“Do you think if you do a poor job you won’t have to wash the dishes anymore?”

My dad held up a pan with a hardened piece of spaghetti on it, as I pulled my foam headphones off of my head and paused my walkman.

“What?”

"If you think leaving food on the dishes is going to get you out of doing the dishes, you've got another think coming."

I stood there, marveling at the idea, which hadn't ever occurred to me. The idea that I could be that deliberately calculating was much more credit than I deserved as a teenager.

Eventually, as an adult, my family (and many friends) realized that leaving a little egg on a pan was less about my shrewd effort to avoid dishes and more an overall lack of attention to detail. As I understand it, I take a lot after my Grandma Lloyd, who was notorious for doing things like making my dad a sandwich and forgetting to put anything between the bread.

Growing up, my parents were fanatical about putting elbow grease (I’ve never seen a greasy elbow…) into anything my brothers and I did. When it comes to a work ethic, my parents had zero tolerance for anything less than full tilt.

Despite my poor attention to detail and overall distaste for any kind of housework, I’d like to think I absorbed the value and importance of working hard. And I think the same is true for many of my clients.

While that mentality serves us well in so many places – our pursuits in academia, achievement in sports, and a reputation for being a hard worker, when it comes to our health and fitness journey, that "all in" mentality doesn't always serve us well.

Because when we come up short in our effort to pursue things like weight loss, we make a plan, and it is ingrained in us that we need to follow that plan, as it is written, come hell or highwater.

But eventually, hell or highwater does come, because life. And so we feel like failures, because we not only know how to work hard, but for many people, hard work is a core value.

I often have clients start our work together by doing an exercise where they identify their core values. Because the better we understand how we work, how we think, and what’s important to us, the more we can make a workable plan that is suited to us.

If our only definition of a job well done is all or nothing, we’re going to spend a lot of time battling ourselves in this journey. And I’m not saying that it’s ok to half-ass your effort when you show up to your workout or the process.

It’s absolutely important that you put a little elbow grease into this work.

But it’s equally important to understand balance. Two of my most common questions to clients is:

What feels doable this week?

What’s one thing you can do to stay connected to the process?

There are going to be many, many times when you don’t have the time, space or energy to go full tilt in your workouts or your wellness in general.

So please, please - understand that it’s ok to not be all in, all the time. It’s great to have a solid work ethic. But it’s also important to know that sometimes, you just have to do what you can, with what you’ve got, wherever you are.

I’ve been strength training on a regular basis since 2010, and coaching clients since 2015. And the longer I walk this journey, the more I’ve come to believe that our fitness routines vary between two stages:

1. Periods of training

2. Periods of moving.

And you’re like, Kim – wtf does that mean?

So glad you asked.

There’s a good chance that I’m only planking with a giant weight on my back if I’m following a program from a coach….

When I think of training, I think of following a specific program and routine for a set period of time. For instance, last November I hired a coach to write me a four-week program. In the program, he wrote me three days of workouts lasting four weeks.

That meant that I had a day one, day two, and day three and I could do those workouts on any day of the week, but the goal was to get all three done in one week. Then I would repeat those same three workouts for the next four weeks.

In a program like that, because I’m performing the same exercises each week, I’m working on progressive overload. If I did 10 reps with 25lbs one week, my goal was to do 11 reps at 25lbs the next week. I was trying to improve on my strength every week, as much as my body would allow.

I’ve had my coach write me a new program every month since November. Once the four weeks are up, I ask for a new program.

To be clear, those three workouts didn’t always happen in a week. I traveled over Christmas and had some other life events that caused me to miss a few weeks here and there. But even so, I went back to my program as soon as I was able, and once I’d completed all 12 workouts, I was ready for a new program.

Everything I’ve described above is what I think of as training – and that is also what I think of as being “all in.” It’s when you’re in a solid weekly routine and feeling dialed in.

But prior to November, I had limited my training for over a year because of a herniated disc in my back. I was trying to figure out what was going to make it worse, and seeking out treatments to try and make it better. During that time, I was advised to not lift over 25lbs, so I stopped training. What I did do though, was exercise.

So maybe I should stop there for a second - let’s define what I mean when I say “exercising.”

First of all, it didn’t always happen at a gym. Second of all, it didn’t always include weights. Third of all, I wasn’t always sweating buckets (actually never, because I don’t sweat buckets…).

What I did do, however, was make an effort to move with intention, get my heart rate up a little, and do something that allowed me to feel connected to the process.

While I know that not everyone loves technology, my other strategy was to use my fitness watch and heart rate monitor to track whatever I did. If I did a stretching and mobility circuit, I hit the yoga start button my my watch. If I walked, I hit the walk button. If I did some other form of cardio, I used the cardio button.

I did that because my watch makes the same weekly exercise recommendation as the CDC - 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise in a week. That tracking process felt really important to me, because it gave me a sense of accomplishment that I was doing something, even if that something didn’t always feel very productive.

I know that a lot of people struggle with having an all or nothing approach. They are all in when they have the mental and emotional space to train. But unless you are a professional athlete, chances are you aren’t working your life into your training, you’re working training into your life.

And you are rarely going to have long spans of time when you can be all in on much of anything because work and family and travel and life.

The challenge is to give equal credence to both training and exercising. I know that most of us would like to be training - when I’m following a program and hitting consistently challenging sessions I feel like I’m making progress.

But the reality is, moving with intention is okay too. Whether you are training or exercising, it all counts. And it is absolutely true that doing something is better than doing nothing.