April Thoughts - 2026

The Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule, is the idea that roughly 80% of our results come from 20% of our inputs. Applied to exercise, it’s the idea that in order to become 80% proficient at any given skill or capacity, it will require 20% of the work compared to gaining 100% proficiency.

In other words, to gain the last 20% of a skill requires 80% more work. This can also be referred to as diminishing returns.

A generalization like this can’t apply to every situation, but it does serve as a useful guide for how we choose to apply our efforts. If you are a professional athlete, it behooves you to pursue every avenue for improvement and refinement that can help elevate you to the highest level and help your team win, secure sponsorships, or achieve accolades within your sport.

However, if you’re just a regular person who works a 9-5, or even if you’re an influencer hoping to share the benefits of exercise with the masses, it may make a lot more sense to hover around that 80/20 mark.

I would love to be able to do a planche, and I am well aware of the best approaches for achieving this skill. It would involve me doing a whole lot less handstand practice and taking more full days off from training to actually rest. Especially as a 41 year old, even training other parts of my body that can help keep me healthy is going to interfere with my recovery between the heavy planche sessions. 

Does this mean that I don’t train the planche? Absolutely not. But it does mean that I train it more gently and with less emphasis on fast progress. The nice thing about strength training, when you do it well, is that it transfers to other skills like the press to handstand, handstand push up, core strength for weightlifting, and general body awareness as well. So I can gain many broad benefits from keeping a small but regular emphasis on my planche training, knowing fully well that at the degree I am prioritizing it, it won’t result in me winning any calisthenics competitions.

For me, this is okay. I take the same approach with the splits. If I want to keep a full middle split, I really have to prioritize it and block out space that would likely be better served somewhere else in my training time. However, keeping my flexibility good enough to manage great handstands as well as sprinting and acrobatic training doesn’t take an excessive amount of time.

In the end, all I want to do is help you better understand how training works. There isn’t an endless supply of energy or time, so the better you can understand what you are getting yourself into and why you are doing it, the better cost-benefit analysis you can do and choose the path you really want to walk. Even with an educated approach, the path won’t always be perfectly straight or free of obstacles, but you can traverse it with confidence, knowing you are moving in the direction that means the most to you.