaneously doing the best that you can to implement a strategy. Whether that means we're working out, we're being mindful of what we're putting into our body, you have some sense of intentionality. This still goes back to the four aspect framework of awareness, intention, action, and accountability. So knowing that we're going to have a sense of awareness into the holidays and the intention is going to be able to rebound from a pattern disruption. And then ultimately the action we're gonna take is the twenty-four hour rule. So you have, let's again, say your holiday, you ate whatever you even put on a couple pounds, whatever's going on there. You're going to allow yourself that twenty-four hours to rebound. So Easter Sunday from twenty-four hours Monday. Cool. I'm gonna let my body digest. I'm gonna drink water. I'm gonna fast. I'm gonna do whatever, eat whatever. Recalibrate. Come Tuesday, we're back into a routine. So utilize that twenty four hour rule to be able to get back to a aspect of a routine in a system. Now, that doesn't have to be the same exact thing you did before the pattern disruption happened. But that's where the twenty four hour rule comes into play. And that's, again, part of the system. And it's basically inviting a non-negotiable, something I've talked about in the past. Having non-negotiables becomes really impactful and ideally even having a non-negotiable. For the holiday, for your travel, for your whatever the pattern disruption is. So let's say you're traveling. It's Easter. It's Passover. It's whatever the holiday. It's your birthday. Even traveling for work. You're saying, hey, I don't care what's going down. I'm going to drink sixty four ounces of water. I can drink alcohol. I can drink calories. I can eat stuff. I can do all these other things. My non-negotiable is drinking sixty four hours, sixty four ounces of water. Or again, having it be a movement-oriented non-negotiable. I'm going to walk for thirty minutes no matter what's going on. I don't have to work out. I can drink. I can sleep. I can stay up late. I can do whatever, but I'm going to move for thirty minutes. Finding one of those non-negotiables. Now, ideally, bonus points if you can get three non-negotiables. That's like the ideal implement is a aspect around protein and or fiber, something that's gonna help manage your appetite, being able to have some aspect of movement and then having something around your hydration. If you can get three of those non-negotiables, you are gonna be really set up for success. But even if you can just pick one of those, That's where you're going to be able to still have success. And even if you don't get that, avoiding the all or nothing mindset by using the twenty four hour rule. Like, OK, cool. That's my twenty four hour window. The holidays, the twenty four hours. Then come Monday rolling around. I'm going to implement a reengagement strategy, a pattern disruption from the holidays. Get back to my work. All right. So I'm going to pause there and we're going to go into some more insight and some data on that. I want to hit the comments because I see some things coming up. Also, some funny. I love all the trolls and the hilarity. Appreciate it. Love it, love it. Yeah, LeBron or Curry even. Dude, I got to be honest, Curry all day. And in general, I go Jordan over LeBron a hundred out of a hundred times. But I'm old and biased, so take it with a grain of salt. Now, with that being said, I'm curious if you guys have questions around where we can fit the twenty four hour rule, how it applies. If you have specific things around the holidays coming up or just life in general. If not, I'm going to kind of dive right back into it. And again, I'll circle back to the comments in the chat as well. So we have, again, this idea of a twenty four hour rule that isn't something I've newly kind of mentioned. I've talked about it way, way in the past. I wanted to bring it back up because it's so impactful. I think it fits really well here in the pattern disruption side. So let's say your routine got disrupted. Use the twenty four hour rule. Give yourself twenty four hours. Have your experience. And then you go back into a system of strategy or routine. If you don't know what to do, I've got you covered. My entire team has got you covered. If you don't know where to start, that's what we're here for. You can even, if you don't want to trust me, you can go online. I promise you, whether it's AI, Google, whatever, a friend, find something to take action on, have one non-negotiable, do that, and then tag in accountability. That goes back to our four variable framework. Again, have awareness of what's going to actually be something you want to address. So awareness around like, okay, I want to change my body fat percentage. For example, I'm like floating almost at twenty percent body fat right now. I get to work towards being I feel at my best around sixteen, fifteen, sixteen percent body fat. And what gets me there is not knowing that information, but awareness is one. So knowing where my body composition is now and ultimately what's even more important is what are some of the things I've done that have allowed my body fat to blow up? Stress and sleep being key factors that having inconsistent sleep, having higher stress variables related to a variety of things, but also allowing myself to eat certain things at certain times of