Celebrating 300 Articles on Gains - and Where We Go From Here
About 9 months ago, I was laid off from one of the places I work - as a result, I have returned to relying more on my fitness coaching business and my clients than I did previously. I’ve returned to writing more frequently (1x/week articles when I was mostly not writing for about a year prior) and putting a bit more effort into YouTube videos (1-2x/week, and branching out into some higher-effort videos).
It’s been a while since I’ve talked about how things are going, so I wanted to write a bit about how it’s been for the last 9 months.
Personal Self-Improvement
The three biggest self-improvement sectors I care about recently have been personal finance, fitness, and language learning. Here’s a little progress report on each.
Training
Training is really the only area hat I can say I’ve been surprised with how successful everything has been. Around 2022, I decided that I would cut down to stage lean weight (around 70kg) for the first time, and I did, and it was awesome. I got a lot of great photos out of it, and learned a lot. This led to me really focusing on my understanding of diet in a way that I’d never really done before, and is probably the single greatest period of growth in my understanding of physical fitness in the past ten years or so.
Then I figured that the next step would be to bulk back up to 90kg (slowly), focus on strength for a while, and hopefully hit some PR’s - this would be the “final bulk” - my last serious go at being competitive. I’m 34 this year, and that’s not “old”, but it’s also starting to get out of my prime a bit. I don’t have the time to train like I used to, and I’ve shifted more towards minimalist training styles in the past few years, spending about half as much time (or less) in the gym.
So, I fully expected that I’d see slower results from taking a more minimalist approach, albeit with better dietary management.
The only other big difference is that I went back to an old school style of programming - in fact, inspired by the very first strength training program I ever tried. It felt like a fun throwback, and not something I expected to be super successful, just something that better matched with the minimalist training style I was attempting.
The results were honestly surprising. I’ve been seeing very consistent and robust strength progress since 2022, to the extent that I am now (at 34) stronger than I was in my 20’s, hitting PR’s across the board. In some cases (squat, overhead press) I’m seeing PR’s where I basically always struggled in the past, and am now SIGNIFICANTLY stronger than I was previously - hitting 5 rep sets with weights above my prior 1 rep maxes. Bench and deadlift are also progressing, albeit a bit more slowly.
This has led to the bulk continuing longer than expected. I hit 90kg and shifted to maintenance, expecting to slow down on progress, only to see progress continue unchanged. As a result, I’m expecting now that it will likely be another year or two before I truly start to hit my limits, where I expected previously that I would already be hitting them by now.
So, it’s not broken, and I’m not going to try to fix it. I’m going to push until I can’t anymore.
Language Learning
Language learning has somewhat slowed down as a point of interest.
I was super into language learning around 2016-2022, in part because I started learning Danish in Denmark and loved it, but then moved away and started looking into other methods for practicing/training the language without native speakers to interact with regularly. The end result is that I got strongly into Lingq (an assisted reading app) and developed a really strong understanding of the language within about a year.
After that, I planned to spend about a year each on other languages, aiming to knock down a general list I’d always been interested in - French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese.
I started off with French since I’d learned it previously and would be mostly relearning, and figured this would be a good starting point. But within a year, I found I really was struggling to have the same enthusiasm for it that I had had for Danish, and did not make nearly as much progress despite daily practice.
Likewise, I tried out Spanish and Italian, and found I similarly struggled with making a lot of progress in the 1 year timespan. I also trialed Arabic and found it was much harder due to the difficulty in learning to read Arabic script.
Realistically, I realized, it would take me 2-3 years to learn these languages to the desired level at a sustainable rate (and likely longer for languages like Arabic/Russian and certainly much longer for Chinese), which means that I needed to vastly expand my expectations on attainability. I also realized that I didn’t enjoy learning these languages on their own enough, and that I might just not want to pursue my giant list any longer in the future.
For the time being, my plan is to finish up getting French, Spanish, and Italian to a reasonable level of competency (which will likely be another few years anyway), then reassess how I’m feeling and if I want to continue further after that point.
