Are You Action Faking?
What The F!#k is Action Faking?
Action faking is a term coined in the entrepeneur book “Unscripted: Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Entrepeneurship” by MJ DeMarco. Action faking involves participating in tasks that don’t actually drive you towards your goals efficiently. In essence, action faking is making yourself busy without making yourself productive. This is a clever form of procrastination. I’m sure there’s been plenty of times where you’ve had an important project or assignment due, but for some reason cleaning your room became much more appealing. Have you ever decided that tomorrow is the day that you turn your life around, so you spend 2 days writing down your life goals, and a 5 year plan, and then a daily to-do list. But you (never end up doing any of these things), you finish it, feel a sense of satisfaction, and then mostly just continue on with your historically established habits. Action faking is when you retreat to the safety of tedium, rather than open yourself up to complexity, challenge and the very real risk of failure and judgement that comes hand in hand with real progress.
I am a chronic action faker. I will read a pile of books about the best way to do something before actually doing it, I’ll waste hours of time flip-flopping between two barely consequential choices. This is probably driven from my anxiety fueled perfectionism, and fear of judgement. It’s much easier to tell myself that I’m too busy to pursue the real work. Doing these things takes the responsibility from yourself. “I would do it, but I’m just have absolutely no time!” This is probably bullshit. it definitely is in my case. I dont have kids, I dont have debt, I can pick and choose my client load. Now your situation is going to be different, but it might be worth asking yourself how much are you choosing to be overwhelmed.
How Does This Relate To Fitness?
This isn’t a self-improvement blog, and I’m not a dodgy internet business guru. But I see action faking happening in people’s training, nutrition and recovery constantly. People take up a lot of their time “bettering themselves” on non-challenging minutia that doesnt really bring them towards what they want. I’m not excempt from this, I have absolutely been guilty of some, but not all of the following:
Training
Constantly switching and optimising your program: There is no ultimate program, what you will respond best to will change over time, but find something that works for the vast majority of people and ride it until you stop making gains.
Foam rolling: It has a place, but you really shouldnt be foam rolling for more than 5 minutes, and doing it with a purpose. Lazily shifting your hips while sitting on a foam roller and scrolling the gram is not warming up.
Junk volume: If you’re doing 20+ sets of a single body part in the same workout, and dont feel like absolutely dying at the end of the session. By doing this, your spending time at the gym, and your fatiguing yourself, but you’re not really challenging your muscles enough to get a stimulus.
Overly long training sessions: Unless you’re a top level strength athlete or due to scheduling limitations you can only make it in a couple of times a week, your training sessions shouldnt go over an hour. Start timing your sets and rest and put your phone on airplane mode. Watch your intensity and focus increase.
Avoiding compound exercises: This goes hand in hand with junk volume. Squats are hard, and tiring. Deadlifts are hard and tiring. “I have bad knees” maybe, maybe you have non-ideal technique, maybe you can find a variation that works better for you. Nothing will get you fitness gains like the big hard challenging stuff. Don’t put them off because they’re hard.
Spending a Long Time Stretching: It has a place, but generally will not get you the range of motion improvements that you want for the time invested. Ask yourself how much time you spend stretching, and how much more mobile you’ve become over time. No, stretching doesn’t reduce soreness[1]. I understand this is a sore point for some, and if stretching makes you feel a bit better feel free to do it, but in terms of fitness and health adaptations it really doesnt do much compared to building cardiovascular fitness, muscle size and strength development will.
Nutrition
Focusing on the minutia: If your calories and protein aren’t where they should be for your goals, don’t stress about meal timing, carb cycling, or mono- to poly- unsaturated fat ratios. These do make a difference, but nothing close to calorie balance and protein intake. Get the big stuff right, and make it feel easy, then you can worry about the small details.
Stressing about your gut microbiome: This is a promising and exciting field for nutrition, however it is very new, and there’s a lot of unsupported claims and preliminary research being made. The interactions of gut bacteria on our health are very complex and not well understood [2]. While there is definitely some current and promising future microbiome based therapies. For the vast majority of us, getting a large and varied source of fibre and working some fermented foods into your diet should be enough. If its not, talk to a specialist( A doctor, not a blogger :))
Gym Supplements: Supplements are the 5% difference maker. And they only really work if you’re doing everything else right. Taking protein powder and creatine isnt going to save any of us from a high fat, high sugar, no sleep and sedentary lifestyle.
Recovery
Massage: You like them, they feel great, and sure, they have a place in a physiotherapy setting. But they can be pretty expensive, and they don’t work as well as having a well structured training program, good nutrition and getting a large amount of quality sleep. This goes for those suspiscious looking massage guns too.
CBD oil: There just really isnt a good deal of evidence to suggest that CBD oil will help sports performance [3]. More studies in humans needs to be done to see if some of the advertised benefits actuallly happen in human athletes. There is good evidence that it helps in those with insomnia and anxiety [4], but I’m not a psychiatrist. It’s probably worth saving your money if you’re simply using it to get some ‘gainz’.
Conclusions
Ask yourself how much are you doing that makes you feel like you’re acting but doesn’t actually push you towards the life that you want. Being busy doesn’t necessarily mean being productive. How can you tell the difference? heres some basic techniques that I like to use:
Look at your time investment to progress ratio. If you’re not measuring your progress, you have no way of knowing if you’re improving
If you know that something is important, dont delay doing it. This is especially goes to serial procrastinators, like me.
Progress is challenging, if it feels easy, or you could do it while daydreaming, its probably not worth spending the majority of your time doing. Look for the challenge and discomfort.
Unless theres a chance that you’ll end up in court or dead, don’t spend more time planning something than actually practicing.
References:
Herbert, R., de Noronha, M. and Kamper, S., 2011. Stretching to prevent or reduce muscle soreness after exercise. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews,.
Cani, P., 2018. Human gut microbiome: hopes, threats and promises. Gut, 67(9), pp.1716-1725.
McCartney, D., Benson, M., Desbrow, B., Irwin, C., Suraev, A. and McGregor, I., 2020. Cannabidiol and Sports Performance: a Narrative Review of Relevant Evidence and Recommendations for Future Research. Sports Medicine - Open, 6(1).
Shannon, S., 2019. Cannabidiol in Anxiety and Sleep: A Large Case Series. The Permanente Journal, 23.