the day that don't align. So having intentionality, knowing I want to, again, lower my body fat percentage, be a certain level of health. I'm going to be intentional with the things related to it. That's where the action comes into play. Being able to have a non-negotiable. My non-negotiable, no matter what, is I move for thirty minutes every single day, whether it's a walk, stretching, working out, jumping rope, martial arts, whatever. It's thirty minutes every day. That's my buy-in. Unless some severe thing would have to come up for that. With that being said, the other principle we wanna look at is having the floor not ceiling concept. What does that mean? So first the base principle is like, we're not gonna be perfect, but we're gonna have a floor, a baseline at which we operate. So again, we're not looking at the ceiling of what's gonna cap me out, but being able to have a minimum standard, a minimum kind of floor we're working towards. Not I'm gonna stop at this point, it's I'm gonna always do at least this. So for me, it's a thirty minutes of movement, ideally at least walking. But it can be ten to twenty minutes of movement, depending on where your fitness level is at. Going back to this thing we've talked about in the past, pattern disruptions will be impactful by having a clear, measurable, having awareness, combining that with intention, having action, and then accountability. Sharing it with you guys here, being able to have, I have three coaches that I work with. I have a mindset coach, I have a fitness coach, and I have a nutrition coach. And I'd be able to put all these things together for the things that I care about. So knowing all that, that's kind of the floor. I have a certain baseline of things I do with all of my coaches to move the needle forward, to have overall progress. Now, am I going to be perfect? No, I'll give you a perfect example. With my mindset coach, one of the things I work on right now is five out of seven days per week, I'm using a workbook I have for journaling. and being able to have certain active practices for my mind. I don't do it every single day. I mean, sometimes I do. Some weeks I do it seven out of seven days, but my goal is to do it five out of seven days per week. And if, for example, this holiday, for whatever reason, I did four out of seven days, I would then take a step back do four out of seven days for two, maybe three weeks. And then I would reset the goal to five out of seven days and keep doing that until I was at the place I want it to be. So that's again, having the accountability. And when I have my scheduled calls, I have a call with my coach after this in a couple of hours, we're gonna go over that amongst other things. So that's the idea of the floor, not the ceiling, looking at the baseline, the floor, which you're operating, not where you're gonna cap things out. All right, again, I'm gonna pause here, take another swing, check the comments. And then we're going to get into the next strategy, which is, again, around a little bit of the nutrition side. All right, what's up? I appreciate the love. I see you. What's up, MRI? Love all the funny comments. Caden, yeah, what's up? Rail, I see you. Mimosa, what's up? Sierra, I think that, or is that Seardog? All right. So, and again, feel free to ask questions as we're going through this. With the holiday strategy, another aspect we can look at is nutrition because that's a big one that comes up. A lot of times people don't have a problem, let's say, getting a workout in or moving or playing. That can be an aspect. But a lot of times people feel like there's apprehension around nutrition. That's what seems to fail them, quote unquote. So it's not the idea of, okay, we aren't going to go to like restrict all day and then binge all night. That's not going to be a very like realistic, sustainable strategy. And I've tried this before. I've tried like, Hey, I'm going to not eat all morning workout and then go ham for a couple hours. And it just turns into an all day, maybe even a couple of days, a food fast as it were. And that doesn't feel good either. So it's like internally not going to work. Also the idea of let's say eating as routine and being able to restrict. Okay. So the idea is that we don't want to remove things. We want to be again, intentional. What does that mean? Being intentional. You can enjoy your food, but having, again, as a non-negotiable, every plate that I have, I'm going to have a palm size worth of protein, or I'm going to chew every bite. Ten times, at least before I take my next bite, where every time I have a plate, I'm going to have I'm gonna have ten grams of fiber with every plate. Again, I'm just making up arbitrary things, but these are real things I've worked with people on that are measurable, that are impactful, and that ultimately will help you still have an enjoyable experience. It's being intentional. So being able to also pick your moments. So we're not going to do everything all at once. We're going to pick things like, for example, I love pumpkin pie. So around Thanksgiving, I'm going to allow myself to have pumpkin pie kind of no matter what's going on. I'm not going to restrict in that nature. I just enjoy it. Now, if I also want to have that plus some other things, I'm going to be very mindful and intentional that I'm going to chew ten times. I'm going to have a little extra turkey