In this episode, personal trainer Jayd Harrison gives advice for building a "light mode" plan for your training and nutrition when things get busy and you're not able to put a lot of time and energy into your workouts and diet.

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Hi there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, a k a Jaydigains, and today I want to talk to you guys about what I call your minimally viable plan for your fitness or your M V P. One of the most common reasons that people come to work with me as a personal trainer and health coach is because they used to be really in shape. They used to go to the gym all the time and they were really on their nutrition, and then something happened in their life that caused them to fall off the wagon and go completely off the rails. Usually when this happens, people end up gaining a lot of weight or losing a lot of strength, and then it can be really, really difficult to get back on track, and so they end up hiring a personal trainer like myself to help them get back into shape.

Now, I have to say that this is one of the hardest situations that you can find yourself in because it's not only that you have to recondition your body and get moving again, which is going to make you feel tired and you're going to be sore, but I think that the hardest thing about this situation is the mental toll, the mental and emotional toll. It's really hard to go from being really strong or really in shape and then kind of losing all of that and having to start from scratch again. And so a lot of people feel a lot of shame around this, and a lot of people also struggle with knowing exactly what to do. Many of my clients who come to work with me were athletes in high school or in college, and so they relied on a coach to tell them what to do, and that's how they lived their life for many years.

But then they get into the adult world and you have to navigate all of the responsibilities of work and family life and finding time to work out and even knowing what to do when you work out and how you should eat can be really overwhelming given all of the obligations and responsibilities we have. So this is why I'm such a big proponent of working with a personal trainer or working with a health coach or nutritionist because these are people who can guide you through the obstacles of adult life to get you in the shape that you want to be in to help you reach your fitness goals. In my own coaching business, what I've found is a really important strategy that has saved my clients and kept them moving forward in their gains is having what I call the minimally viable plan or their light mode plan.

Now, this is a sort of plan B type of training program or nutrition plan that's going to meet the minimum requirements of just general health and wellness, because that's kind of the first thing to go when we hit obstacles. What a lot of times happens is people just kind of stop exercising altogether. They stop even caring about what they eat. That can be very damaging to your overall progress. So what we want to do when we're going through something that's really challenging is have something that we can follow that's going to be very low effort to think about, very low energy to manage that's going to at least allow us to hit the minimum requirements for health. So that's what I shared in my coaching call with my clients and subscribers in my Coaching Corner Discord. Now, if you want to participate in one of the monthly coaching calls, you can join my Coaching Corner Discord and subscribe at the Supporter plus level.

This will get you access to the monthly coaching calls and other exclusive resources that are available to my one-on-one clients, subscribers and supporters. If you're one of my one-on-one clients, you automatically get access to all of this. Also, if you are subscribed to one of my D I Y workout programs on trainer eyes, you get access to these as well. So lots of ways to get engaged and plugged in. So without further ado, let's get into our discussion of how to build a minimally viable plan for when shit goes off the rails. It's really important just for maintaining momentum in your fitness journey and progress to have something in the back of your mind, in your back pocket, that's your sort of minimally viable plan, your minimally viable training and nutrition plan. Because what happens for a lot of people when they hit an obstacle, like something comes up at work, work gets really, really busy, or you get sick or some kind of life event happens, the first thing for most people that falls off is nutrition and exercise.

It's your nutrition and your exercise plan that are the first to go, and I want to empower you guys with an alternative to what happens for a lot of people, which is that they just fall off the wagon completely and stop cold Turkey on both healthy eating and on their exercise. And this is this on again off. Again, relationship with fitness will sabotage your gains, and it's not only going to sabotage your gains like your strength gains or your fat loss gains, but it's also, it's just going to feel, it feels like shit. It feels like shit when you have made so much progress and you've stuck consistently to the plan and then you fall completely off the wagon, it's really demotivating and then it can be just super, super hard to get back on the wagon. For most people, that is the main struggle, especially the more advanced or intermediate clients that I get when they come to see me.

A lot of times they're like, I used to be in shape. I used to be working out a lot and then I fell off the wagon and I can't get back on. So starting back up from a full stop is really, really hard. It's not impossible, but it is really hard. And so what I want to offer you guys is a concept that you can have in mind that will help you to keep the momentum going even when you have a lot less time and a lot less energy to devote to your gains. You have your Plan, you have your training plan where you're lifting four or five times a week or running two or three times a week. You also have the amount of calories that you're trying to eat. You're tracking your calories, you're tracking your protein, and all of that is great, but it does take time, right? It takes a lot of time through your week. Now, something crazy happens, you got to travel for work or a crazy work project happens, and then you don't have the mind space or the time to be tracking or putting lots of hours into the gym. And I want you to keep in mind even when this is happening, there is always something that you can do to push the needle a little bit on your fitness and health. You don't have to completely full stop, give up on everything. Okay? When that happens, what I want you to do is fall back into your plan B or your minimally viable training plan.

Your minimally viable fitness plan is going to be those baseline minimal requirements for health, because what happens with a lot of people is that they fall completely off the wagon and they don't even hit the minimum requirements for diet and exercise. So think about your bare minimum requirements. What are those? We'll talk about nutrition first. The first is for nutrition. If you reach a point where you're not able to track all every day or you're not following a meal plan, you're not able to cook, just try to keep in mind the healthy plate model. We talk about the healthy plate model a lot, and that is where you're taking your plate. You divide it in half on one half of the plate, you're going to fill it up with vegetables or vegetables and fruit, two servings of vegetables or a serving of vegetable and a serving of fruit on the other half of your plate, you're going to fill up a little over a quarter with some kind of source of protein, lean protein ideally so like fish, white meat, lean cuts of beef or some kind of vegetable source of protein, and then on the remaining less than a quarter of your plate, you have your grains and your starches, preferably whole grains, and you can use this healthy plate model to build a healthy plate at a restaurant or throw together a girl dinner or something like that.

