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Summary
In episode 751, Coach Allan sits down with Steve Kamb, founder of Nerd Fitness and author of the book How to Try Again, a guide Allan credits with helping him early in his own health journey. Kamb reframes failure not as a character flaw but as something that simply happens to us, arguing that when we fall off a routine we do not return to zero: we get to skip the tutorial steps we already learned and build on past attempts. He challenges the romanticized idea that we should always grind and never quit, noting that sometimes quitting the wrong thing, or pausing where you are, is the smartest move.
The conversation centers on Kamb’s PACT framework (Pause, Accept, Change, Try), a loop for getting out of your own way when the all or nothing mindset keeps collapsing into all, then nothing. He walks through accepting the messy reality of travel, kids, and stress instead of waiting on the back to normal fallacy, running controlled experiments like a scientist, and pre accepting any outcome to quiet the paralysis of expectations. Drawing on stories about golf, a friend navigating chronic illness, and the Japanese concepts of wabi sabi and kintsugi (illustrated by his own cracked and gold repaired coffee mug), Kamb makes the case for self compassion and finding the path that actually works for you.
Links
- How to Try Again by Steve Kamb: Get the book on Amazon
- Nerd Fitness
- Start Again and Make It Stick (free guide)
Key Takeaways
- Failure is an event, not an identity: Kamb traces how the word failure shifted from something that happens to something we become, and urges seeing ourselves as humans who failed, not failures.
- You never restart from zero: Getting a workout in involves 15 or 20 steps, and after a failed attempt you already know the early steps, so you can skip the tutorial and spend energy on the actual activity.
- Make a PACT: When you keep looping through the same failure, Pause, Accept your real situation, Change a variable, and Try something imperfectly, then repeat the loop as life shifts.
- Reject the back to normal fallacy: Believing next week will finally be perfect gives you permission to give up now, so accept that normal is never normal and do something different today.
- Pre accept any outcome: Borrowing a mantra from a golf coach, Kamb narrows focus to the activity you enjoy rather than the result, which loosens the grip of expectations.
- Lead with self compassion: Tough love and beating yourself up rarely work, so accepting that change is genuinely hard creates the opening to try again differently.
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Episode Notes
Podcast: 40+ Fitness
Episode: 751
Published: 2026-06-16
Host: Allan Misner (aka Coach Allan), author of The Wellness Roadmap
Guest(s): Steve Kamb, the founder of Nerd Fitness, an approachable fitness company that helps busy humans level up their lives, author of How to Try Again
Listen & Subscribe: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube (audio only)