Personal Finance
It’s been fine. I’ve been able to save up plenty, if not as much as I wanted. Lower income (see Business below) has slowed things down, but ultimately we’re ok, and I’m blessed to be as fortunate as I am, and to have the income that I do.
Website Migration
Around February, I was shocked to discover that my website views (10k+/month, mostly organic) dropped to 0. I only found this out about a couple days after the fact when a reader alerted me that links to my latest post were failing to load.
I discovered that, without warning, my hosting service had basically just… stopped working. I host my website through Squarespace, but I used an external service to handle my domain name and email hosting, because it was the only way to get the ‘.af’ domain. I’d been paying extra for this domain (about $200/year in total) largely because it’s a fun little pun, and made my website stand out a bit.
When I contacted the service I acquired my domain name through, they were surprised to discover that they had no idea why it wasn’t working either. I went back and forth with their customer service for a few days, but this completely eroded my trust in them as they were literally unable to figure out why their service wasn’t working. As a result, I rapidly changed from gains.af to gains-af.com, a domain which I could acquire directly through Squarespace for convenience, and which costs me significantly less (about $100/year in total), and began using that going forward.
My domain hosting service never figured out what went wrong, so I still have no idea there.
In any case, I had my website up and running again within a couple of days. But this wasn’t without consequence - because of this migration, I lost all my Google SEO which I had built up in about 12 years of running the website. I formerly got about 5k+/month visitors from Google directly, which represented a huge chunk of my organic readership. Overnight, that vanished, and has only slowly begun to recover. I am now getting readers from Google on a consistent basis again, about 5 months later, but it has not yet cracked the 1k/month mark.
This is, obviously, a huge setback. As a result, I’ve been forced to put a lot more time, energy, and money into advertising to get the ball rolling again, and as a result, website traffic has somewhat recovered, but is not in a “healthy” place.
It may not be fully recovered for years. Articles which used to drive a lot of traffic on a consistent basis are barely being seen. I have almost 300 articles now, most of which effectively won’t be read despite their usefulness, and it hurts quite a bit to see 12 years of work lose quite a bit of value.
Writing
As a result, I’ve struggled at times to write as much as I used to. It’s just a lot harder (and feels much more like an uphill battle) when so much of what drove the value of my writing has vanished. It will recover, but it will take a long time, and the modern environment, with the advent of AI spam, makes this much harder to do than it was in 2012 when I started out.
I also have to admit that, after nearly 300 articles (this one is actually #291 but I feel like it counts as a 300 article celebration post), I’m starting to feel a bit stretched.
Roughly six months back, I wrote a post bemoaning how few bloggers there are left, and how much the fitness blog landscape has changed in the past 10 years. There’s just been a huge dropoff in the kind of content that I grew up around, with most coaches pivoting to video or other social media efforts, or just moving on from fitness entirely into related influencer-y topics.
But now I get it. I feel it.
After six months of trying to put out a lot more writing content, I’m realizing that I don’t have too much else to say.
This is something that happens with a lot of creators - sooner or later in your niche, you run out of content to make because you’ve said everything there is to say, done everything there is to do, burnt out on making the same content over and over or finding new ways to spin the same basic info. I feel that quite a bit, because I’m struggling to find topics that I haven’t covered yet - there’s not much “new” in fitness in the last ten years that’s worth covering, and the rules don’t change too much over time. All that changes is that you have a new generation of people who don’t know anything, and haven’t read your content the first time around - and of course, a lot more people get their info from Tiktoks and video than from blogs nowadays.
I’ve enjoyed the work I put into making videos, in part because I can be more conversational and relaxed, but also in part because I can branch out into other things - commentary and reactions - that remain relevant but don’t involve me having to put out a definitive “statement” on something for the 300th time. I think, realistically, there’s more growth potential there in the near future than in blogging, and my Youtube presence can certainly benefit a lot more from the extra effort than my blogging presence can. Likely, this means that I will (sigh) be “pivoting” to video a bit more in the near future, and potentially writing less frequently or less consistently.