for my protein. I may not have as many mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes. I'm going to maybe have a little bit more on the pumpkin pie. That's where we get to be intentional. And when we think about that, that's the non-negotiable component to give you an example of that. And we talked about, again, movement, the buy-in for that. So I also want to go to the same side that I was talking about before that can be a hindrance for me is the recovery, the stress, and the sleep side of this. So one day isn't honestly going to make or break anything, but what tends to happen around holidays travel, the atypical pattern disruptions is seldomly is it one day. What realistically happens, this is what we were talking about before, is there's a spiral, a guilt spiral, or I'll do it next week, or I'll start after the holiday season, I'll start this day. And then that day doesn't really come. So then the same thing happens with recovery and sleep. We stay up, later because there's parties or we don't allow ourselves to sleep in and we sacrifice. I literally did this the other day, if I'm being honest, I didn't even intentionally do it. I ended up getting five hours of sleep. I just couldn't sleep. And I did all the things I normally would do. I journaled, I turned off the TV. I did like stretching and self-care. I just couldn't sleep. I was honestly how the day went. Some of my inputs, I was worked up. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to have to journal a little bit extra and I'm just going to eat this. In a perfect world, I would adjust my next day and where I'd sleep in. I couldn't because I had to bring my kids to school. So that wasn't really negotiable for that. What I did do is I adjusted my caseload so it wasn't as stressful so that it wasn't going to be as taxing. But the point of this is being very insightful around our sleep, not necessarily letting sleep compound in that behavior pattern. And again, using that twenty four hour rule, if we notice that the sleep's getting away from us, I'm going to immediately implement, OK, twenty four hours and I'm going to be very intentional about with my sleep that's a non-negotiable for example same thing on the recovery side if we're constantly burnout that's where i do like measurables and watches and data is like it's not perfect but i'll pull up my like workload right now and there's a range and once it gets past a certain range like right now i'm in the green zone once i notice i'm in the red zone as far as my workload i know i have to either be intentional with my sleep or my training or a combination of the two So the point here is having some aspect of these areas as non-negotiables and being able to utilize that twenty four hour rule on what you're going to focus on. So give it twenty four hours and then you implement that ASAP. And being able to reword these things, revamp it is that you're not under motivated. You don't lack discipline. You tend to either be under recovered that's especially with the motivation and or lacking a system that tends to go with the discipline if you're not motivated you're usually either underfed underslept or overstressed if you feel like you're lacking discipline what's really probably going on is you don't have a clear accessible plan Because we can have all the plans. We talked about this in the past. You can have all the information. It's not a lack of information. It's a matter of, is that system going to be actionable based on where you are currently at? So for example, I could have a very clear plan. I'm going to have a million dollars at the end of this year net in my bank cash. The plan is simple. If I just save twenty eight hundred dollars a day for three hundred and sixty five days, I will have a million dollars. That's a simple plan. That's not a lack of discipline by itself to implement that. It's a matter of do I have the systems and is it realistic for me to make, for example, twenty eight hundred dollars a day? And do I have the system in which to do that? So same thing for the fitness side. You want to put on ten pounds of muscle and you want to lose thirty pounds of body fat. Do you have the system to implement that, especially given where you're at right now? again where this information coaching comes into play now if that speaks to you obviously we have coaching support you can get to that even if you literally just followed around with our workouts we do body doubling workouts we have pre-recorded workouts we even have for those of you watching especially on amazon or tick tock we have our bands for sale you can get our workout program we have a thirty day band workout program we have a hundred day plan that goes along with that and even for all of you watching everywhere you go to our website and you go to lifestyleoffitness.com and you just fill out that form, we will send you a program with a coach assigned to you. You'll jump on a call with me or someone on my team, and you will literally be able to take that plan and be able to have nutrition training and a schedule, even supplements included and have a direction in which you can take it. Even if you don't sign up for coaching, you will have a two week program that you could just replicate for the entire year. And you could just rerun it, rerun it, make adjustments, follow along with this free stuff. It literally won't cost cost you anything, but