Give Yourself a Bigger Margin For Error

How many of you out there are perfect? **One or two people jokingly raise their hand**.

How many of you slip up from time to time? How many of you may not think about how you bend over to tie your shoe or pick up that piece of paper every time? No one who answered honestly can say they do everything correctly every time. No one expects perfection. We don’t, and you shouldn’t. The idea is to give yourself the biggest margin for error possible.

Now, are we telling you it’s okay to pick things up incorrectly compromising your back or knees? Of course not. Are we telling you it’s okay to have the ice cream, cake, and bread? No. However, you need to realize that no one is perfect. We realize that, and we don’t expect perfection from you. Giving yourself the biggest margin for error simply means doing everything you can so that those couple times that you do slip up, it doesn’t cause a huge negative outcome. I’m going to give two practical examples, one from a nutrition side, and one from a functional movement side.

First, the nutrition side. We talk about 90/10, right? Eating correctly 90% of the time and 10% being things you normally shouldn’t be eating. Just as a practical example, think about eating 21 meals a week (3 meals a day). That means that two to three of those meals (about 10%) may include things that you normally wouldn’t eat. The idea is that if you eat correctly the majority of the time, those small little slip ups won’t really cause a problem. Again, you’re setting yourself up for a greater margin of error. If you eat fantastic for a week, then you go to a barbeque somewhere and eat a couple things you shouldn’t have, it’s okay because you gave yourself a large margin of error by eating so well the rest of the week. That one meal isn’t going to haunt you too much. Let’s say in that same week, you had 2 or 3 slip-ups already and you get to that barbeque on Sunday… your margin for error is much, much smaller because you already had those slip ups earlier in the week. Essentially, the food that you eat at the barbeque in the second scenario is more likely to cause you to gain fat because it is combined with the other 2 or 3 slip-ups.

Now to the functional movement side of it. Do you have tightness in different places? Back, hips, shoulders? Some of you are saying “check, check, check”. Is overall flexibility a problem for some also? Yes. How does that feed into our everyday life? If you have tightness in certain muscle groups, it only takes that one time when you bend at the waist to pick something up and boom, there goes your back. Or in training it only takes doing that swing wrong one time out of a thousand and boom, back pain. The more flexible and mobile those muscles and joints are, the more margin for error you have to move incorrectly and not have it result in major injury. How can you get that bigger margin for error and significantly decrease the possibility of injury? Get here on time, and take the warmups and the cool downs seriously. I see way too many people are just going through the motions on the warmups or blowing parts of them off entirely. You don’t want to get hurt and spend your time and money dealing with back issues, right? That’s where the warm ups and cool downs come into play. They help you maintain flexibility and mobility to give yourself the biggest margin for error for that one time you don’t do something correctly.

Give yourself the biggest margin for error possible. Eat well as much as you can so those couple slip ups every once in a while don’t hurt you. Take the warm-ups and cool downs seriously and don’t blow them off. The rest will come easy breezy.

Make it Happen!
-Coach Adam