[80/20] Gym edition

Hey 🙂

I’ve pretty much accepted I’m not a gym guy. I tried to be. But, I never was a sports person, and I’ll never be in love being there. I only started going to the gym in my 40s.

But I know I have to go, and because I know I have to go, I’ve made myself actually think about how I go — otherwise it’s just wasted time I resent.

So I lean on the 80/20 principle. Constantly. I know that’s a bit nerdy to admit, but it’s genuinely what’s going through my head on the treadmill and in the weights room.

A few examples of how it’s played out for me over the last few years:

• About 18 months ago it clicked that the high-leverage thing wasn’t the gym program — it was my diet. I could kill myself with more reps and more sessions, or I could dial in the diet and get 80% of the result for a fraction of the effort. Diet won. Dialled it in, lost a load of weight, got lean.
• Took that same lens to the diet itself. About 12 months ago I cut out refined sugar completely. One decision, and it dragged a whole tail of bad food choices out with it — the high-fat stuff that was working against me went too. One lever, huge downstream effect. That’s the 80/20 of eating, for me.
• Walking: I used to think I was doing myself a favour just clocking steps. Good for the head, good to move, no argument there. But it’s slow and it’s time-hungry if what you actually want is fitness. So I swapped it for a hard hill climb on the treadmill, thirty minutes, pushed hard enough that I’m properly breathing, properly sweating. Half an hour of that beats hours of ambling.
• And there’s another 80/20 inside the hill climb itself — it’s what keeps me going through the whole thing, not just the last five minutes. While I’m pushing the pace I think about the fact that about 80% of the fat you’re losing is actually leaving your body through your breath. So when I’m breathing hard on that climb, I remind myself that’s literally where it’s going. Keeps me honest about keeping the pace up rather than easing off.
• There’s a third 80/20. Twenty, twenty-five minutes in, I want to slow down and ease off. That last five minutes is the whole game. Same as the last two or three reps in a set of eight to ten — that’s not the bit to cut, that’s the bit that was the point all along. The high-leverage moment is exactly where it gets hard, not before it.
• Same idea shows up in how I program my sets. Rest-pause training is an 80/20 move for the smaller muscle groups — shoulders, delts, that kind of thing. Short breaks, 15 to 20 seconds, between reps instead of full rests. Less recovery time means the muscle’s under more strain overall, so I get more out of fewer total reps.
• Reverse pyramid training is the same thinking applied differently — lift heaviest first, then work down in weight as you go. You’re hitting the heavy stuff when your muscles are freshest, not saving it for when you’re already tired. Front-load the leverage.
• And the last one — train hard, push those last reps, make it feel hard. But don’t train in a way that gets you injured, because the real 80/20 is consistency. An injury that takes you out for six weeks isn’t high leverage no matter how good that one session felt.

None of this is fitness advice — I’m not a PT, wouldn’t dream of telling anyone else how to train. It’s just how I think my way through something I don’t want to do but know I have to.

The 80/20 principle isn’t just a gym thing for me. Going deep on it, reading Richard Koch’s work, and actually bringing it into my life, has probably been the single most important mental model I’ve picked up over the last couple of years. It’s amazing how it shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. The gym is just one example.

If you want to go deeper on it yourself go read The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch.

Beyond that, I think it’s just a good first question to ask about anything you’re doing. Is there a shorter path here? Is there a higher-leverage move that gets me there faster, better, with less wasted effort? That doesn’t mean it won’t be hard — it’ll be hard. It just means you’re not confusing effort with leverage.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.