there's insight to be had and then just taking action and it will be refined. It's a matter of just implementing when the pattern gets disrupted. That's why I go back to this twenty-four hour rule. Having the twenty-four hour rule will allow you to break a pattern. that you don't want and or when the pattern you wanted got disrupted you allow it to have that disruption for twenty four hours and then you get back to it and you implement I would go back to last week's point where we were talking about how do I take a regression how do I deload to get back into a routine it's basically just cutting the volume by fifty percent so I'll leave it at that and again I'm gonna take another sip of water we're gonna check the comments questions and I'll move into the next piece And this next one's going to be the big one. It's like the mindset component here. All right. It looks like we got more of the same stuff. I appreciate you guys in general, just commenting. And if you don't have questions or if you have questions, you don't want to share it in a public version. Just feel free to always email. I have it on our website as well. You can submit a topic request every week. We, I like look at that. And if we do have a new topic request, we haven't done, I'm going to give away a hundred dollars on a live stream. I haven't had any new ones come in, but if you want to win an easy hundred dollar gift card to LOF, Just submit a topic and we're going to randomly pick someone out. And if there's only one person that submitted it, guess what? You're the guaranteed winner. And I won't even announce your name. I'll just randomly pull a drawing and I'll shoot you an email. Okay. So with that being said, here's the, again, mindset shift. So stop thinking in days, start thinking in weeks, months, and long-term. The caveat I will say for this is for my ADHD or my neurodivergent peeps out there is not our strong suit. We're very much what's in front of us. Urgency is very motivating. It doesn't align with long-term success though, which is why you might feel challenged with this, which is why I actually offer coaching specifically for neurodivergent ADHD oriented people. Something I've been doing over the last year, working with certain contracts and companies, I've learned a tremendous amount. I've honestly been working with ADHD oriented people for like ten years in martial arts, but specifically in the health and wellness space and being able to have that awareness of time. Don't think about in days. Think about in the long term. And holidays are ultimately a part of your system. They're not outside of it. There's not like, I don't even think of it as cheat days. These are intentional days where you get to enjoy. So you don't start over after the holidays. You're continuing through the holidays. This is factored into the system. This is factored into our schedule with all of the coaching clients that I have, that my team works with and everything we work through. The ultimate idea is being able to work fast. through this, not after and or around this. Because one day, let's even just do some simple math. There's thirty five hundred calories in one pound of body fat. How much can you actually eat on any one given day? Let's even say you can eat ten thousand calories, which is like I can. That's an astronomical amount of food. Let's say you eat ten thousand calories. So the likelihood that's maybe two pounds of actual body fat. And if you gain two pounds of body fat on one day, A, you're not gonna feel great. And at the end of the day, if we then adjust for the next two weeks, if you do a five hundred calorie deficit every single day for two weeks, you'll be down those two pounds. So yes, one day for two weeks, but in the grand spectrum of things, you'll for a net year, still be in a place where you're gonna be down body fat and up muscle. So long as you're sticking to the system, you're utilizing these principles. You have a floor you're operating off of where it's a buy-in for the day and non-negotiable. So I wanna again, pause there, get another sip. and give you some real life examples that you can use going into this weekend that you can use for future holidays as well, where they're watching this live, the replay, when you're watching this, this is kind of meant to be like an evergreen style. I mean, it's always going to be good. It's always going to be applicable and accessible. Even as new data comes out, I will always update things. But some of these things are just time tested and true for like over a decade that I've seen almost two decades in the health industry. We're in the health and wellness space. So let's take family dinner. That's going to be one. Take travel days as another. Kids schedule chaos and a late night. These are four variables that will inevitably come up around holidays and or travel. So number one, family dinners. Let's say it's whatever holiday and everyone brought stuff over. You got your favorite meals. How are you going to navigate that? A, there's probably things you're looking forward to. I'll use my example. I really look forward to pumpkin pie. I like pumpkin pie. I also like peanut butter cups. Whether it's homemade, whether it's store-bought, whether it's peanut butter pies, I love peanut butter and chocolate. So that's something I look forward to as well. Knowing that I'm not going to just fast all day and