Pareto in Health and Performance
Being more effective with your health and performance decisions
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I have previously written about the challenge (and perhaps fool’s errand) of chasing perfection when it comes to health (and probably performance). I also endeavour to use the lens of making any potential actions simple enough to insert into the normal, daily, routine of readers. Be it adding creatine to something you’re consuming, brushing your teeth on one leg or adding a plant to your workspace ideally, there’s not a lot of opportunity cost for readers to implement these because let’s face it, everyone is busy.
It is with these things in mind, inspired by one of my favourite heuristics the Pareto principle (aka 80/20 rule), that I am writing this article.
What is the Pareto Principle
For the purposes of this piece, the Pareto Principle effectively states that 80% of the benefits are derived from 20% of the efforts, with the final 20% of the benefits derived from the final 80% of the efforts. A similar thought process may be high leverage behaviours.
In health and performance, this means in effect that a small number of your actions are giving a disproportionate amount of benefits (sounds like “the big rocks” right?).
Why Not Do Everything You Can?
This is certainly an option and if you are not constrained in doing so, please go ahead. The vast majority of readers, though, will be resource constrained in one way or another meaning this is not feasible.
Beyond this, there are some reasons you may not want to attack it all initially.
In behaviour change, my experience (and that of others such as James Clear) suggests that motivation wanes swiftly and habit is what allows continued adherence. The problem is that the energy taken to attack everything is often significant and the motivation will thus wane sooner. Similarly, success itself is motivating and breeds more success - momentum is huge here. Thus, fewer, higher impact behaviours will allow better habit formation and medium/long term success as a result (you can then add more behaviours - see “habit creep” and “habit stacking'“ from the above mentioned James Clear).
How Do You Identify High Impact Behaviours?
You can look below for some easy tricks/rules of thumb that may help, but the more traditional ways of doing this revolve around some well established practices that may not be so foreign.
Needs Analysis
What are the areas of need, for example, these may be strength or diet. Having highlighted these, think about the single most impactful thing you could do to action these areas. In the examples cited, this may be a full body strength exercise like an overhead squat or in the diet sense eating out only 2 meals a week.
These could then naturally evolve, for example; adding a second full body exercise like a deadlift or in the other example adding trying to eat six different vegetables a day.
A variant on this, is the SWOT analysis. SWOT being an acronym:
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
Whilst this may feel a little clunky for the situation it may provide more texture and aid in goal completion. For example, having highlighted sleep is a strength you choose to focus on diet or finding you love endurance you may decide you need more strength work. The weaknesses, and strengths highlighted, your opportunities are then the onsite gym at work and willingness of your partner to share cooking duties. The threats being work dinners and deadlines.
You can see that this increased granularity may help initially finding solutions and more importantly highlights likely failure points for you to engineer out of the situation to ensure higher likelihood of success.
Some Useful Tricks to Find Your Highest Impact Actions
This is where things may be a little philosophical and theoretical but there’s value here, I promise.
The Best Program is the One you aren’t Doing
You know that person on social media evangelising their latest program they have just started? The one seeing huge improvements after stagnating for ages? Yeah that one. Chances are the stimulus for this is less about the program and more about the change in stimulus. It is with this in mind that good coaches will often “say the best program is the one you aren’t doing”. Remember that the small details don’t matter as much as we think often.
This is by no means permission for you to go program hopping randomly, but it is permission to change things up if you feel you are stagnating and keep in mind that varying things is important for ongoing stimulus. These changes do not need to be night and day, probably more flavours of the same.
Done a lot of traditional squats? Then try some front squats for a while for example.
Broccoli Days and Programs
We generally enjoy things we are good at, and shy away from things we are not so good at. This can happen in training too, which usually perpetuates the problem. This was the genesis for something I used for a while when training seriously in the gym (it was a long time ago). Initially I did a program with only exercise variations I hated and boy did I see benefits of this (on these exercises and transfer to testing exercises). Following this success, I have periodically included a ‘broccoli’ day into programs - a day where you do all the things you don’t love but know are good for you. Now that I am no longer 20 years old and bulletproof some of this is maintenance work, but initially it was exercise variations I hated. For some reason, grouping and theming the day makes it enjoyable in some self-punishing/sadistic way.
The Thing you Hate is the Thing you Need Most
In an Eastern philosophical twist on the above two concepts, it is very likely that the thing you struggle doing or dislike is the thing you need most. I recently discussed this with a colleague (who’s quite similar to me in many ways from a personality standpoint), who set out to do some yoga and quickly reverted to doing a Crossfit style workout. For those who know me well, they will agree I build habits quite quickly and can maintain them well (I have a Duolingo streak well over 1700 days in duration). That said, the thing I find hardest is doing very little aka meditation. I have been trying to build a consistent meditation habit for over a decade. It is for precisely this reason that I believe it is so important for me from an overall health and wellbeing perspective.
Scaling Pareto
The Pareto principle as we have talked about it to this point has been about certain actions to take for best return on investment from an effort/time standpoint. The principle scales down too though. You know that day where you’re even more time poor than usual? Or just super tired? But in both cases you still know you really should do something, in fact you may even want to do something. Well Pareto works here too. That gym program you have, the one with eight exercises, all with multiple sets, yeah that one. You get most benefit from the first exercise for each muscle group, with diminishing returns thereafter. Similarly the first set of each exercise gives most benefit too. So, in the situations outlined, you could easily use Pareto to help you further by doing just one set per exercise or even just one exercise with a few sets.
Readers who have known me for a decade plus may be quite surprised by this article. I think most folks who are health and fitness interested, and were 20 something when starting their journey in the space would remember a time where quotes like “we all have the same 24hours in a day” or similar were popular and graced our lips. Of course, to be old and wise one needs to be young and stupid (or so I tell myself to feel better about things). Having managed to have a little more life experience and gained some perspective you come to realise that whilst health and fitness are important to folks, something like family increasingly becomes more so and you can only prioritise so many things. I say all this to say, that I am hoping this article helps in this regard.
The goal of this article isn’t to liberate resources for you to spend more time on behaviours not conducive to health, it’s not about laziness. It is also not intended to be about productivity p*rn. The goal is for you to be more effective and see better results. Ideally it will aid in decision making for the realities of life.