What’s Actually Working for My Clients
Every week, I talk with people trying to improve their nutrition, training, sleep, and health while also dealing with jobs, children, travel, injuries, hormones, pets, and the general clown show of adult life.
The solutions that work rarely look revolutionary.
Nobody discovered a secret food that melts abdominal fat. Nobody started waking up at 4:17 a.m. to journal in an ice bath. Most of the progress came from making ordinary things easier, more flexible, or better suited to the life the person actually has.
Here are a few things currently working for my clients.
What’s Working for My Clients
Making maintenance boring and automatic
One client rotates through a handful of family-friendly menus and keeps easy carbohydrate sources like bananas and rice cakes available.
She doesn’t need a new meal plan every Monday. She doesn’t prepare separate “healthy meals” while her family eats something else. The food works for everyone, and she knows how to adjust portions for herself.
That reduced decision-making has helped make maintenance feel like autopilot. It has also supported better CrossFit performance, including new personal records and handstand push-ups without an ab mat.
Novelty gets marketed heavily. Reliable food you’ll happily eat next Tuesday again is usually more useful.
Ending a fasting routine that looked better than it worked
Another client had been fasting on Fridays. It sounded disciplined, but it reliably left her feeling worse on Saturdays.
She stopped fasting, ate normally, and began placing more of her carbohydrates around training. A full banana before exercise improved her energy, while moving more carbohydrates later in the day helped her avoid the stomach discomfort she had experienced earlier.
The lesson wasn’t that everyone needs a banana before working out. It was that a nutrition strategy should be judged by what it does—not by how impressive it sounds when described online.
Choosing maintenance during a chaotic month
One client entered an unusually demanding period at work and temporarily moved from fat loss to maintenance.
The goal became steady nutrition, enough sleep, and the smallest version of movement she could realistically complete that day. Sometimes that meant exercising indoors.
Sometimes it meant doing much less than usual.
Maintenance didn’t erase the goal. It protected the system supporting the goal.
Trying to force fat loss through every stressful season is one reason people repeatedly lose the same ten pounds. Knowing when to hold your position is part of knowing how to make progress.
Scheduling “walk and emails”
A busy parent added a ten-minute “walk and emails” block immediately after her morning work huddle.
That’s it.
She put it on her calendar, stepped onto her walking pad, and handled simple emails while moving. Walking stopped being something she hoped to squeeze in later and became part of a sequence that was already happening .
Ten minutes won’t transform anyone’s cardiovascular health by lunchtime. But ten minutes performed repeatedly beats the beautiful 45-minute plan that lives permanently in your imagination.
Doing loaded carries while playing fetch
Another client started performing loaded carries while throwing the ball for her dog.
Is this the most scientifically optimized strength program ever designed? No.
Is it strength work, movement, time outside, and dog entertainment happening simultaneously? Yes.
Exercise doesn’t always need its own sacred 60-minute window with ideal lighting and a curated playlist. Sometimes the best opportunity is already hiding inside something you do every day.
Alternating deficit and maintenance days
One client uses a rhythm of deficit days and maintenance days rather than attempting to diet seven days per week.
She rated her adherence at 8 out of 10 and said the structure freed up mental bandwidth. She still created the energy deficit needed for fat loss, but she wasn’t spending every day wrestling with hunger and thinking about food.
The exact weekly structure won’t work for everyone. The broader idea will: Your calorie target can be organized around your life instead of pretending every day makes identical demands of you.
A fat-loss phase should require attention. It shouldn’t become your full-time personality.
Protecting three anchors while traveling
A frequently traveling client reduced the plan to three priorities:
Protein
Steps
Sleep
Formal workouts became optional.
Her body weight remained steady because she protected the behaviors with the greatest return instead of trying to drag her entire normal routine through airports, hotels, restaurant meals, and schedule changes.
This is a useful way to think about travel—or any disruptive week. Decide what keeps the floor from falling out. Protect those few things first. Everything else is a bonus.
Using tracking as a tool instead of a streak
One client stopped obsessing over perfect food-tracking streaks and began treating tracking as a skill she intends to use long-term.
She’s now making better macro decisions while eating out and getting more creative at home. One recent success was an Alfredo-style sauce made with Greek yogurt that fit her targets and was enjoyed by the rest of the family.
That’s what tracking is supposed to do. It should teach you how foods fit together, help you notice patterns, and make future decisions easier.
It doesn’t need to award imaginary internet points because you logged mustard for 93 consecutive days.
Using movement to improve the rest of the day
A client noticed that spending even 10–20 minutes outside with her children on high-stress days reliably improved her patience.
The movement wasn’t intended to burn a meaningful number of calories. It changed her mental state and made the rest of the evening easier.
We often judge exercise only by what it does to body weight, muscle, or cardiovascular fitness. Those benefits matter, but sometimes the immediate return is simply becoming a person who is less likely to lose their mind during dinner and bedtime.
That counts too.
Redefining exercise during an injury
One injured client stopped judging exercise by whether it resembled her old workouts.
Bodyweight movements, static exercises, physical therapy, and carefully adapted cardio allowed her to keep training while she recovered. The exercises changed, but the practice of showing up remained.
Your normal workout may become temporarily inappropriate because of an injury, illness, demanding schedule, or change in capacity. That doesn’t automatically make every form of movement inappropriate.
Progress occasionally looks suspiciously unlike the original plan.
What these examples have in common
None of these clients found a universal rule.
They paid attention to what was happening, made a reasonable adjustment, and watched what changed. The plan became easier to repeat because it fit their actual constraints.
That’s the part worth stealing.
You don’t need to copy all ten ideas. Pick the one that solves a problem you currently have:
Make meals more predictable.
Stop forcing a strategy that leaves you feeling worse.
Choose maintenance for a difficult month.
Attach ten minutes of movement to something already on your calendar.
Protect three anchors while traveling.
Useful plans survive contact with real life.
The rest are just very organized fantasies.
—Mike
