Do less, to do more

By Daniel Francis

If you were to analyse the setup of my articles this year thus far, the three words that would sum them up would be consistency, goals, and health. God has been speaking to me lately to keep sharing about how you can better achieve your goals. For some reason, these health parallels keep finding their way into the articles. Hey, once the message is received, I think I have done my job.

So, continuing my fitness journey, I have been constantly looking for information on maximising my workout but also ways to ensure that I am gymming to live and not living to gym as some say. One concept I came across was ‘Reps in Reserve’. ‘Reps in Reserve’ is a type of training where you perform a set of repetitions but you stop just short of muscular failure. Typically, it is advised to keep going until you achieve failure to get the best muscle growth. This method of pushing to failure on every set was something I did for a few weeks, but I came across a big problem: I was constantly exhausted!

The muscle growth and the strength I gained were important but it was met with a greater level of fatigue which made it difficult to attend to the day’s work. I did not look forward to going to the gym the next day. I found the idea of reps in reserve very appealing. It matched my mantra of “some exercise is better than no exercise” and “consistency over perfection.”

As I implemented the new method, unsurprisingly I had more energy during the day. I didn’t labour mentally thinking about my next workout and even though my growth would be affected, I realised that in the long run it worked out better because I would be more consistent with the gym and less likely to fall off.

Is there anything in your life currently where you are heading to failure? Have you decided to give this area your everything, even to the detriment of maintaining your other necessary activities? The idea of going to failure is exciting in our heads when aligned with a particular goal. It gives us a surge of excitement to aim for a high target. At the beginning of the year, this is typically the norm but as the months pass by, we realise that our plans are very taxing and very difficult to keep up. We give up.

We are currently in February. How many of us have given up on some of those New Year’s resolutions already? Yet if we had taken a more conservative approach, we would have forgone greater short-term results but increased the likelihood that we stay consistent, which in the long run yields greater results.

I’m all for going big and I believe in some instances, it is warranted yet in the fast-paced world we live in, it is those who acknowledge the power of consistency over time who come out on top. It is those who set aside 10-20 minutes of reading who finish more books than those who try to read an hour each day and give up after a few weeks because the time crunch becomes too much. It is those who set aside a few moments to pray and or read their Bible each day that tend to stay consistent.

Your heart is in the right place, however a solid foundation of consistency at the end of the day yields greater results. Once consistent, you can then dedicate more time to these important activities because you are now more likely to stick with them.

I guess what I’m saying in this article is to do less to be able to do more. Temper the verve to go big when your energy is better spent focusing on the smaller steps in front of you. Consistency is the key. If prioritised, it can transform your life at a foundational level and beyond. To achieve this level maybe it’s a good idea to keep some reps in reserve in the different areas of your life so that overall, you can keep a level of consistency that produces the results you want to see. Pray on it. Read the Word for greater guidance and with all things take God with you on it and you can’t go wrong.

Daniel Francis is a millennial helping other millennials. He is a two-time author of the books The Millennial Mind and The Millennial Experience, and an entrepreneur. Over the past four years, he has served as a Personal Development Coach whose work targets Millennials and helps them tap into their full potential. He is also a self-publishing coach and has guided hundreds on self-publishing their book successfully.

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Email: themillennialmind2020@gmail.com