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Summary
On episode 450 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan gets personal about his own slip during the early months of COVID-19 lockdown in Panama, and lays out the process he uses with clients to turn a setback into a comeback.
Allan's angle is direct: even trainers slip, and the goal isn't to avoid every mistake, it's to have a repeatable process for recovering from one.
He walks through his three-step recovery plan, forgive, learn and plan, then act, using his own six weeks of inactivity, stress eating, and extra drinking as the example, and connects it to why being healthy and fit matters beyond looks.
Links
- https://40plusfitness.com
Key Takeaways
- Even trainers and health professionals slip, and it doesn't erase your progress or your credibility. During roughly six weeks of Panama's strict COVID-19 lockdown, Allan barely moved, drank more than usual, and ate poorly, and calls the resulting weight gain “the COVID-15.”
- Recovery follows three steps in a specific order: forgive, learn and plan, then act. Skipping self-forgiveness blocks recovery before it starts, skipping the plan leaves you without direction, and skipping action means nothing actually changes.
- Forgiving yourself isn't an excuse, it's the prerequisite for change. Allan describes accepting responsibility for the choices he made (“that's on me”) while also recognizing the real triggers, stress and uncertainty, that contributed to the slip, and says real, deep self-forgiveness has to happen before anything else can move forward.
- The lesson you pull from a slip needs to be specific and actionable, not vague. Allan's takeaway from his own slip was concrete: when he hits a stressful period, he needs to keep moving no matter the circumstances, because movement was what eventually pulled him out of it.
- COVID-19 mostly exposed how unhealthy people already were rather than being a uniquely deadly threat on its own. Allan points to US health stats (roughly two-thirds overweight, one-third obese) and notes that in the same stretch of time COVID had caused about 180,000 deaths, tobacco-related illness had caused roughly 280,000, framing the pandemic as something that accelerates existing decline rather than causing it outright.
- Being fit and healthy functions as real protection, not just an aesthetic goal. Allan talks about not wanting to look like an easy target and about wanting to be physically capable of helping the people he loves, including being able to help his wife decades from now, as reasons fitness matters beyond how you look.
- Constantly consuming news and social media during a crisis made things worse, not better. Allan describes reading COVID articles obsessively for weeks, which deepened his stress and depression instead of giving him any real sense of control.
- Positive self-talk and recommitting to your “why” and vision are the daily practice that keeps a slip from becoming a permanent state. Allan frames it as a conscious, repeatable decision: recommit, forgive, learn, plan, act, rather than a one-time fix.
“We write our own next chapter. Our next chapter hasn't happened.”
Coach Allan Misner
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