2 Psychological SKILLS That Determine If You'll Stick to Lifting and Nutrition | Ep 411
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Even if you know what to do for nutrition and strength training, you keep stopping, falling off, and starting over.
Discover why this has nothing to do with discipline, willpower, or motivation, and everything to do with two trainable psychological skills that predict whether you'll follow through or quit.
Episode Resources:
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Timestamps:
0:00 - Why you keep starting over with strength training and nutrition
8:36 - Skill #1: Self-efficacy (believing you can execute the next step)
13:58 - Small wins and progressive overload for confidence
14:40 - Join the 3-Week Strong Finish Challenge
15:55 - Skill #2: Self-regulation (following through when life gets messy)
20:22 - 4 tactics to build self-regulation
24:04 - Related psychological models explained
26:18 - Practical steps and identity shift for lifters
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Philip Pape: 0:01
Even if you know what to do, you've listened to podcasts, watched to videos, maybe hired a coach, you know how to eat, how to train, how to lose fat, build muscle, and yet you still keep stopping, you keep falling off, you keep starting over. Today I'm gonna show you why this happens and why it has nothing to do with discipline, willpower, or motivation. You'll discover the two trainable psychological skills that predict whether someone follows through or gives up and walk away with specific tips to build these skills. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and today we're gonna talk about the psychology of adherence, specifically what the research tells us about why people stick to strength training and nutrition and why most people don't. This is one of those episodes that is about mindset and how you think about consistency. And we're gonna go beyond typical advice and probably beyond things that I've even discussed on the show because I recently came across a research review, it was in mass, that examined the factors related to long-term resistance training adherence specifically. And they challenged some of my own assumptions, they confirmed some others, and I'm always learning and trying to apply what I've learned for you guys and to our programs and to the Fitness Lab app, and really just make sure we're using the latest uh knowledge from the evidence to help us out, myself included. What struck me most from this review is that the psychological mechanisms that determine whether someone sticks to their training and nutrition, they're trainable. I guess it didn't surprise me, but it was really cool to see the validation that these are skills that you can develop. They are skills. They're not personality traits, they're not, you know, stuck in your permanent identity. They are skills. So let's get into it. Let's start with what the evidence shows about why most people quit, but why some people don't. And that's going to give us a clue about what we can do. So here's the thing about sticking to anything really, but specifically your training and nutrition, is that I think we're focused often on the wrong variables. It's kind of like when we talk about energy balance and we talk about calories and calories out. And calories in, calories out are variables, but they're usually the wrong variables because most people, even if you understand that, have trouble getting the right calories in and producing the right calories out. And it's like, what upstream do we actually care more about in terms of variables that get us to those other variables being what we want? And you've heard lots of these methods. You've heard of smart goals, for example, you've heard of finding an accountability partner. You've probably heard, hey, you've got to make it fun, you've got to remove friction. And I've talked about all of those. And some of it can help. These are all, I'll say, tools more than anything, but none of them actually explain why two people, if you put them side by side and they have the same environment, the same program, the same knowledge, one of them sticks to that for years and the other one might quit after three weeks, right? And they may have some of these tools in place and still it's not working. So what's going on? Well, the research tells us that the factors that drive long-term adherence, they're not external factors, they're internal factors. They're psychological constructs that are operating beneath the surface. Now, I want to make something clear up front. We don't have a ton of direct evidence on long-term resistance training adherence specifically. As is the case with most of these studies, they're looking at acute responses, short-term outcomes. Maybe they're looking at aerobic exercise, not strength training. And so the research I'm drawing from today looks at psychological models that predict health behavior more broadly and then connects those to what we know about lifting. But I am quite confident that to say that, like when we talk about principles, principles apply to lots of different contexts and situations. And so these models make a lot of sense to me. And that's what we're going to talk about, right? These are I'll say universal mechanisms. The same psychological factors that predict whether you stick to walking or running or health behavior should apply to training and nutrition as well, because we're talking about human behavior, right? The principles don't change just because you're doing one thing instead of another. So, what are these factors? Well, the research points to a few key items here. Positive, effective response is one. That's how you feel after training. Interesting, right? Positive, effective response. Self-efficacy is your belief in your ability to execute specific behaviors. That's how much you believe in yourself and your confidence to do something. Intrinsic motivation is doing something because you genuinely want to do it. And then self-regulation