then only eat that and make myself suffer. What I do though is a non-negotiable for me is I move thirty minutes before the meal and after the meal. that's a very simple like cool i'm going to before i go back for seconds i'm going to go for a little walk another thing i found extremely impactful is hydration being able to drink water So I have three basic non-negotiables. I eat my body weight and protein, especially on those days. So I'm two hundred-ish pounds, maybe two-oh-five, two-ten right now, I float like maybe two-oh-seven. So I'll eat two hundred grams of protein, a non-negotiable. That's something I'm getting in protein shakes, turkey, whatever protein source you got, you're gonna have your protein. That's my non-negotiable. Find a nutrition non-negotiable, hydration and movement non-negotiable, you'll be set up for all of these situations. i have protein throughout the day i've been feeding myself number two i'm staying hydrated i'm drinking half of my body weight in fluid ounces whether that's just water whether it's lately i've been honestly enjoying diet snapple you can judge me if you want to i like it i even like diet coke i don't drink all the time but seltzer water you can flavor water put fruit in a filter and just have some flavored water that way whatever works for you i think honestly cucumber and lemon that's the move But being able to have half my body weight, so at least a hundred ounces in water. The third thing is movement. Again, I mentioned at least thirty minutes of movement, but ideally I'm doing it before the dinner that I enjoy, like a special and having pumpkin pie and thirty minutes after a special. And in a perfect world, it is not a non-negotiable as a bonus. I like it to be a strength training oriented high impact calorically demanding meals. So that as I'm eating these things, my body's replenishing the glycogen it used from the workout. So that's again, a preference. Now we can take the same principle and apply it again on travel days. It'll slightly adjust, especially on travel days. I tend to eat lighter. So I'm very intentional the day before and the day after, but that day of, again, I'm hydrating, especially when I'm flying. Here's the caveat. It's not super fun to have to always go to the bathroom, but when you're flying, your body is going to potentially retain fluid. You're also going to feel dehydrated depending on your electrolyte intake. So make sure you're getting fluids in and you're moving, especially on a plane. If it's more than like five, six hours, your risk of a variety of things, I'm not going to diagnose stuff, can go up. So you want to move, even if it's stand up stress. a little bit, go to the bathroom, come back. It's good for you. It's in the same orientations of hydration, nutrition, movement. You apply the same principle in all these arenas, you will have success. For travel days, even if you're driving, let's say you're driving to the in-laws, you're driving to go for a holiday weekend, being able to hydrate, being able to, when you stop, move, even if it's stretching. Now, ideally it's thirty minutes, but it doesn't have to be thirty minutes straight. It can be thirty minutes throughout the day. So it can be three minutes ten times throughout the day. And start with what feels accessible. If three minutes total feels accessible, start with that, but set a movement oriented goal, set a hydration oriented goal, and then set a food oriented goal. So for example, if it's especially driving, I tend to lean on protein shakes, you know, hard boiled eggs, string cheese, sandwiches, some baseline things you can get almost anywhere. Same thing in airlines and flights. I eat pretty consistent stuff. And you can even bonus points. You do a little bit of extra research ahead of time. Nowadays with AI, and even again, if you jump on a call, we have so many resources inside of our coaching program. We have AI things that'll tease out and suggest to you based on where you're going, here's the things to get. Your coach will be there for you. We have so many resources around that. Now let's go to the kids schedule chaos. This is every week we deal with the kids schedule, but sometimes it gets a little more chaotic. This is where being able to stay calm and being able to have a baseline operational non-negotiable. For me, it's the pause, breathe, assess technique, which is I'm going to pause, take a nice deep breath, and then I'm going to assess what I want to do before I do the thing. which again, I'm not perfect at this. This is something I get to continuously work on. If you ask my kids or my family, they would tell you, obviously, this is something I get reps at and it's not a dialed in perfect system, but that's how you can handle when it comes to the kid's chaos as a parent. Plans change, schedules change. It happened to me yesterday. I was going to have a meeting this morning. I had to reschedule it because my daughter ended up going to bed later, being up all night. It was like a tougher sleep night. And thankfully, the meeting was able to be adjusted. If it wasn't working, I would have been able to just wake up being on low sleep and make it happen. And what I would have done, similar to how I kind of operate, I was just talking about, I would find ways to be moving. I would continuously hydrate and then I would have my baseline hit my nutrition mark. For me, it's protein. Protein