As a personal trainer, designing a tailored, effective workout plan is the baseline. It is the absolute minimum I will do for you. But here is a reality check that a lot of fitness pros skip over: a workout usually lasts about one hour. So what happens during the other 23 hours of your day?
That is the whole game. You can crush a perfect 60-minute training session with me, but if the remaining 23 hours are filled with habits that quietly drain your energy, compromise your sleep, or work against your goals, your progress is going to feel like it is moving in slow motion. My goal isn’t just to make you sweat for an hour and say, “Here is your workout plan, bye!” That is completely against my style.
The hour in the gym is the easy part. The other 23 are what actually decide your results.
What I Mean by the “Other 23 Hours”
When I look at someone’s routine, I am not just looking at their training. I am looking at the whole day. I call it a Wellness Audit, and it is not a strict, rigid set of rules. It is a simple look at your real lifestyle to find the habits that work with you, not against you.
A few pillars matter most:
- Movement: how you move outside the gym
- Fuel: how you eat and hydrate
- Recovery: your sleep and how your body handles stress
And do not underestimate the two that sound the most boring, how you move and how you eat. You have probably heard the saying that your healthy body is built by about 20% workout and 80% diet. And it is absolutely true! The steps, the meals, the water, that is the bulk of your day, and it quietly outvotes your one hour in the gym. If you are not sure where to start on the food side, I broke it down step by step in where to even begin with your wellness journey.
The most important rule of a Wellness Audit is that it has to match your actual life, not a fantasy version of it.
Sleep: Where Your Training Actually Pays Off
Something that feels backwards but is true: you do not get stronger during your workout. You get stronger afterward, while you recover. And a huge part of that recovery happens while you sleep.
When you shortchange your sleep, you are asking your body to rebuild without giving it the materials. You feel it the next day. Lower energy, stronger cravings, a workout that feels twice as hard for half the result. You can train like a champion at 6am, but if you are running on five hours of sleep, you have already capped what that hour can do for you.
You simply cannot out-train a body that never gets to recover.
Stress: The Part That Quietly Works Against You
Stress is the pillar most people skip, and it is sneakier than it looks.
When your stress stays high, your body fights you on almost everything: your appetite, your sleep, your recovery. So it is worth being honest about where it is coming from, because even your training counts. A detail most people miss: not all exercise calms you down. High-intensity work spikes cortisol and can leave you feeling “wired but tired,” while steadier, lower-intensity movement actually helps regulate your nervous system. (I went deeper on that side of things in my post on Zone 2 training.) So part of auditing your other 23 hours is asking one honest question. Is my training calming me down, or quietly winding me up?
Rest Is Non-Negotiable
I will say this as plainly as I can: rest is non-negotiable!
We treat rest like the reward we earn after being “good,” when it is actually part of the plan. And rest does not have to mean doing nothing. On a low day, gentle movement still counts, a walk, an easy spin on the elliptical, some light mobility. The point is to keep the thread going without digging a deeper hole. And like I always say, nobody is perfect, but everyone is “quite good” at something. Don’t strive for perfection, strive for consistency.
How to Actually See Your Other 23 Hours
Here is the tricky part. The hour in the gym is easy to see. The other 23 are mostly invisible. Your sleep, your stress, your recovery, your everyday movement, they all blur together, and most of us are just guessing at how they connect.
If you want to stop guessing, it helps to see it all laid out together. There is a tool called huuman that pulls your everyday health data into one clear view, so you can finally see how your sleep, your stress, and your recovery line up with how you feel and train. If you are curious, you can see your whole health picture in one place and start connecting the dots. Once those other 23 hours stop being invisible, they get a lot easier to fix.
Start With One Micro-Win
Please do not read this and try to fix all 23 hours tonight. Pick one thing. An earlier bedtime. A 30-minute walk, which honestly does more than you would think! One real rest day this week, without the guilt. Make that automatic, then add the next one.
You do not need to train harder. You need the other 23 hours working for you instead of against you.
What is the hardest part of your other 23 hours to manage? Drop a comment below, or if you are ready to look at your own routine, message me at erikanaka@nakanakamomfitness.com