is the ability to follow through on your intentions despite obstacles. Interesting, right? Your ability to follow through despite obstacles. And so these four things are working together in a kind of like a system, and they interact, just like many things interact, right? You can't necessarily separate them. And when we understand that, then we can engineer our approach to try to maximize them. So I want to start with the one that surprised me a little bit in the research. And this is this is the emotional payoff of training. What the data shows us that people who lift weights usually feel better afterward. All right, that sounds obvious, and that I could get on board with. That's not the surprise. I agree. I tell people that all the time. Like, you may not feel like lifting. It may feel, it may be hard. Once you do it, you're gonna love it. You're gonna do it, you're gonna feel great afterward. But in this case, there was a there's research, right? So a 16-week study looked at recreational adults, and it found that uh feeling scale, uh, a score on a scale of how you feel, right? How good you feel, increased consistently from before to after training. The interesting thing though is the highest positive feelings came after strength-focused sessions like deadlifts, squats, etc. Compound movements produce the most positive emotional response. That's pretty cool. Okay. Now, what does this mean for you? Well, if you've ever felt like training should be a slog or punishment or suffering, you know, you have to suffer through it. Research is telling us otherwise. You don't just have to take it from me anymore. Training, especially heavy compound lifts, actually make you feel good, better than before you started. And you know what? I can buy this for sure. It's not until I started lifting that way that I really started to enjoy lifting. And I try to get that message across to people who are like, well, I don't like to work out, I don't like to, you're not doing it right. And I think this matters a ton because of something called hedonic theory. And that's the idea that people are going to repeat behaviors that feel good at the end, right? It's an incentive. There's a there's a famous study where people stuck their hands in cold water, and one of the conditions was cold water for one minute, another was cold water for one minute, plus an additional 30 seconds where the temperature was raised slightly. And then when they were asked which condition they wanted to repeat, most people chose the longer one, even though it involved more total cold exposure because it ended better. And this has implications to our training because if you're crushing yourself to the point of feeling awful at the end of every session, which I don't recommend, you're fighting against your own psychology. You know, you might think I'm being hardcore and this, you know, I think of my CrossFit days. Man, I was like, at the end, I don't know if I felt great or not. Like maybe hours later I did, but right afterward, I felt pretty terrible. I like I wanted to die. And we often put that on a pedestal. But you're actually programming your brain to not like training when you do that. So the takeaway is leave the gym feeling good, not destroyed. Whoa, pretty cool, right? Like research supports this, where you know, progressive overload matters, training hard matters, but there's a difference between a challenging session where the weights are heavy and one that like crushes and destroys you and demoralizes you. There is a difference. And usually the former is going to end up being the more effective workout anyway. So that's that's feeling capable after because you've done something. But now let's connect that to the next factor, which maybe is the most important factor, at least in my opinion. And that is related to self-efficacy. I think self-efficacy, it comes up a lot. I hear people, well, I guess I don't hear people use the phrase a lot. I've used it a lot since I met Dr. Eric Helms years ago and he used it. And there's something called self-self-motivation theory that it's part of. But a lot of people, I think, confuse self-efficacy with motivation, and they're definitely not the same. You know, motivation is wanting to do something. And I heard someone say recently, hey, anytime you do something, you were motivated to do it. So if you're doom scrolling on your phone on the couch, you were motivated to do that. Motivation gets you to do something. Whatever, it doesn't matter. Good, bad doesn't matter. Self-efficacy, on the other hand, is believing you can do it. Specifically, it's believing that you can execute the next step successfully. It's a level of confidence, isn't it? And here's how I like to think about it. So motivation is saying, do I want to go to the gym? Self-efficacy is saying, can I complete today's workout successfully? There's a difference, right? Do I want to go to the gym? Motivation. Can I complete today's workout successfully? That's self-efficacy. That's more on the confidence side. And the research is clear here as well. Higher self-efficacy is associated with more positive feelings after training, as well as greater intention to continue training or exercising, and even better self-regulation around food choices. So it is a predictor across multiple domains. And what I find super powerful about this is that self-efficacy, it's not just believing you can achieve some umbrella long-term massive goal, right? It's not. It's granular, it's down to the process level, skill level. It's can I hit my protein today? Not can I master flexible dieting? Can I do this workout? Not can I become a competitive lifter or can I get jacked in six months, right? And the cool thing here, we're going to tie it into the first thing I talked about, is what the research found that lifting heavier loads was related to great, greater self-efficacy. And if you think about it, it makes logical sense because every time you add weight to the bar, every time you hit a PR, even if it's Rep's PR, yes, you're