is a big one because if I'm eating my protein, A, I'm making sure my muscle growth is staying on track and B, I'm more than likely going to stay full. That's why I'm so big on it. Again, depending on where your needs are and your body's health, you may or may not want to go for one pound of lean body mass or one gram per lean body mass, pound of body mass. It's just, it's an easy formula. Now going to, again, the late nights. The one thing I will say is a caveat for late nights, assuming you might even be drinking. Again, I don't endorse drinking. I don't think that's a good idea. If you're going to be having a late night, especially if it's a recreational late night, you might be drinking. Hey, that's not the day you want to do weight training, by the way. If you plan on consuming alcohol, alcohol is going to impede your body's ability to recover and grow its muscle tissue. So that's the day you want to have a rest day and or a cardio day or possibly a hit day, a high intensity interval day that's not very heavily muscle growth oriented, not very anabolically driven because alcohol is going to impede your body's ability to recover. cardio is a great day for that. Like I see, especially here in Nashville, they'll have like half marathons, marathons, five Ks, like a brewery kind of thing. That's kind of a day where it makes sense. Now it's still, you don't want to be in a calorie surplus, but that's kind of where you compare those things together. And if you're going to stay up late, again, ideally also hydrate. If you even are drinking for every drink you have, have eight, And again, I want to say, I'm not saying you should be drinking. I'm just speaking to those that obviously if you are, this is a reality, right? So I want to like just help offer insight to that. There are also some things that you can take and there's some things you can do to help support your body naturally detoxifies and cleanse itself. However, there's basic ingredients you can give it to support that. Some nutrients, some B vitamins are a great one. Beets can be another really helpful one because of the vasodilation of it, especially the B vitamins. Being able to basically have fruits and vegetables and a high amount of protein is gonna always from, I can't say always, very high percentage of the time serve you and work in your favor. So if you plan on drinking, Be mindful, have low protein or high protein. Be low on the processed garbage. Get your fruit, get your vegetables. And again, ideally match it on a day of movement that's more cardiovascular based. And ideally factor for getting good night's sleep. A lot of times when we have a late night, We may even wake up early the next day to go to church, to go to an event, to a dinner, to whatever. Make sure you're getting good night's sleep the day before, the day after, ideally whenever possible. If you are having a rough late night and you're not getting sleep, that's not the move. Now on the flip side, let's take a late night, but it's a work late night and or it's a productivity oriented late night. For example, You are traveling and you're working late and you're at an event. I'll think of one of my coaches specifically who tends to travel for his work and he has early mornings and late nights and it really impacts his ability to get quality sleep. So what I always offer when we talk about these things is being able to focus on what we control. So saying, all right, cool. If I have to be up early, I'm going to try as best as I can to get to sleep as soon as possible. If I have to be out late because of the job and I'm going to be up early, being able to schedule for naps If that's possible, if it's not, keep your stress level low. Try and delegate things where you can. Again, make sure you're hydrating and eat pretty simple and non-processed to not exacerbate the stress response system when it comes to those late nights, especially if you're not getting good quality sleep. So again, that's covering how I would personally handle and have handled the family dinners, travel days, kids schedule chaos, and even late nights. So to recap, again, it's just basically have three non-negotiables in a perfect world, have at least one in a floor principle, the floor concept, one non-negotiable. Just pick one of these, have a non-negotiable. That's what you do in any one of these scenarios. In an ideal world, you have three non-negotiables, one that covers hydration, one that covers nutrition, one that covers movement. And where I see also, I'm going to call out a couple of things here, some common pitfalls, as it were, is skipping meals to then be able to overeat later. Now, I'm going to be honest, this one is one that I can still gravitate towards, not even intentionally skipping meals, but I'll honestly take today as a perfect example. I've eaten twice today. which is not bad, but it's six thirty or six. Yes, six thirty. So ideally, I would have eaten three times or four by the end of this stage of the day in a normal kind of situation. However, I know my schedule and I kind of plan for this. So I didn't break my fast until about two o'clock. I was also drinking protein shakes in my coffee. I don't count that as breaking a fast. That's technically meal number one. So that's counterintuitive thinking meal number one isn't breaking a fast, but I put protein in my coffee. That's why I get basic protein in