Welcome to the Root Strength Podcast, bringing you worldwide experts from all areas of health and fitness.

We cover training, nutrition, coaching, and mindset.

Welcome your host, Strength and Conditioning Coach,

2012 and 2013 Cross-Tic Games Champ,

Michael Kaju.

Mind, Body, Brute. body brute.

Hey, this is Michael Kaju, and today I want to talk to you about something that no one else is talking about. This is actually counter to some advice that I've even given in the past.

And it's that training like an elite athlete when you're a beginner or intermediate athlete can actually make you perform worse and not better.

The way that I came to this insight was when a

D and I put out a podcast on the WAG Podcast called What It Takes to Get Lean. This was

by far our most popular podcast. It just blew up and so I started to dive in and I wanted to know why was this resonating with people so much and the gist of it this, one of the two main topics was that people in the beginning of their nutrition journey think that they have to, they mistakenly think that they have to eat like someone with six-pack abs that is completely shredded.

When in fact all they really need to do is adopt one new behavior, one new habit that will give them some progress and move them towards their goal.

And when I started to lean into this, I realized that we do this, human beings do this

in every single area of life. We look at the people in the top of an

industry or a field or a sport, and we think we have to do exactly what they're doing,

just to get a little bit better.

The reason that this can actually lead to worse performance rather than getting you better

is because of habits.

So an elite athlete, for instance, has a dozen

different habits that they have built up over the course of years. They have

their nutrition, their sleep, their training dialed in, they're meeting with experts in other disciplines, a gymnastics coach, a body worker, a functional medicine doctor

medicine doctor. Their sleep is dialed in. Their relationships. They might be even like

...