AVOID THESE FITNESS TRENDS
Most stalled physiques don’t come from a lack of effort. They come from effort being applied in the wrong direction.
In our coaching experience, athletes rarely struggle because they aren’t working hard enough. More often, they’re working hard on things that feel productive but quietly pull them away from the fundamentals that actually drive progress.
Each year, a new set of ideas gains momentum in fitness spaces. They’re usually well intentioned. They often sound logical. And they’re almost always framed as optimisation.
But many of them create friction, confusion, or unnecessary trade-offs that show up months later as stagnation, frustration, or burnout.
Expecting Progress to Feel Easy
Fat loss and muscle gain are rarely comfortable processes.
In practice, meaningful change almost always involves some degree of inconvenience, discomfort, or friction. That doesn’t mean something is wrong. It usually means the stimulus is sufficient to drive adaptation.
What we see repeatedly with athletes is an expectation that progress should feel smooth once they’re “doing things properly.” When discomfort shows up, it’s often interpreted as a sign to change direction, soften the approach, or find a workaround.
Avoiding discomfort altogether doesn’t make the process healthier. It usually just slows it down and blurs feedback.
Hybrid Training Without Clear Intent
Hybrid training can be a legitimate goal when it’s chosen deliberately and aligned with what the athlete actually wants.
Problems arise when athletes try to be maximally strong, muscular, and conditioned at the same time without acknowledging the trade-offs that come with that choice.
Across multiple prep seasons and off-seasons, this lack of intent tends to show up as:
Compromised recovery
Inconsistent training quality
Confusion around fuelling
Progress that never quite moves in any direction
Clarity of goal simplifies decisions. Ambiguity multiplies compromises.
Training Fasted or Under-Fuelled When Performance Is the Goal
There are contexts where fasted training can make sense.
However, consistently training under-fuelled while expecting high-quality performance is one of the more common mismatches we see in practice.
If training quality genuinely matters to you, energy availability matters. Pretending otherwise because fasted training is popular, convenient, or framed as “mental toughness” ignores basic physiology and usually shows up later as stalled lifts, reduced output, or poor session-to-session consistency.
Treating Social Media as Reality
Comparing your everyday training, eating, and recovery to someone else’s best angles, lighting, and timing is one of the fastest ways to lose perspective.
Social media shows outcomes. It rarely shows:
Years of repetition
Boring consistency
Strategic trade-offs
Periods of underperformance
When athletes forget that context, frustration usually follows. Not because they’re failing, but because they’re comparing their process to someone else’s highlight reel.
Switching Things Up Instead of Mastering Fundamentals
Constantly rotating methods, protocols, or “new ideas” often feels productive.
In reality, it more commonly delays meaningful adaptation.
Progress tends to come from doing the unglamorous basics well, consistently, and for long enough that they actually have time to work. Novelty can be useful when applied intentionally. Chasing it for reassurance usually just resets the clock.
Downplaying Fibre and Gut Health
Minimising fibre and plant foods because they don’t fit a trend overlooks decades of evidence around digestion, appetite regulation, metabolic health, and long-term outcomes.
If a dietary framework only works by removing entire food groups, it’s worth questioning whether it’s robust, or simply temporarily effective.
In coaching, we often see that gut health issues don’t announce themselves loudly at first. They creep in gradually and start affecting appetite, food tolerance, adherence, and overall quality of life.
Fear-Mongering Individual Foods
Turning nutrition into a list of “good” and “bad” foods creates anxiety far more reliably than it creates progress.
Outcomes are driven by dose, context, and overall dietary patterns, not by avoiding single ingredients that happen to be trending online.
This kind of thinking rarely improves consistency. It usually undermines it.
A More Useful Lens Going Forward
Not everything that looks productive is actually helping you progress.
From a coaching perspective, many plateaus aren’t about effort. They’re about misdirected effort. Doing more things. Consuming more information. Changing direction more often.
Progress, whether it’s physique, performance, or health, is rarely about complexity. It’s about clarity.
Clear goals.
Appropriate fuelling.
Consistent training.
An honest understanding of trade-offs.
As we move into a new year, this isn’t about rejecting everything new. It’s about being more selective with what earns your attention, energy, and trust, so the work you’re already doing has the best chance of compounding.
Developing that level of clarity and restraint rarely happens by accident. It’s usually built through experience, feedback, and long-term oversight. If you want support navigating those decisions with less noise and more direction, our team is here to help.
Sustainable progress comes from clarity, not constant change. If you want experienced oversight to help you focus on what actually moves the needle, we’re here to help.