I’ve recently put a new System in place at RISE.

We send people a text and a postcard and give them a shout out in the Facebook group when they’ve passed a certain number of Sessions.

5, 20 and then every 50 onwards.

Recognition of success rather than criticism over not achieving “perfection” is a big part of why our guys do so well. Get more info at www.myrise.co.uk/apply or just get cracking at www.myrise.co.uk/join if you like the sound of that.

If you’re interested, top is Judy who just passed 1,050 Sessions (she actually will have done more, but it only tracks from when we changed the website in 2016).

I was looking at the distribution of the Session numbers just.

And an idea crossed my mind.

I thought I’d check out the Session totals of ex-members.

And see if there was any interesting observations.

There was.

Although, I’ll be honest, it was exactly as I expected.

By far the most “popular” number was 1.

Meaning, out of all the numbers of Sessions people finished on, 1 Session was the most frequently seen.

It was only a relatively small percentage of all the numbers (before anyone misunderstands, it’s not that “most people” don’t get past the first Session, it’s just that’s the one that has the highest drop out compared to any other individual number).

And the ‘mean’ was waaayyy higher.

But it was that first Session that had the highest ‘drop out’ rate.

Followed by the third, then second.

Which I fully expected (other than thinking those two would be the other way around).

I get it.

When we start something new, we’re in what can be called the ‘uninformed optimism’ stage.

We’re not entirely sure what’s going to happen, but it sounds great and we’re excited.

At some point, we ‘dip’ into what’s called the ‘informed pessimism’ stage.

We realise that, whilst there might be a great set up to help us, we’re still going to have to do some work and it won’t all be easy.

This can come at a variety of points.

But after the first Session is definitely potentially one of them.

We’re a bit sore.

A bit confused by what’s going on.

We don’t look and feel any different.

And it’s tempting to think “this isn’t for me”.

We don’t necessarily consciously decide to stop.

We might think “I’ll get back to it next week when things are a little better”.

But that “doesn’t end up happening”.

And before we know it, we’re cancelling having only done a Session or two.

We have two options when we hit that ‘dip’.888

Stop.

Only to ‘start again’ at some point in the future.

Maybe repeating that loop indefinitely (sound familiar?).

Or we can keep going.

Push on to ‘informed optimism’.

“Yeah, I get it won’t be easy all the time and will require time and effort. But I feel I’ve got a good setup and I can get there with time”.

And on to ‘completion’ – reaching our original goal(s) and setting new ones.

People very rarely give the reasons of soreness and overwhelm as their reasons for stopping.

We don’t necessarily think it through all that much.

You’d be amazed how many people over the last 20 years have told me of big changes to their work and / or personal life that, coincidentally, seem to have happened only hours or days after that first Session.

Also, interestingly, the ‘sweet spot’ seems to be about 25 Sessions.

The ‘drop out’ rate after that dropped to between 0 and 2 people per Session number after that.

Do that and you stand a pretty good chance of ending up in the many hundreds.

Interestingly, 25 is pretty much exactly what you’d get if you do 3 Sessions a week for the 8 week of our introductory programme, the ‘Great in 8’.

That first 8 or so weeks goes well and you stand a pretty good chance of staying a fair while.

We just do one a week (or less) in those 8 weeks and (even though that would still lead to progress over time) we’re likely to not keep going much longer.

We get it.

We really do.

It can all seem “too much” sometimes.

Couple that with maybe having overdone the first Session and being a bit too sore and it’s super tempting to think “this isn’t for me”.

But keeping on going past that dip is the only way we’ll ever get there.

Much love,

Jon ‘Reckon I must have done 5,000 workouts in total by now’ Hall

P.S. That 5,000 workouts sounds a lot, doesn’t it? I’ll cover soon why it’s not as much as it seems.

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RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!

Jon Hall
Jon Hall

When not helping people to transform their lives and bodies, Jon can usually be found either playing with his kids or taxi-ing them around. If you'd like to find out more about what we do at RISE then enter your details in the box to the right or bottom of this page or at myrise.co.uk - this is the same way every single one of the hundreds who've described this as "one of the best decisions I've ever made" took their first step.