making physical progress, but it's also psychological progress. You did a hard thing and you've done it. And now you say, your brain says, I can do this because I did it before and I can do it again. You're collecting data points that reaffirm your efficacy. And this is also, if to take a highly relevant tangent, this is why progressive overload is also so important beyond what it gets you. It actually builds that self-belief. Because every time you have a successful extra rep or higher load, when you complete a planned workout that you intentionally designed to be slightly more challenging than last time, that is like a deposit into your self-efficacy bank account. And that's what's also really powerful, where I see people change from I hate working out to, oh my God, I can't wait for my next session because I want to see if I'm stronger. There is a difference there. Now, you have to build this intentionally. It's a skill. You have to engineer your wins. You have to bring them from nowhere into existence, not fake wins, but real wins that are achievable. So that means they have to be something you can achieve because you have to start with the self-efficacy, self-efficacy you have right now, which if you've never lifted weights at all, is going to be quite low compared to somebody who's even done one gym session and knows that they can do a lift. Does that make sense? So you're starting where you are, and you want to guarantee what I'll call technical success, which means starting with a minimum that you absolutely 100% can hit rather than some ideal that's like you're not sure how challenging it's gonna be, and then there's a chance you're gonna miss it. This goes back to the always get your reps philosophy that I originally learned in starting strength. And it's a super powerful psychological model because it means you need to track in a way that shows that you progress to give your brain evidence that you did progress, but you have to progress. So rather than fail, because it kind of breaks the loop or breaks the chain, if you will. Okay. And that's starting with a target that's slightly above where you are now. That's why I'm a big fan of the small wins and the small steps. Same thing goes with protein, calories, whatever. If you're not eating very much protein, don't double your protein. Pick a goal that's a little bit more than that, and then a little more, and you hit that, and then a little more and you hit that. And then within weeks, it doesn't take long, guys, it doesn't take long for any of this stuff. Within weeks, now you are at a level that you thought in the past was impossible, but now you totally believe you can do it because you've done it. It's like when your squat goes from 95 to 135 to 185 to 225. And a few months later you look back, you're hitting 275, and you're like, oh my God, remember that time I did 95? That seems like nothing. 275 would have felt impossible. And now you're like, when am I getting a 315? Right? And your brain is gonna predict success based on past data. So you have to feed it good data, good meaning data that emphasizes you can do this and have the self-efficacy. So quick break here because we're talking about self-efficacy and self-regulation. Today is Wednesday, December 10th, and we are just kicking off our three-week strong finish challenge today. If you haven't had a chance to grab a spot and sign up, you can still do so at live.witsandweeets.com and you can get the replay from our kickoff two days ago and all the resources, the strength training templates, the custom nutrition plan, access to our coaches, accountability, all of it. And that challenge is designed around what we're talking about today, about proving to yourself that you can maintain or even progress with your training, your nutrition, your recovery, even in the hardest weeks of the year. And this is exactly relevant because we're gonna show you how to have that achievable level of success rather than a wishful thinking that you fail at. And that framework is what we call the flex framework, right? It's about setting minimums and then also having bailouts. And even the bailouts give you a psychological win that you're not manufacturing, but you're actually achieving. And that helps you build the evidence that you can do this and follow through no matter what's happening around you in the hardest time of the year. And that's exactly how you build self-efficacy, aiming to prove that you have a floor that you can always count on no matter what. There's still time to join. The challenge runs through the end of the year. So join now. If you're seeing hearing this a couple days later, it's we're just getting started. You have plenty of time. Go to live.witsandweights.com, register, jump in. You'll get all the resources. I'm not going to go over those again. Just go check it out. You can read about it. If it doesn't look interesting, don't have to join. Live.witsandweights.com. And then by the end of the year, you'll know what your sustainable baseline is. Not what you hope you can do in some random perfect conditions, but what you can actually maintain when life gets super, super chaotic. And that knowledge is so invaluable. That is the self-efficacy that we want to build. All right. Live.witsandweights.com to join our three-week strong finish challenge, whether you're trying to lose fate, fat, or just maintain your results. All right. Let's get back to the psychology of adherence. And I'm going to talk about the second trainable skill that determines whether you follow through. So the first one was self-efficacy. I know I talked about feeling good after a workout. That wasn't really the skill. The skill was tied to self-efficacy itself. The second one, so self-efficacy is about believing you can do something. Now I want to talk about self-regulation. So self-regulation is actually doing it, but when life gets in the way. This is the whole point. Think of it this way: self-efficacy is the foundation. Self-regulation is what keeps the building standing