It’s fun and exciting to start an exercise program. You hit new goals, contact fresh reinforcers, and acquire those “noob” gains.
But what happens when the honeymoon wears off?
Enter Maintenance Mode
When working with clients, I delineate between two distinct teaching phases of intervention — acquisition and maintenance.
During the acquisition phase, my clients are building their repertoires and/or adjusting their environments such that they contact new or different reinforcers. Often times, among other things, the client must learn which exercises are most important to them, how often they should train, when to change their program, and how to do so.
During the maintenance phases, my services (1:1 coaching time) are slowly faded out. The goal of this phase is to determine if the level of performance can be maintained in the face of less intervention. Maintenance is not sexy and comes with less of the bells and whistles and clients are faced with, “Hey, we built this up, but now can we maintain this progress?”
To some degree, we are all in some form of maintenance mode. The challenge is whether or not, you want to maintain what you have today.
Maintence Case Example
Take Kendra. She is a classic example of building up a fitness repertoire and maintaining in the face of general life challenges (e.g., sickness, job transitions, dog surgeries) and coaching changes. We measured her physical activity through exercise minutes recorded on two different wearables (solid blue line). In November 2023, she switched over to a new Fitbit Charge 6.
Right away we notice the change in exercise minutes. The cheaper device wasn’t always capturing the effort she put in:
In addition to seeing the exercise minutes change, Kendra:
- Built up to 150 exercise minutes or more each week through December 2023
- When we faded our coaching (dashed blue line), she MAINTAINED this level of exercise minutes
- Met or exceeded the 150 minutes per week for 3 consecutive months
Having worked with Kendra for over 8 months now, this blog and chart is the highlight of months of work including: weekly meetings, ongoing adjustments, delivering feedback, and setting various goals along the way.
With a little bit of behavior-based support, a little can go a long way.
I’m excited to see where Kendra heads through the rest of this year!
Way to go Kendra!
