How working out 5 times a week changed my life — Building Products [Mischa Sigtermans](https://mischa.sigtermans.me) [ Thoughts ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) [ Books ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/books) [ About ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about) [← Thoughts](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) May 8, 2022 · Health Personal How working out 5 times a week changed my life ============================================== I stopped chasing fitness goals and made going to the gym the goal itself. The shift from outcomes to systems changed everything about how I work, eat, and build. I used to be the kind of person who'd work out for three weeks, see no visible results, and quit. Then I'd start again two months later with a new routine, a new app, and the same pattern. Three weeks in, three weeks out. I did this for years. The problem wasn't discipline. It was the goal. I was training for outcomes: lose weight, get stronger, look different in the mirror. Those outcomes take months to show up, and in the gap between starting and seeing results, my motivation would evaporate. Every workout felt like a payment on a loan I couldn't see the balance of. The thing that changed everything was embarrassingly simple. I stopped making the outcome the goal and made going to the gym the goal. The shift --------- When I made 'going to the gym' the goal, every day I showed up was a win. Not 'I lifted heavier than last week'. Not 'I lost half a kilo'. Just: did I go? Yes. Done. Today was a success. This sounds like lowering the bar. It isn't. It's removing the gap between effort and feedback. When the goal is attendance, the feedback loop is immediate. You went. You won. Tomorrow you go again. The compounding takes care of itself if you keep showing up, but you don't have to think about the compounding. You just have to think about today. I've written about [systems over outcomes in product building](/thought/the-painkiller-test) and the idea is the same. Track daily behaviors, not distant outcomes. The daily behavior is the thing you can control. The distant outcome is a side effect of enough daily behaviors stacked up. Chasing the side effect directly is how you quit in week three. What the routine looks like --------------------------- I train 5 to 7 days a week on a Push, Pull, Legs split. Monday through Wednesday is the first cycle: push (chest, shoulders, triceps), pull (back, biceps), legs. Thursday is rest, sometimes HIIT if I feel like it. Friday and Saturday are upper body and legs again. Sunday is rest. The split is simple on purpose. I've tried complicated periodization schemes and full-body programs and bro splits and all of them eventually collapsed under the weight of their own complexity. Push, Pull, Legs works because I don't have to think about it. Monday is push. That's it. I walk in knowing exactly what I'm doing, and I don't waste twenty minutes deciding which muscle group needs attention. The other piece is dietary tracking. I use MyFitnessPal to track everything I eat. During a bulking phase I eat around 3,200 kcal. During a cut I drop to 2,000 to 2,200 kcal. The numbers aren't magic. They're just specific enough that I can't lie to myself about what I'm eating. Without tracking, every day feels like it was 'pretty good'. With tracking, I know exactly where I am, and that knowledge is the difference between progress and guessing. The accountability partner -------------------------- The single most effective tool in my routine isn't an app or a program. It's another person. I have an accountability partner, and we check in every day at 10 AM. Did you go? What did you do? That's it. The check-in is short and it's not complicated. But knowing someone will ask me tomorrow morning whether I went to the gym today changes the calculation at 6 PM when I'm tired and the couch looks good. The cost of skipping isn't just missing a workout. It's having to tell someone I skipped. That social cost is small, but it's exactly the size of the gap between going and not going on the days when motivation is absent. I've never met a productivity system that works as well as another person who expects you to show up. Every app I've tried, I eventually stopped opening. The accountability partner I've kept for years. What changed beyond the gym --------------------------- The benefits of working out consistently weren't what I expected. I was chasing physical results. What I got was a different operating system. Alertness improved first. I stopped needing the mid-afternoon restart. The 2 PM slump that used to cost me an hour of productive work either disappeared or became mild enough that I didn't notice it. I started completing what used to be an 8-hour workday in closer to 6 hours, not because I was rushing, but because the hours I was working were sharper. Impulse control followed. I'm not going to oversell this as a life transformation. But the days I train are measurably better days for focused work. I make fewer impulsive decisions. I'm less likely to context-switch between projects. I'm more likely to finish the hard thing before opening the easy thing. Whether that's the exercise or the routine or just the fact that I started the day with something that required effort, I don't know. The correlation is consistent enough that I stopped questioning the mechanism. The physical changes came last, which is exactly backwards from what I was chasing when I started. I'd spent years trying to look different and failing. When I stopped trying to look different and just showed up, the physical changes happened as a side effect of the consistency I'd been unable to build when I was focused on them directly. Systems, not goals ------------------ The reason I'm writing this on a tech blog and not a fitness blog is that the lesson generalised. The shift from outcomes to systems changed how I think about building products, managing my time, and running projects. At [Stagent](https://stagent.com) I don't set quarterly goals for features shipped. I set a daily rhythm: review the backlog, pick the next painkiller, build it, ship it. The features compound the same way the workouts do. Not because I'm chasing a target, but because I show up every day and do the work. The gym taught me that consistency beats intensity, that tracking beats guessing, and that another person expecting you to show up is worth more than any app. Those three things apply to fitness. They also apply to everything else I do. I started going to the gym to change how I looked. What changed was how I worked. I'll take the trade. *thanks for reading* Hi, I'm [Mischa](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about). I've been *shipping products* and *building ventures* for over a decade. First exit at 25, second at 30. Now Partner & CPO at [Ryde Ventures](https://ryde.ventures), an AI venture studio in Amsterdam. Currently shipping [Stagent](https://stagent.com) and [Onoma](https://askonoma.com). Based in Hong Kong. I [write](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) about what I learn along the way. [More about me](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about). Keep reading: [Nightshift: why Friday's gig is on Saturday](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/nightshift-why-fridays-gig-is-on-saturday). 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