GET TO YES

 Today, I’m going to discuss a concept that was introduced to me by a favorite mentor of mine, and though he isn’t the originator of the idea, I’m still so grateful they shared it with me: “get to yes”.  What does it mean?  It means that, when presented with a challenge or a question, instead of flat out saying it can’t be done, or explaining WHY it can’t be done, find a way to “get to yes”.  Decide it CAN be done FIRST, and then figure out WHAT it will take in order to get there.  So often, we discover that the things we say “can’t” be done are really things that are just very very difficult to get done, but they can, in fact, get done.  Get to yes will, of course, apply to any subject, but applying that lens specifically to training and nutrition will prove invaluable to any trainee willing to apply it.

Sometimes it's even "get to yes...yes...YES!"

 

When I ran 5/3/1 Building the Monolith, I only budgeted myself an hour a day to train. I trained first thing in the morning, and did not want to wake my spouse up any earlier than that for the sake of my training.  If you’ve not seen the program, it has a prodigious amount of training volume packed into each day.  I had observed many reports of the program saying a typical training day lasted 90-120 minutes.  BUT, I had already decided I was going to run the program, so now I had to “get to yes”.  I analyzed what tools I had available to me, and discovered that giant sets, short rest periods, and setting up my gym the day before I was supposed to train would set me up to succeed.  I spent a solid week determining which pairing of exercises would work best to allow me to get in all the work I needed without totally obliterating a muscle group, since I’d have to turn right around and repeat the giant set as soon as it was done in order to meet my timeline.  It would have been easy to look at the program and just say “it can’t be done”: getting to yes was far more difficult but, in turn, it got me the results I wanted.  I just had to be at peace with the fact that the solution was going to SUCK.

 

And that’s the big part about “getting to yes”: you can’t let difficulty, reasonability, logic or conventions prevent you from getting to yes.  The world is full of “no”: getting to yes requires some thinking and strategy.  That’s totally fine: find out WHAT it takes to get to yes, and then, from THERE, determine what it is you are and are not willing to do.  My “get to yes” of Building the Monolith could have very well included an option of “train for longer than 60 minutes”, and in turn, I personally would reject it.  It’s no longer about the answer being an impossible answer: it’s about the answer including a path I don’t want to travel.  Get super unreasonable in your “get to yes”.  “I want to gain 60lbs in the next 3 months”.  Oh, ok, cool: looks like we’re going to be needing to eat 10k calories a day, split over 5 meals at 2k a meal, every single day, while also getting 8 hours of sleep for recovery.  You might be unwilling to do that, and that’s fine: you GOT to yes.  We no longer ruled the goal as impossible: we simply discovered we weren’t willing to do what it takes to get there.

See he gets it...

 

In turn, regularly practicing “getting to yes” identifies to us WHERE our boundaries are and what we are and are not willing to compromise on.  For me, personally, I will easily give up sleep to reach my goals.  Sleep just isn’t that important to me, and my solipsism has me honestly doubt its necessity as far as reaching my goals go.  So if I have big training or nutrition goals that are going to require a lot of time to accomplish: no problem dude; I’ll just sleep 2 fewer hours.  Other people find such a notion borderline grotesque, and would never sacrifice a minute of sleep.  Those are their boundaries.  But maybe those people are willing to employ a meal prep/delivery company, whereas I won’t do that as I’d rather spend my money on ANYTHING other than that.  However, if both of us were diligent in our “getting to yes”, we BOTH had those ideas at some point as a viable solution to reaching our goal: we just personally decided on where we would not compromise in our getting to yes.

 

Make this a regular practice in your daily lives.  Seek out challenges and difficulties and find out what “getting to yes” would require.  Ultimately, employ methods that ARE within your means.  It’s cheating to be stupid and say “I just need to win the lottery and then be independently wealthy, and then I can eat and train however I want!”  It’s far more genuine to approach it in earnest and say “I could work a side job, or I could stop drinking on weekends and save that money, pack lunch to work rather than eat out every day, or switch from name brand to off brand products, or recycle cans, etc etc, to be able to afford to eat and train the way I need”.  You can identify where the time suckers are in your day and shave them off to find an extra 15 minutes to get in the mobility work you think you need, rather than saying you just need more time.  You could no joke actually try calling up Louie Simmons and ask if you can train at Westside (worse that happens is he says no) rather than lament about how confusing the system is and how there are no good gyms in your area.  Either way, get to yes FIRST, and then figure out if you’re willing to do what it takes to get there.