How to Escape the Perfect Timing Myth That is Quietly Stealing Your Best Years
What a decade of coaching men through difficult seasons taught me about the lie that keeps most men permanently stuck and the mindset shift that frees them.
There’s no perfect time to start training, and there’s no perfect time to get your life together. Every man I’ve coached who waited for conditions to align lost months and years they’ll never get back. The myth of perfect timing is the most expensive lie in men’s self-improvement.
But men are still willing to pay the price, time and time again.
For over ten years, I’ve freelanced as a personal trainer outside of my strength & conditioning job, working with men from all walks of life. Teacher, farmer, electrician or plumber, it didn’t matter. They all thought delaying was the strategic thing to do, but they failed to see the big picture.
Every missed workout forced them further away from the life they wanted to live and further away from the man they were called to be.
Here are the five versions of this lie I’ve watched take the most from the most capable men I’ve ever coached.
MYTH #1: “I’ll start when things calm down.”
Let’s be honest for a minute. Just when you think life is starting to slow down, new situations start to pop up. You need to get that idea out of your head. You might find yourself saying:
“Work has been insane lately, and I need time to decompress. I’ll get back on track next month.”
But what you’re really telling everyone when you say this is that you’ve accepted that everyone else’s needs matter more than your own.
The men who get the best results are the ones who train through life’s chaos instead of waiting for it to calm down. You have to remember that busy seasons will never end. They simply rotate. You’ll be waiting forever if you wait for life to calm down.
I fell into this trap a couple of years ago. On August 1st, 2023, I tore my right biceps moving rolls of rubber flooring before our first football practice. Then my middle child was born that Friday. You want to talk about life being wild?
I was living it.
I ate like crap, got lazy, and became out of shape. I reasoned with myself every morning, telling myself I was too busy and could wait until after football season because life would be less crazy. But guess what:
Life didn’t slow down, and I wasted a full year waiting for the calm part of life.
That’s what happens to every man who waits for the calm. They waste years of their life growing more out of shape, becoming a man they don’t recognize.
MYTH #2: “I need to find the right program first.”
First off, the program isn’t the variable that will make or break your progress. All of the research in the world can’t help you if you never put it to use.
You can say you don’t know who to trust anymore or that every program promises you everything and delivers nothing. I don’t care. Here’s what I hear when people use that excuse:
You’ve failed so many times that you need a guarantee before you try again because you don’t trust yourself to follow through.
Here’s a big newsflash:
The men whose bodies you worship don’t have the perfect programs. They’re just freaking consistent.
Take a look at Mike O’Hearn. He’s obtained worldwide notoriety for the physique he’s maintained for so long. And if you ask a group of people what they think of his program, you’ll get mixed reviews. But you don’t get his physique by doing what everyone thinks is perfect.
You get a jacked, muscular physique by dialing in and being consistent with your program the same way O’Hearn has been for the last 30+ years as he adapted his training.
Ask yourself:
Would you rather spend six months doing research with no results, or start making progress and adjust your program as you research?
MYTH #3: “I’ll start Monday.”
I’ve heard this more times than I’d care to count.
“I was supposed to train today, but I’m not feeling it. Tomorrow will be different.”
Dude. Tomorrow won’t be different, you won’t feel different, and the workouts won’t feel different. The only thing that will be different is how much farther off the path you’ve fallen.
People that use this excuse simply aren’t ready to face how far they’ve fallen, and Monday feels safer than today because it feels like a fresh start.
But Monday is nothing more than psychological fiction.
The gap between the man you want to be, and the man you are, doesn’t magically close on a specific day of the week or time of the year. That gap is only going to close when you stop negotiating with yourself.
Every time you tell yourself that you’ll restart on Monday is a lost opportunity to set yourself apart from the average man. An opportunity to carry yourself in a way the exudes confidence in any room you walk into. And an opportunity to show your kids that you’re a man that can move fast and play hard.
Ask yourself: Is waiting until Monday worth risking all that?
MYTH #4: “I need to get my diet right before I start training.”
I get it. Training now without your nutrition locked in feels like wasting effort. But let me tell you something.
You have to stop hiding behind your perfectionism and blaming the plan when conditions aren’t perfect.
Most men are confused about this.
You have to train first. And when you get rolling with your training, that’s when your discipline takes control of your nutrition.
After a decade of coaching athletes, I can tell you that waiting for perfect conditions always guarantees imperfect results. When you fail to start something, you’ll always compound nothing.
MYTH #5: “I’m too far behind to make it matter now.”
So you feel like starting today would be pointless? Like you’d just be proving how far off the rails you let yourself go?
It’s time to get over it and stop mourning the version of yourself that you used to be.
The gap you created shouldn’t be used as an argument against starting. It should be used as an argument to get going again.
You see this all the time with former athletes, but the ones that dominate the comeback story genre are professional wrestlers.
Yes. They’re athletes. You try doing half the movements they have to do.
Former wrestler Diamond Dallas Page has his own system of yoga that he’s packaged and made popular on the internet. He’s helped the likes of Jake “The Snake” Roberts and Scott Hall improve their health and recover from addiction, to Chris Jericho and AJ Styles recover from injury and maintain physical conditioning.
The men who make the most dramatic changes are the ones that have lost the most. The comeback story can only be written by a man who was far enough off the path to need one.
When you believe you’re too far to start, you’re only guaranteeing that you stay where you are.
The Shift
The men who changed stopped asking:
“When is the right time?”
And started asking:
“What is the most effective task I can complete today?”
This mental shift isn’t about better motivation or more discipline. It’s the decision to stop treating your life like a project that starts when the conditions approve it.
And that’s what we do at Path to Powerhouse.
We don’t wait around for the perfect time. We make perfect use of the time we have.
Become a paid subscriber and get access to monthly in-depth training guides, weekly coaching notes that help you take control of your time, and behind-the-scenes looks at how I program training to be time-efficient.
It’s time to join the movement and start living like a powerhouse.
Grow stronger,
- Josh
Switched from running half marathons to strength training a few years back.
Same lesson played out. The version of me waiting for the perfect 16-week program never started. The version that picked up a barbell on a random Tuesday is still going.
The “power of now” is such a cheesy statement and yet totally true. The best time to start something was yesterday. The second best? Right now. So many folks are bogged down by the myth of perfect timing.