Ever since I started my daily fitness practice, people have reacted with skepticism to the fact that I don’t take a day off.
They ask questions such as
Don’t you ever take a day off?
These questions are rooted in an assumption that every workout must be “hard.”
But not every workout is a heavy lift day. I regularly have days when I go lighter or active recovery days.
When people suggest I take a day off, they are misunderstanding what I’m optimizing for. For me, it’s important to protect the ritual and routine of my workouts, even if I don’t actually do much at all.
In almost 13 years of daily workouts, I’ve gone through seasons where I didn’t feel like doing much at all. And sometimes I didn’t do much beyond some stretching and foam rolling.
But by protecting the ritual, I never had to “get back into it” when I was ready to pick up.
The ritual reinforced my identity as someone who exercises daily. It kept the space on my calendar that is dedicated to my fitness. And it kept me in the routine of showing up for my workout — even if it wasn’t much of a workout at all.
For over 8 years, I applied the same principle to my writing and publishing. The act of publishing a daily blog wasn’t always about writing and sharing a masterpiece or the ultimate thought leadership.
It was a daily practice of connecting with my ideas and giving them a form I could share with others.
The practice of forcing myself to publish daily meant that I couldn’t get stuck in an idea. Knowing I would come back tomorrow meant that I could sustain momentum to break up big ideas into smaller pieces.
Both of these practices — exercise and writing — are rituals that regulate me. They reinforce pieces of my identity. They give me space in which to connect with myself.
Over the past couple of months, some life changes have uprooted my schedule and my control of my time. I’ve had to fight hard to keep my daily workout practice. But my writing has been forced out of the picture too often.
It’s not just about time; when I do have the time to write I often don’t have the bandwidth. My days are marked by constant context switching, logistics, and clock watching. This creates fragmentation and removes the space for the sustained attention that is required for ideation and writing.
The cost hasn’t just been the loss of my daily blogging streak.
It’s been a far greater toll: losing my connection to myself and a practice that regulates my nervous system.
In many ways, it’s reinforced the principles that have guided me for over a decade.
We often speak about consistency as a path to accumulating results.
But consistency isn’t only about the output; it’s also about protecting the conditions that allow you to become the person you’re trying to be.
A daily practice isn’t valuable because it’s building to some great output.
It’s valuable because it creates a routine that helps shape the rhythm of your days. It’s valuable because it becomes a tool for regulation. And it’s valuable because every time you sit down to do the practice, you’re reinforcing an identity.
Sometimes we don’t fully understand what a practice is giving us until life interrupts it.
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