I don't know if you guys are on TikTok and have seen the trend girl dinner, but throwing together food. As long as you have the healthy plate and model, you can build a healthy, healthy meal that's going to keep you roughly within a healthy amount of calories and nutrients that you need to keep your body moving in the right direction and to keep yourself from backsliding into bad habits that are going to sabotage your gains, your muscle gains, and your fat loss gains. So always fall back on the healthy plate model with your nutrition, even if you stop tracking your food, even if you aren't following a meal plan, keep the healthy plate model in mind for your nutrition. That's your bare minimum for your exercise. Your bare minimum is going to be some kind of daily or weekly activity. You can think of a daily activity in terms of 7,000 to 10,000 steps if you want to do it by steps.

That's a great way, that's a great range to shoot for. So have your smartphone track your steps or wear some kind of pedometer activity tracker device or something like that. Track your steps and set a daily goal. This is going to help you to get up and get moving, and you don't have to do it all at once. You can literally reach your step goal by just getting up and taking a lap around your neighborhood or around your work or around your office every couple of hours, and just get those steps in here and there where you can sneak it in. That's going to help to keep your heart healthy and to keep your muscles stimulated, especially the muscles in your legs. It's also going to help you with your mental health, right? It's going to keep that blood flowing, so that's going to be your bare minimum of exercise.

Okay? So you can do 7,000 to 10,000 steps a day, or you can set the goal of 30 minutes a day, 30 minutes, and that can be whatever exercise. It doesn't have to be steps like walking around. Just do something that is going to be moving your body, moving your muscles. You can go for a swim, you can go for a walk, you can play with your kids, play with your animals. You can have spicy snuggles with your partner. I don't care. Get moving. Get your heart rate up for 30 minutes every single day. That's going to be your minimal exercise plan. Now, if you are concerned particularly with muscle gains, then you're going to scale back your workouts too, okay? You can scale back your workouts. You're not going to lose all of your gains, but here's what I suggest is you bump back the frequency of your lifts to two or three times a week.

Two is the minimum for maintaining your muscles health and to keep them strong two times a week is your minimum. You're going to scale back the frequency to two or three times a week, and all three of your workouts are going to be total body. So in each of these workouts, you're going to hit at least one exercise for legs, at least one exercise for arms, and at least one exercise for your core. You're going to do one for each of those, or you can do a compound exercise that hits everything at once, like your deadlifts or your squats. Even bench can be considered a full body exercise. So you're going to prioritize hitting all of your muscles in your body in the single workout and prioritize or compound lifts because those are going to get more muscles working at the same time, so you're going to keep your muscles stimulated and keeping your muscles stimulated at this minimal level is what's going to help keep you strong and at least maintain your strength and maintain the amount of muscle that you've built while you're going through this weird obstacle while you're having to scale things down.

That is our goal. Keep the muscles stimulated at a minimal level, and so that is what I have as sort of the basis of my light mode, minimally viable fitness plan, and I think everybody needs to have one in their back pocket for when they hit obstacles. When crazy stuff happens, when you get busy, know that there's always something that you can do. You don't have to completely full stop just because you can't follow your current training plan or your current nutrition plan because you don't have the mental spoons, you don't have the mind space. You don't have the energy. It doesn't mean that you can't do anything. There's something that you can do. There's always something that you can do, so have some kind of minimally viable plan that you can fall back on because when you do that, when you fall back on your minimal plans, it's going to be so much easier to get back on the wagon in your full programming.

When you get back to your four or five days a week of training, and then you're tracking your nutrition, tracking your calories, or following a meal plan, it is going to be so much easier to get back onto that coming from a minimally viable plan where you're just hitting the minimum requirements, it's so much easier because all you have to do at that point is just kind of turn the volume up on different things. You're just optimizing it at that point versus starting over from scratch, from full stop. Okay, so I want to give you guys that advice as we head into the holiday season, as we head into all the stuff that happens that interrupts our gains, you do not have to stop, okay? There's always something that you can do, so keep those minimum requirements in mind and give yourself permission to fall back on them when things get crazy.

You're more than just an athlete, right? You're more than your workouts, your health, your overall health and wellness. Your overall fitness includes all the aspects of your health, mental health, social health, emotional health, physical health, nutrition. Those are all a part of what makes you as a system function best. So there's going to be times where work life or your family life is going to demand more energy out of you, and I want you guys to not feel trapped, like you're going to lose all your gains. You have to pick one or the other. You don't have to pick one or the other. Put your energy where it's needed. You can maximize your gains by just working smarter. We can always change things up, but that's why I do what I do. A personal trainer that is most of my job, is helping people to figure out how to make fitness work and how to make fitness happen given the restraints that they have in their life.

But there really Is, there's always something we can do, and I mean, working with a personal trainer, working with a coach is a great way to figure that out so that you don't have to stop and have this on again, off again. Relationship with your fitness, working with a personal trainer and having a plan. Somebody who can help you plan and who knows what needs to be done in your corner is going to go a long way to keeping you progressing versus going on your own and just going on and off your plan.

Thank you so much for listening or watching this podcast. I hope that you found it helpful and that you'll be able to use the minimally viable plan idea to keep yourself moving forward in your fitness even when you hit bumps along the road, things get busy, et cetera. Make sure to subscribe to this channel if you haven't done so already, and keep in mind that there's both a video version and an audio version so you can watch or listen anywhere. Just go to Jaydigains Coaching Corner podcast, either on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. I'll see you guys next time. Have a great rest of your day, and don't forget to drink your water, eat your protein, eat your veggies, and I'll see you next time.