How do you prevent routine and discipline from turning into monotony and threatening your consistency? Tune in to today's Quick Wits to find out. Welcome to the Wits and Weights podcast. I'm your host, philip Pape, and this twice a week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self-mastery by getting stronger, optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition. We'll uncover science-backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset, with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry, so you can look and feel your absolute best. Let's dive right in.

Every single morning, weekday, weekend, it doesn't matter. I love to have oatmeal, peanut butter and maybe some fruit, and I've been doing that for years on end and I love it. I enjoy eating that. It meets my macros, it meets my requirements for carbs, especially after a workout. It's delicious, it's easy to prepare, I don't have to think about it and I can copy and paste it in my food logger. Now, that is a form of practice. That is a form of routine, of discipline, something that benefits me. I don't have to think about it, it's part of what I do. That is different from something that you force yourself to do over and over again, hoping that it will stick and give you results and it becomes monotonous. Reconciliation is a challenge to your consistency, whereas discipline and routine are not. So it's important to understand the difference.

If we think of training, for example, when you go to the gym, there might be movements that you do session after session after session, and they never get old. For me, that might be my bench press or deadlift. Now they might get old in the sense of they're too stressful or they impede my recovery, but I'm simply talking about the psychological aspect of the movements. If there's something you can do over and over again and you can progress, there's no reason to change it. As I say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But if you are doing something like, for me, the low bar back squat, I recognize its value and importance, but I would also get bored to death and psychologically challenged if I had to do it over and over and, over and over again, and so the programming that I follow allows me to vary my movements across. Different squat movements, get similar muscle, similar movement patterns, work similar muscle groups and, in fact, enhance my ability to increase my low bar back squat without it being monotonous. So think about the difference, whether it's your food choices and your routine there, eating the same meals over and over again. If you enjoy them, if it makes it easier to stick to your plan, that's awesome.

If you feel like you have to do it, that's where we question hey, is this just a form of psychological torture and monotony that we need to question and introduce some novelty, some variety? That is the antidote to monotony. Is a little bit of fun, right? We're human beings. We like things to be changed up a bit, and variety for variety's sake isn't always a bad thing. It's all in context. So ask yourself if what you are doing is part of a positive practice and routine or it's monotony and requires some novelty. And go from there and that's how we build sustainable practices. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Wits and Weights. If you found value in today's episode and know someone else who's looking to level up their wits or weights, please take a moment to share this episode with them and make sure to hit the follow button in your podcast platform right now to catch the next episode. Until then, stay strong.