coffee. I do it. I finish up by one o'clock. That's the latest I'll have caffeine. Otherwise I'll be up all night. I've experimented with this. One o'clock is my baseline. Like that's my, where I get to cut things off. Okay. So being able to have that is where I found it impactful. Then I could have, the temptation was today, I made a sandwich, a turkey and cheese, high fiber bread sandwich. So I got about twenty grams of fiber. I've got about seventy grams of protein between the cheese and the turkey and the bread. So I got a hundred grams of protein in already. So I got thirty grams for my protein shake and I got seventy between all the stuff, the turkey, the cheese and the bread that I had. and i got about twenty grams of fiber so already just from two meals i got a hundred grams of protein i got twenty grams of fiber and i'm less than a thousand calories so i'm not saying that's perfect i don't like calorie counting but i do like to pay attention to my protein intake the point is after this i'm gonna have a window of time where i'm gonna have my bigger meal of the day i'm gonna be again intentional with that and instead of just hammering a whole pizza pie because we have like leftover pizza for my daughter's birthday recently i'm going to have a slice of pizza with a turkey bowl that i'm going to make that's going to be ninety nine percent ground turkey chili mix, black beans, peppers and onions. And I'm probably going to mix in some cauliflower rice. And then I'm also going to have some quinoa black bean chips with a little bit of medium sauce. That's like fifteen calories per serving. So, again, I'll mix in all sub carbs. I worked out before I did five by five bench press and deadlift before this. So I'll be able to Get some energy in, recalibrate my glycogen, get protein. And this is where, again, the temptation is if I would have skipped my sandwich meal, I would have been more inclined to house way more food at dinner. So don't skip meals to overeat later. Be able to still let yourself eat. I'm honestly, even for dessert, I'm going to have some peanut butter cups and a bran muffin and some dehydrated mangoes. But if I would have fasted all day without eating anything and then ate that, I'd be eating way more on the dessert and the dinner side than if I would allow myself, which I did today, to eat throughout the day. So that's usually a pitfall I see, number one. Number two, I'll just take the whole weekend off. The holidays, I'll start, I'll pick it back up on Monday after the holidays. Do what you can, have your floor, have your non-negotiable, move for thirty minutes, no matter what's going on. Even if it's at the airport or if it's in the car, like find a way to make it happen. That's your non-negotiable and or adjust your non-negotiable for the travel. Saying, okay, cool. I'm not going to do thirty minutes of walking today. I'm going to do ten stretches at different points throughout the day. That'll maybe take five minutes. But don't just say, ah, I'll take the whole weekend off. Utilize the twenty four hour rule. If you even have a day off that you're like kind of going off, quote unquote, it's scheduled and allow yourself to have twenty four hours. Fine. But then you're back to it. Don't allow twenty four to become forty eight to become seventy two. That's the pitfall. Pitfall I see for most people is it becomes I'll do it later. Concept that is very contagious. Another one I see is trying to be perfect. The all or nothing, the perfectionism. We don't even get started and or I wasn't perfect. So I'm just going to scratch it. What I think is interesting is what I see for most people is when they're training, they tend to eat a little bit better, but if they get injured or they take time off, they tend to allow their nutrition to slide. That's the opposite. When you are training, you can be a little bit more, um, adaptable with your nutrition, even though technically exercise is like, like, ten percent of your total energy expenditure, it's still an impactful ten percent that compounds over time, depending on how you do it. So what I see for people is like, oh, you know what, I'm gonna eat a salad and all these things when I'm working out. It's like, when you want to eat a salad is like, ideally when you're not working out, because you're not burning more calories. You're moving less. That's when you want to really be dialed in with things. I mean, ideally you're intentional all the time, but that's where I see an interesting pitfalls, like trying to be perfect. And when you're not, it's the all or nothing. And then lastly, not having a plan going in. It's like, I'm just going to play it by year. I'll figure it out as I go, going into the holidays, going into travel, just seeing, I'll see what they have available. Like, it's like, no, have an intentional plan. And this kind of segues into the last little piece I'll touch on is having a simple, actionable plan, being intentional and action oriented is the move. So this is what you can actually do. If you do nothing else this weekend, I want you to do this. I want you to set a protein goal. I want you to move your body for a minimum of three to five minutes every day. And I want you to drink at least a quarter of your body weight in fluid ounces. So I'm two hundred pounds. That would be fifty ounces. So drink twenty five percent of your body weight in fluid ounces, hit