up when the wind starts to pick up. Does that make sense? It's doing it when life gets in the way. And the research defines it as the ability to control your behaviors, your feelings, and thoughts in service of a goal. Right? So self-regulation is the ability to control your behaviors, feelings, and thoughts in service of a goal. Notice that's not a habit. A habit is automatic. This is a skill. It's what allows your behavior to match your intentions despite obstacles. And that despite obstacles part is the crucial part. It's what we've been talking about since day one on this podcast when we talk about sustainability, flexibility, and all of that. Because here's the reality. You're going to have days where you're tired, you're stressed, you're busy, you're traveling, you're dealing with family stuff, right? And the older we get, the more of that stuff there is just it's not going to go away. Work emergencies, in my own case, a surgery a week after a colonoscre. Come on. Come on, world. Right? Self-regulation is what allows you to make a useful choice in those moments. A useful choice in those moments instead of abandoning ship. So, what does this look like in reality, in practice? Well, it looks like choosing a shortened version of your training when time is tight instead of skipping the training. Or moving it out a day instead of skipping it. It looks like logging your food even when you don't eat like you intended, because the data still matters. It looks like adjusting your dinner because your lunch was bigger than you planned. It looks like lifting while you're on vacation, but using a minimalist plan in a local gym instead of pretending the gym doesn't exist till you get home. Now, that last one's a little of if you choose to do that, right? That's if your goal is to continue training on vacation. Now, the research, as always, shows these cool little insights that if you're not paying attention, you don't realize this stuff, and then you just hear the same thing everybody else says on podcasts, which isn't always reality according to research. Self-regulation can transfer between domains, going back to our idea of principle, our idea of principles and universal mechanisms. And what I mean by this is improving your regulation in one area like training can improve your self-regulation in another area like nutrition. Pretty okay. Now this is interesting. I didn't mention when we were talking about self-efficacy, a thought that I had, which is that the more I've become confident as a lifter, the more I become confident in other areas of my life. Same thing applied to my confidence of public speaking. And self-regulation is the same thing. It's connected. It's like upward spiraling. When you build the muscle of following through in an area, that strength, that confidence carries over. The person who learns to adjust their training when time is limited is probably more likely to adjust their meal when their circumstance changes. It's the same skill, which is super powerful because it means you don't have to learn 20 different skills. You learn one skill and you apply that principle to multiple areas. So, how do you do that? How do you build self-regulation? Well, again, we're going to look at the research. What does it say? Because I'm not an expert in this area. I'm learning like you guys, but then I try to bring this to my clients and uh, you know, the app that I have, Fitness Lab, I actually put those principles in this app so that you can benefit from it. So I'm gonna give you four tips to build self-regulation. The first one is to use action plans and implementation intentions. So, what do I mean? This means deciding in advance what you'll do when an obstacle arises. This is the if-then strategy. That's all it is. It's not figure out when I get there. It's if X happens, I will do Y. If I'm traveling and the hotel gym only has dumbbells, I will do this dumbbell workout. If I wake up late, I will do a 20-minute session instead of my full 60-minute session. Now, not every scenario has to be accounted for, just the ones that you feel are common to you. And what I like to do with clients is say, what scenarios have hit have bothered me a lot? What have gotten in the way a lot? I'm gonna make strategies for those first. That's the first one. So implementation intentions, if then. Second, it's is something called pre-commitment. It's like pre-planning, but you're actually doing something, like you're actually doing a thing. For example, packing your gym clothes and your gym bag the night before, right? So you're doing something to make the situation easier, lower friction, et cetera. Pre-logging your meals in your food app and then just executing. Same thing with your workouts. Setting up your environment so the default is the best choice for you, like your kitchen, your cabinets, your fridge. That's what pre-commitment is. You've already committed to the thing by taking action ahead of time. The third tip I have for you is habit strength. Habit strength. Now remember, I mentioned earlier, habits are automatic things. Working out is not a habit. Working out is part of your lifestyle. It's a series of habits and intentions and behaviors, et cetera. But a habit is automatic. So the more automatic a behavior becomes, by definition, the less self-regulation it requires. This is why I love systems. Systems are always going to be superior to a decision. Decision can be, can cause fatigue and stress and can interfere with your emotions, et cetera. A system, I won't say makes it automatic, but it helps all the automatic things happen on a regular basis. So if you're training at 6 a.m. and that's just what you do because you've you've done the pre-commitment with your gym bag, you've developed the habits of just getting up at 6 a.m., it all leads to you ultimately training, being the person that trains at 6 a.m. Do you know what I mean? So you don't have to regulate yourself into it. This is a little more complexity when we talk about habits and how habits build up into