The protein shake was genuinely terrible.
This was before supplement companies figured out how to make them taste like anything. Chalky. Gritty. Milk-flavored regret. I drank it anyway because I’d read it worked and I was trying to show up the next day.
That’s the most basic version of what I’m talking about this week. Do the thing that lets you come back tomorrow. Not the optimal thing. Not the best thing. The thing that keeps the window open.
Because here’s what I’ve watched kill more progress than any bad program, any wrong diet, any imperfect plan:
Doing the same thing over and over without ever asking what it’s actually teaching you.
Month one I copied the magazine workout exactly. Didn’t change a word of it. I had no idea what I was doing so I just did what the page said and trusted that something was better than nothing.
Month two I started making adjustments. This exercise hurt my shoulder. That one I actually liked. I started scribbling in the margins — little notes, complaints, observations. Nothing useful to anyone else. Just honest.
Month three I wrote my own plan from scratch.
Nothing fancy. Crumpled notebook. Pen. Checkboxes. Weights I’d used. Sets I’d done. Dates.
That’s the arc. Copy. Tweak. Own. You don’t start by inventing something. You start by borrowing something that works. Then your experience starts to shape it. Then eventually it’s yours.
But here’s the part I missed for a long time — and what I watched everyone else miss too when I started coaching people.
Most people do the 28 days and then wonder why nothing stuck. They show up, they do the work, they finish the program, and then six weeks later they’re back at zero and they can’t figure out what went wrong.
It’s because they never closed the loop.
”You can put in the work all month long and lose every bit of altitude you gained if you don’t actually ask yourself what you learned. The loop has to close. Otherwise you’re just repeating the same month forever.”
The altitude you’ve gained doesn’t disappear at the end of a program — but only if you carry it forward on purpose. The work isn’t enough on its own. You have to look back at it. You have to ask what it taught you.
Over twenty-plus years of coaching I’ve watched people come in hot — motivated, ready, doing everything right in week one. And I’ve watched them fade. Not because they were lazy. Not because life got in the way. Because they were running on urgency and urgency burns off.
Urgency is fuel. It gets you started. But it’s not a system.
What keeps people going after the urgency fades is the feedback loop. The moment at the end of each week where you sit down and ask: what actually happened? What worked? What didn’t? What do I keep and what do I throw out?
Four questions. That’s all Recycle is.
I started asking them at the end of every training week. Then I started asking them about everything — about work, about relationships, about the things I kept saying I’d change but never did. Same four questions. Same honest accounting.
The people I’ve coached who made it past thirty days and then past ninety and then past a year — they all did some version of this. Not always formally. Not always written down. But they were asking what did this week teach me in some form, and they were actually changing their approach based on the answer.
The people who didn’t make it kept doing the same routine and waiting for different results.
”The direction matters more than the plan. But if you never look up to check the direction, you can work hard for months and end up exactly where you started.”
There’s a version of this that goes wrong, and I want to name it because I’ve fallen into it myself.
Recycling can become a reason not to run.
You review last week so thoroughly that it becomes its own form of avoidance. You optimize on paper. You redesign the plan. You read more about the right approach. And somewhere in all that thoughtful evaluation the actual showing up gets quietly deprioritized.
Recycle only works when Run already happened. The loop has to have something in it first.
The chalky protein shake worked because I drank it at the end of a workout, not instead of one. Same principle.
Do the thing. Then close the loop. In that order, every time.
THE CHARGHE FRAMEWORK · R IS FOR RECYCLE
Close the loop. Carry the altitude.
End of every week. Four questions. That’s the whole thing. What worked? What didn’t? What goes back in? What gets thrown out? You’re not looking for a perfect answer. You’re looking for an honest one. The protein shake was terrible and I kept drinking it because it was working. The shoulder exercise was fine on paper and I dropped it because it was actually hurting me. Both of those decisions came from Recycle. Neither would have happened if I’d just kept following the magazine without ever asking what I was actually experiencing. Your plan is a draft. Experience is the editor. Recycle is the editing session. Don’t skip it.
THIS WEEK’S QUESTION
What’s one thing you’ve been doing on autopilot — in the gym, in your eating, in your routine — that you’ve never actually stopped to ask whether it’s working? What would change if you asked that question tonight?
Twenty-something years later the four questions are still the thing I come back to. Not because I figured everything out — I didn’t — but because the loop keeps me honest. It keeps me from running the same broken month on repeat and calling it commitment.
Commitment isn’t doing the same thing harder. It’s doing the right thing more deliberately.
Drink the shake. Show up tomorrow. At the end of the week, ask what it taught you.
Then change one thing based on the answer.
That’s the whole climb.
See you next week.
— The guy who still has the crumpled notebook
Know someone who could use a real reason to start? Forward this to them.