Track Your MicroGains
Get my personal tracker at the end.
I shifted my mindset in late 2023 from expecting large gains to micro gains. The goalposts shifted as well. Read more to learn about what MicroGains are and how they can change your life.
The biggest killer of goals is not large goals, but rather the false expectations about how to achieve them and what it looks like when they are met. People usually have a sprinters mindset when it comes to goals, and when tough obstacles are met, they quit.
Breaking it down
We now know that most people are sprinters but quit when the going gets tough. Most people know that life is a marathon and not a sprint, yet the default bias that everybody has is short-term gratification. When people don’t receive the gratification they desire, they quit.
Fitness is a big goal that everybody has for a New Year’s resolution. When January starts, the gym is full of new signups and there’s a packed house for the first few months. Yet when March hits, the gym reverts to the mean where only the people who are serious about their fitness stay.
Why is this?
They had a big goal of finally getting fit, but quit when they weren’t seeing the results. They may have tried new diets that drastically confused their brain and body, which caused them to relapse because their body was still getting used to the new foods, and they still weren’t seeing any results. Or, they may have gotten some newbie gains, but were either over or undertraining and as a result, weren’t seeing any new gains.
The problem is false expectations
They were trying to get quick results and were sprinting towards the finish line instead of running the marathon. This actually may have given them some results at the beginning, but it wasn’t manageable. People already know that life is a marathon, yet their enthusiasm gets the better of them and they burn out their motivation quickly.
The solution is reframing goals into MicroGains
MicroGains is the idea that I came up with that makes it a mission to get better every single day. Instead of looking at targets from a larger distance, like months or years, it reframes them into daily actionables.
Instead of reaching a weight target of 160lbs, it reframes it into fitness targets like “getting 1 more quality rep per exercise per day”. When that easy, yet quality rep becomes met, the mind rewards them with dopamine and a feeling of accomplishment. Yet, it keeps them desiring for more. Because the exercise didn’t exhaust their body with confusion and muscle exhaustion, it slowly retrained their mind and body to new stimuli.
MicroGains compound daily
And those days add up over weeks, months, and years. When I did this with my fitness goals, I stretched my mind and body to new limits. Now, my body has a new norm and it is constantly getting stretched to new heights every single day.
Case study:
I stopped going to the gym in 2018. Instead of doing powerlifting exercises, I focused my energy on getting better at Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. As a result, my body slimmed down and I became very technical in BJJ.
But I decided I wanted to get stronger by focusing on functional strength with sport-specificity in mind and I tried to add calisthenics to my routine. However, this failed because I tried to go too hard on calisthenics which made me require more recovery time. This hindered my BJJ training.
As I got better at BJJ, I started to get more technical and use less strength during training. This made it optimal for me to start my calisthenics journey again. This time, I focused on pullups. After BJJ training, I would make it a mission to focus on 1 quality rep of pullups. This was difficult because I was already fatigued after BJJ training, but the goal was to build functional strength. The only way I could build this was by adding more physical stress on top of the push and pull of grappling strong people. This was tough for the first month, but slowly my body adjusted to the new stress load.
At first, I focused on doing 7 sets of 1 quality reps in the pullup bar. This is more difficult than people imagine because I focused on the symmetry, muscle connection, and range of movement at the top and bottom with slow time under tension. The goal was to slowly attain better technique with bias on technique over quantity. The goal was to initially get better technique over time and increase the rep ranges. Eventually, I was able to get to 2 quality reps in a row, which slowly increased to 3, and so on. I also added more exercises with no additional stress and plenty of recovery time. All of this was post-BJJ training. I started this around November of 2023, and only started tracking it in February of 2024, but the results speak for themselves:
Reframe your mind to MicroGoals with the rule of 1
With any goal, set the bar high, but retrain your brain to focus on daily actionable goalsets with the power of 1. With fitness, it could be 1 more (quality) rep or getting 1% better with the technique or form. You could parlay this into any goal in mind, and when you track them, you will be astonished at how much you can accomplish in a few weeks. With MicroGoals you can MicroGain infinitely because the goal is in the journey not in the results.
(p.s. I wrote a blog about this topic on my website here)
Track your MicroGains below 👇
Make a copy of my MicroGains Tracker here
Get my calisthenics setup here
Click the images below 👇
