First Principles Thinking: The High-Performance Mindset Shortcut Most People Ignore
Ask any high performer their top priority for success?
They won’t talk you through their workout, morning routine, or list off their personal bests.
They will take every opportunity they have to stress the importance of mindset.
If you’re serious about improving the way your body performs, then you need to start thinking differently. And learning how to be ruthlessly decisive and cut to the chase with your processes can be a highly effective tool.
The concept for you to embody today is called First Principles Thinking. Applying it can create a shift that will radically change not just your training results, but the entire trajectory of your life.
Why is it so important? Because there’s so much noise out there you simply can’t afford to waste time with. It forces you to reject the millions of voices in the wellness space, simultaneously shouting at you, pulling you from pillar to post.
“How can you make the ‘dream’ life work?”
It forces you to ditch advice that worked for someone else but may not apply to you, and instead think like a problem solver with excellent clarity of thought.
Applying first principles thinking isn’t just theoretical, it leads to deliberate action - reflected in the way you train, eat, and live.
We get to a place where the big details of our life have an idea and logic behind them - we don’t do them ‘just cus’.
Often we act based on emotion - no biggie in moderation. We are human, and should acknowledge our feelings and emotions. We can use them to guide us.
Having our lives dictated by them is another thing. So ideally we have some scientific or philosophical logic behind our actions, rather than just acting based on emotion and instinct all the time.
How do we use First Principles Thinking?
At its core, we are simply talking about taking something - a statement, a task, an argument, and breaking it down to its purest, most fundamental truth, then re-building our stance from there. Our understanding of the first principle provides us with an immovable reference point to keep coming back to as we get further and further into the weeds with detail, variance and caveats.
Let me give you a sporting example.
First Principle: The winner of a football match is the team who scores the most goals.
Now, think about how highly advanced and technological this sport is. Clubs have 100+ staff to achieve this end. Players, managers, assistants, analysts, physios, doctors, strength coaches, recruitment teams etc. These staff collectively spend every waking hour devising their team strategy, tactics:
One club chooses to dominate the ball, passing their opponent to death
One club chooses a strategy to be ultra-defensive and wait for their moment to pounce
But the club who chooses possession, might be so patient, and so focused on passing - they forget that at the end of these 1000 passes, they need to stick the ball in the goal.
The ultra-defensive team may do a sterling job of defending like their lives depend on it, waiting for their moment to shine. But then actually forget what they were supposed to when they finally get it.
No club, whatever their strategy, can ever lose sight of the first principle - we need to score more goals than them to win.
But back to fitness.
You don’t derail your entire training strategy with the flick of a wrist, just because you scrolled past a popular training fad. The abandonment of your current strategy is proof that you weren’t doing it for any real reason, only a generic one.
There was no underlying principle.
Why try to imitate what worked for someone else when you haven’t walked their shoes or lived their life?
Instead, start with what’s true - both for the world, and for yourself.
First principles thinking is not just about asking questions - it’s about finding the right questions to provide the biggest possible clarity on your actions.
Instead of asking questions like:
“What’s the best diet for losing weight?”
“Should I be doing more cardio?”
“What’s the best exercise for making my injury go away?”
Instead, start with:
“What does research say humans need to thrive - for training results, and long-term?”
“What physical capabilities define a truly fit, athletic person?”
“What are the strength training principles for a highly functional body resistant to injury?”
Let’s take that cardio example.
Rather than asking, “Should I be running more?”
Ask, “What should a fit human be able to do?”
A genuinely athletic individual can:
Run fast (sprint/power)
Run far (aerobic endurance)
Run fast for an extended duration (lactate threshold, mental grit, speed endurance)
If you resolve to only do one of those three, you’re missing a big part of the picture. And that missing piece might be the very thing limiting your progress.
Applying first principles we would conclude: Don’t just default to more miles or faster splits. Let’s start with what ‘complete’ fitness actually looks like. Then train for that.
Same thing with nutrition. You can waste time arguing about keto vs plant-based vs whatever the trend of the month is. Or you can strip it down:
The human body needs protein to repair and build tissue.
Fibre for healthy digestion, metabolism and longevity
It needs micronutrients for essential chemical processes.
An ideal combination of all 3 macronutrients for a specific calorie amount relevant to the individual and their objectives
So the real question becomes: How do I give my body everything it needs to thrive without unnecessary baggage? From there, your nutrition plan writes itself.
Instead of asking: “Should I take a rest day?”
Ask: “What does my body need to actually adapt to the training I’m doing?”
The answers might revolve around:
Better sleep
Intensity management
Training variation
Proper nutrition
Stress management
Hydration
Asking the right questions leads you to the solutions you crave.
This is how high performers think.
They don’t follow trends. They don’t outsource their decision-making to influencers or apps. They strip it all back to the basic truths - and then use that truth to create a system for them that works.
Start thinking like this and you’ll find clarity where others find confusion. You’ll have a plan in place for yourself that is probably not going to change that much for the rest of your life (which sounds dramatic, but the reality is, most of the scientific truth we have around health, fitness, muscle development and longevity, won’t change too much over the next 30 years. We will have new caveats and better understandings of course - but not so much that they remove you from the first principle.
Last quick example - we have known about the benefits of static stretching since the 1960’s. Here we are 60 years later - still in the knowledge that stretching could be a good method for maintaining healthy muscles. Although our understanding will improve, that basic truth will probably always apply to us as humans.
So here’s a challenge for you this weekend:
Pick an area of your life that feels cloudy.
Then ask:
“What are the basic truths I can work with here?” - just like the truth about football.
How can you use it to improve your gameplan?
I look forward to hearing from you guys about what you find!
An Amazing Offer While I’ve Got You Here…
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I made sure to create separate channels for each of the problem areas people tend to come to me with (eg. ankles, hips, lower back, upper back/shoulders)
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