behaviors. Okay. And then the fourth tip I have for you is tracking micro winds. Very common theme on this show. Every time you successfully do anything where you've adapted in some way, and that could be physical adaptation, but more likely psychological or habit adaptation. Every time you do one of these intelligent pivots because you have high self-regulation instead of quit, you know, you find a way around the obstacle. That is data and that is evidence. And you should track that in some way, whether that's a habit streaker, some sort of app. This is, I love my app for this. I'm just gonna toot my own horn. Fitness lab is all about this because you get little microactivities every day and you can build wins. And it's always asking you, like, what do you feel about your choice? What would you win here? What would you win here? And then it reinforces that for you. And that builds that self-regulation as well as the self-efficacy, right? So, self, what is self-regulation not? It's not white knuckling your way through life. That's not what we're doing. It's building a system that reduces the willpower that you need in the first place. All right, so in my notes, I was gonna start going over some different psychological models behind all of this. I don't want to make this episode longer than it needs to be. I'm gonna quickly list them out. There's actually seven of them that explain health behavior and adherence. And you can look them up and look, if any of these are ones that you want me to dive into on a future episode, reach out to me on Instagram at Wits and Weights or go to wits and weights.com slash question. Reach out to me and let me know. Here they are. Self-determination theory, that is, that's what I meant to say before when I said something else. I said it wrong. Self-determination theory. That's when you have autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And that helps you develop intrinsic motivation and that leads to greater adherence. Okay, related to what we talked about today. I'm not going to get into it, but self-efficacy is related to competence and capability. So it's very important here. Second is the theory of planned behavior. That's when you have a strong intention to do something and increases your odds of doing it. The third one is the integrated behavior model, which takes that further and says, hey, external factors can get in the way. So this is where you have to use self-regulation to control your environment, resources, context, everything like that. The fourth one is social cognitive theory, which emphasizes self-efficacy and your belief in something. And when you believe in something, you're going to more likely do it. And then there's three more. Those are, or what are how many? I mentioned four. I'm just going to stop it though. Those are my four favorite. They all overlap with what we've already talked about. You don't have to pick any of these models. I just thought it'd be cool to understand that there's hard science behind a lot of this. You just have to build competence through these winds. You have to create autonomy by giving yourself choice within this structure. It helps to find community that can reinforce this identity of yours as someone who trains and eats well, and ultimately design a system that makes it easy to follow through, easier to follow through than not follow through. You're stacking the deck in your favor using this psychological knowledge. So the last thing I'm going to mention is how do you put this into practice, like literally practically? All right. Self-efficacy, you want structured wins. You want things that are repeatable, which we already alluded to when it comes to your training, of picking something achievable, but that's still growth. That's an example. For nutrition, self-efficacy again comes to wins like hitting your protein, eating one more serving of vegetables than usual. Some sort of micro win like that. So that's self-efficacy. For self-regulation, you just want to reduce friction. So that's pre-logging, that's packing your gym bag the night before, that's doing meal prep, that's having your workout template ready to go, or you know, your training template ready to go. The less that you have to decide the moment, which means less to regulate by definition. And then what are your fallback plans? What's your minimum viable when something happens? What's your bailout, which is what we talk about in the flex framework, which we're what what our challenge is all about. And then all this connects to your identity. Seeing yourself as someone who trains, someone who prioritizes good food and protein, someone who adapts, who doesn't quit. That's a very powerful thing. So if you're if you're gonna take one thing out of all of this to start from, I'm gonna say look at your strength training. If you're not already doing strength training in the way that we've alluded to today, focus on that because it's a backbone of everything. If you can start training and making progress and building strength and muscle, it's gonna give you self-efficacy and self-regulation that translates to all the other stuff. It's pretty powerful. All right. And then remember, if you want to put this into practice right now, during the hardest three weeks of the year, join us in our three-week strong finish challenge. It's still open, live.wits and weights.com. We are building these skills, your self-efficacy, your self-regulation, using a structured challenge that have minimums, bailouts, and of course, community and coach support. Go to live.witsandweights.com. Prove to yourself that you can maintain and grow through the holidays. Enter 2026, knowing exactly what you're capable of. Go to live.witsandweights.com or click the link in the show notes. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, self-efficacy and self regulation aren't gifts that you're born with. They are skills that you build. One rep, one meal, one successful adaptation at a time. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
