Stop Expecting Willpower to Do The Heavy Lifting
Learn how to make it easy to stick to your healthy habits and training goals, rather than trying to grin and bear it
One of the most dangerous myths in fitness is the old adage: “no pain, no gain”. It suggests that to make progress, it needs to always hurt. It suggests that this isn’t supposed to be fun or easy, but a painful persuit one has to endure.
But honestly, fuck that. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Yes, if you want to grow muscle or improve your cardio vascular fitness, you need to do things that get increasingly more difficult in some way over time.
This is known as progressive overload. Essentially, to get stronger or bigger or faster, you need to make sessions harder over time. This could be more reps or sets at a weight, a bigger weight, a slower tempo, shorter rests, harder variations of an exercise, a greater range etc.
But this doesn’t mean everything has to always be a struggle.
In fact, I’d argue that making things too hard makes it less likely that you’ll do any of it at all.
If every time you go to the gym, you destroy your legs and can’t walk for four days, it makes it a lot less likely that you’ll be back in the gym the next day…