at least half of your protein grams of your body weight. So if you're two hundred pounds, you have at least one hundred grams of protein. If you're two hundred pounds, you'd have at least fifty ounces of water and you're walking or moving for at least three to five minutes. That's like super baseline, non-negotiable bare minimum. That's the one thing I want you to focus on. If you want more adjustments, you're a little bit more advanced, you're trying to move from like, eighteen percent to fifteen percent body fat, you're trying to move fifteen percent body fat, ten percent body fat, we would dial those things up a lot more. But again, setting a very clear non-negotiable floor that you're operating from. And again, if you deviate from that, you have a pattern disruption, use the twenty four hour rule, give yourself twenty four hours, then get back to it. So this is something that we utilize with our fighters, but this is applied across the board. And I just want to invite that for you guys. All right. So I'm going to pause here and check into the comments. We'll start to bring it home. Yeah, ideally, not yet, ideally just water, but there you go. That's pretty much it, y'all. I'm going to bring it home from there. Again, I'll be back next week talking about what do you do after the holidays, how we're quote unquote rebounding, utilizing that twenty four hour rule to take action. And yeah, exactly. If you fall, I don't even like thinking of it like there is no wagon to be on or off that thing. Again, mindset, I want to shift, but I appreciate you pulling that up. Bulba is there is actually no wagon. There is no like, hey, this is the path per se. It's hey, this is the system. If the system has a breakdown, we revamp the system, but there's no perfect path. There's no wagon. There's no like we're on this trail. It's cool. We're carving the path along the way. So that's being able to adapt around it and just having some baseline non-negotiables. And guess what? Even if the non-negotiable breaks, it's not like I fell off the wagon. It's like, no, I learned something from this. And I implement my twenty four hour rule. Twenty four hour rule is I allow myself to have twenty four hours and then I'm getting back to a very clear non-negotiable. And again, the formula to that is we have awareness around what it is that we are focusing on, whether it's we're counting our bites, whether it's measuring our body fat percentage, whether it's how many pushups I can do, how many pull-ups, whatever it is you care about, you have awareness around it. You create an intentional goal. I, for intention, want to be able to play with my kids till I'm a hundred. and be able to hold them over my head that's like another version of an intention where i want to have fifteen percent body fat or i just want to be able to be pain free i hear all of these come up quite a bit or i want to be able to have more energy some of these are a little bit bigger than others ideally you're having very specific ones so instead of saying hey i want to have more energy i want to be at a five out of five energy ninety percent of the time And then we have action around that. What's the process that facilitates that? I'm going to get seven to nine hours of sleep a night by being able to not look at TVs two hours before I go to bed because you can't always control how much sleep you get. And I'm going to be held accountable by either having a schedule. scheduled check-in call with my coach, with my doctor, with a friend on social media, with a meetup, with wherever, but having some sense of accountability. So again, the four steps, awareness, intention, action, accountability, that will deliver you results. When that gets deviated, when a pattern disrupts that, give yourself twenty four hours, then get back to it. And that's pretty much it, y'all. All right. I'm going to leave it at that. I appreciate you guys. Again, you can hit up our website, lifestyleoffitness.com. Jump on a call with me, someone on the team. I'll hook you guys up, not only with insight on the call, but you'll also as a thank you for me to you. You'll get a fourteen day program, training workout, meal plan. You'll get a coach assigned to you, giving you accountability. And if you don't like it, that's cool. It'll be yours. You do what you want with it. And if you like it, great. We'll have coaching options for you. We have a whole awesome path. But in the meantime, you'll at least have resources. And wherever you're watching this, if you're not already, please follow, subscribe, like, all that good stuff. And then you can get notified when we're going live in the future. If you have questions on content or you have questions you want to see me address, go again to our website. And we have a... tab where you can submit a request, a topic. And if you do that, you're going to be in the running for a hundred dollar gift card. Each week when we have someone submit a topic, I announce a winner. I give them a hundred dollar gift card. I'll email them privately. So you don't even have to put your name out there. If you don't want people to know your name, I'll make it private. I got you. All right. That's going to do it. I'll see y'all next week. Have a happy holiday, whatever you're celebrating. If you're celebrating, if you're just kind of getting travel on, safe travels and see y'all in the next one. Peace everybody.