We live in a world obsessed with ceilings. Everyone wants to brag about their biggest squat, their fastest mile, or the day they cut down to their lowest bodyfat. Those are the highlight reels—the snapshots that get posted and shared. They’re fun to celebrate, and they matter in their own way. But the real story of change doesn’t come from chasing ceilings. It comes from raising the floor.

Arnold talked about this on today’s Pump Club podcast, and it’s a concept that hit home for me. The floor is what you fall back to when life gets busy, messy, or just plain hard. It’s the minimum standard you refuse to dip below. One great workout doesn’t change you. Two hundred standard workouts do. One perfect day of eating won’t transform your body. Two hundred average days, stacked one on top of the other, will.

That’s what raising the floor is about—building habits and routines that keep you moving forward even when you’re not at your best.

Think about it in terms of training. A personal record is exciting. You grind for weeks, maybe months, and then finally hit that new squat or deadlift number. But here’s the truth: PRs don’t last if they’re built on shaky ground. What actually builds strength is all the reps in between. Rep after rep. Set after set. Day after day. It’s boring, it’s unglamorous, but it’s where progress lives.

When your floor is low, a bad day can knock you flat. You skip a workout, you eat junk, and suddenly you’re off track for a week. When your floor is high, you bounce back faster. Maybe you miss your planned heavy session, but you still hit your minimums. Maybe your nutrition isn’t perfect, but you still keep it within the rails. The floor keeps you moving forward, even when the ceiling feels out of reach.

And here’s the paradox: the higher you raise the floor, the higher the ceiling eventually climbs. Consistency creates progress. Progress sets up PRs.

My own mantra at Asgard Athletica is simple: Lift heavy. Learn daily. That’s the ceiling I’d love to chase. But the floors are what keep me honest:

• Read 25 minutes a day. No matter how hectic things get, I can carve out that time. Ideas compound just like reps.
• Rate 10 songs a day. A small creative ritual that keeps me engaged and curious.
• Average 10,000 steps a day. Some days that’s easy, others it’s a fight. But it’s the baseline that keeps my body moving. I keep an average here. I may miss some days, but I make up for it on others. The average keeps me going.
• Three lifting/conditioning workouts a week. Life throws curveballs, but if I hit those three, I know I’ve upheld the standard.

These are my minimums. My floor. The foundation I can fall back on when everything else is chaos. And working two jobs, it usually is.

So the next time you’re tempted to chase a shiny number or boast about a PR, ask yourself: what’s my floor? Because the truth is, no single ceiling defines you. What defines you is what you do on the days when motivation runs dry, when the schedule is packed, when life pulls you in 10 directions at once.

Raise the floor. Stack the reps. Bounce back faster. Consistency over perfection.

The ceilings will take care of themselves.