After a month on the road running stunt clinics, the question I heard most was how I keep up with my training and nutrition while traveling. My honest answer is that? I don’t. The reason I’m completely fine with that is the same reason one great clinic will never make your season. If you want your cheer team consistency to increase this season, take a listen.

Discipline Doesn’t Mean 100 Percent

When I’m home, I train consistently, eat well, and lean on routines that make both easy. On the road, those systems disappear. Some days that means airport food, eating out three meals a day, or skipping the gym after an eight-hour clinic.

We’ve built a strange picture of what discipline looks like: the 5 a.m. vacation workout, the chicken and rice carried through the airport, the “no days off” posts. None of that is required to stay in shape.

A year has 365 days. If you prioritize training and nutrition 90 percent of the time, that’s roughly 329 days moving toward your goals, which leaves 36 days to be completely off your game. Spread across a year, those days barely register.

Vacation isn’t the problem. The problem is letting vacation become your new normal.

A lot of people fail at fitness because they set the standard at 100 percent. They commit to five workouts a week, track every bite, cut alcohol and dessert, meal prep on Sundays, and hit 10,000 steps daily. Then life happens: a trip, a cold, a crazy week at work, three missed workouts. Suddenly they feel like they’ve fallen off and need to get back on.

I’ve never liked that mentality. When training and taking care of yourself are part of your lifestyle, there is nothing to fall off of. You had a weird week, and that’s all it was. You don’t need to punish yourself, add two-a-days, or starve yourself Monday because of Saturday’s pizza. Just go back to normal. Your ability to return to your baseline matters far more than your ability to never leave it.

Raise Your Baseline, Not Your Best Day

Stop trying to make your best days better, and make your normal days better instead. Picture a normal week where you train four to five times, eat mostly quality food, sleep reasonably well, and get enough protein and water. That week, repeated, will put you in a really good place over the course of a year.

When life gets in the way, let it. Eat the local food on vacation. Have the drink. Skip the workout when you’re exhausted. Enjoy Christmas without wondering whether the mashed potatoes fit your macros. Exceptions don’t determine your results. Your baseline does.

It took me a long time to understand this, and even longer to actually live it. Shifting from being a 100 percenter to a 90/10 approach is what finally made it sustainable.

One Clinic Won’t Make or Break Your Season

The longer I thought about this, the more I realized it applies almost perfectly to coaching. Coaches fall into the same trap by putting enormous weight on individual events. Summer camp, choreography weekend, the first full out, a couple of rough practices two weeks before competition, the extra Sunday practice, and the clinic where you bring in someone like me all get treated as make-or-break.

I believe in clinics. My business travels the world running them. Even so, I’ll be the first to tell you that one Hybrid clinic won’t make your season, and one bad clinic won’t ruin it. The same goes for one incredible practice, one terrible practice, or one guest coach giving the perfect correction.

Say we come in for a two-day clinic. We clean up grips, give your athletes drills, work progressions, and maybe change how they think about a skill entirely. Everyone leaves excited. Then we leave, and the real question is what happens Monday, Tuesday, and three weeks after that.

Those two days sit inside hundreds of days of practice. The old habits come right back if athletes slide into them, if coaches stop reinforcing corrections, or if practice turns into throwing skills over and over instead of building the fundamentals we worked on. That isn’t a Hybrid problem. The same is true of any camp, choreographer, consultant, or coach you bring in. The value isn’t what happens while that person is in the building. What matters is what you do with the information after they leave.

Your Program Is a Random Wednesday in October

Teams have a baseline just like individuals do. Start with what a normal Wuesday practice looks like. Do athletes take warm-up seriously? How many quality reps do they get? What’s the response to corrections? When a stunt falls, do they understand why? Are coaches teaching technique or just saying “do it again”? Do athletes hold each other accountable, and do coaches hold athletes accountable? And what happens when nobody important is watching?

That’s your program. It isn’t the locked-in practice you had because the choreographer showed up. It also isn’t the clinic weekend where everyone was focused because new coaches were in the gym. Your program is what happens on a random Wednesday in October when everyone is tired and there’s still an hour and a half of practice left.

Coaches, you aren’t exempt from this. Your athletes’ average behavior matters, and so does yours. Nobody needs the greatest speech of your life every week, a revolutionary new drill, or a perfect practice plan every day. What matters is the average experience of being coached by you.

Are you prepared most days?
Is the standard you hold consistent?
Do you actually teach athletes why something went wrong?

Look at the technical standards you held at summer camp and check whether they’re still there in September. When competition gets close and stress kicks in, do you stay patient enough to develop skills, or does technique go out the window? And do your athletes know what to expect from you?

All of that eventually shows up on the floor. A team’s performance is, in a lot of ways, the accumulated average of the behaviors that came before it.

Think in Seasons, Not Practices

We dramatically overestimate the importance of days and underestimate the importance of years. Eat terribly today and almost nothing happens. Do it for five years and a lot happens. A single incredible workout changes nothing, but five years of consistent training can transform your body.

Cheer works the same way. One great practice won’t change your season, and neither will one terrible practice. A single clinic doesn’t create a championship team, and one bad competition doesn’t mean you have a bad team. Individual events feel huge because they’re happening right now, but the trajectory is what actually matters.

Put this into action right now:

• Instead of asking “How do I make today an amazing practice?” ask “How can I make our average practice better?”
• Instead of asking “How do I get my athletes motivated?” ask “How do we build a program where working hard is the normal expectation?”
• Instead of asking “What clinic can fix our stunting?” ask “How do we take what we learn at clinics and make it part of what we do every week?”

That’s raising the baseline.