There is still a lot I want to do when it comes to writing. I want to go back and overhaul, update, and repost a lot of older articles that are due for it. I think there’s a lot more call for longer “guides” and deep dives, compared to the relatively shorter posts I generally do on specific topics. Some older articles also reference sources that have since vanished from the internet, and I need to update them with newer references. But going forward, this will likely mean less “new” writing, and more reworked and updated content.
The other elephant in the room is fiction writing. I’ve talked frequently in the past about how I initially wanted to be a fiction author, and only got into fitness as a way to pay bills. Now, almost 13 years on, I’ve got a (nearly) self-sustaining business that requires a lot of effort to maintain - if I can reduce the amount of effort required and automate as much as possible, hopefully I can get to a point where I can have the free time to write for fun, and actually get around to publishing some of my fiction writing and see where that leads me.
Business
Business has been - fine.
It’s not scaled as well as I initially hoped. I’ve been slower to get new projects off the ground than I wanted, and I’ve not had the time or the energy to jump into some things that I had hoped to get done sooner.
As a result, I’ve been able to grow the business a decent bit to make up for the loss of income from being laid off last year, but it’s not back to 100% where I was before. This has meant a more careful year of spending and saving, and a lot more work to find and retain new clients.
It’s also meant a lot more stress. When you work for someone else, you can certainly be very stressed, but there are limits - eventually, you clock out, you turn your brain off, and you move on.
When you work mostly for yourself, and from home, there are no limits, there are no boundaries. You’re always worried about whether you’ve done enough or could have done more. You find yourself working at 10p on your laptop in front of the TV because you have a lot to do and it’s more stressful to relax than it is to keep working. Every new client and every canceled former client feels like a personal judgment on your success and character, and every canceled client feels like a step backwards when you’re trying to scale.
Another annoyance occurred when I discovered that a payment software basically just stopped working properly - rejecting payments, double-billing, and not always correctly identifying when a payment had been made. This caused havoc on my accounting, and forced me to abandon processes which had been in place for years in terms of selling my digital products. Similarly, discussion with their support team produced nothing other than a lot of wasted time, as they don’t know what went wrong. I’ve still not yet found a proper replacement, and have had to spend a lot of time investigating new options.
I’ve been working on some projects in semi-secret, in part because I want to have personal proof that when these projects launch, they can survive mostly on the success of paid advertising alone - I’ve exhausted a lot of my organic presence in the last 9 months solely off of regularly pushing for new clients, and it’s not like I’ve had a lot of time to dedicate to growing my social media following, so it’s not really expanding the pool either. I have been working as hard as possible in my free time on these (semi-secret) projects, but am hoping that when they release, it will be able to make up for some of the difficulty in scaling that I’ve been experiencing.
Once these projects are out the door, I’m going to need to relax for a LONG time. A few weeks or months. And once that’s done, I’ll be moving on into other areas of focus.
Future Plans
With all of the above in mind, here are some changes to be expected in the future:
Training continues as-is, focusing on hitting new strength PR’s and then eventually shifting to cutting weight and extreme fitness minimalism
Language learning continues as-is for a couple of years, then maybe gets minimized to focus more on relaxing and enjoying other pursuits
Writing shifts from regular/shorter articles, into less frequent/larger ones, and overhauling and updating existing content
Keep making videos once or twice a week on a variety of topics
Continue to scale my client list where I can, up to a sustainable target
Launch the semi-secret projects I’ve been working on, and focus on making them sustainably driven by paid advertising so that I can get a renewable source of income that scales better with time invested
Relax
Shift focus more towards managing social media, mailing list, advertising, and supporting internal client/customer communities
Shift into personal writing, get away from fitness when I can make a sustainable living via the semi-automated systems I’ve developed
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached thousands of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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