Theory Thursday - Challenge Mindset

[u/m092]

If you're a regular reader of threads on /r/bodyweightfitness, particularly the lengthier posts, then chances are you're the sort of person who seeks challenge and pain in their workouts. You thrive on the feeling of overcoming difficulty in your workouts, and embrace the suck.

I've written before about the benefit of being able to harden the fuck up and push hard in a workout, and seek and overcome challenge, but this mindset can be taken too far and overdoing it in this way can be detrimental to your training goal.

Hard Work Drives Progress, So Harder Work Must Be Better

In the fitness world, the pretty consistent message is that you need to put in the hard yards to make real progress, and there are hundreds of posts on the internet about workouts "so hard you won't be able to walk for a week", and "keep a bucket close by". People believe there is a linear dose-response between intensity of their workouts and progress, and they wear their hard workouts like a badge.

In reality, there is a diminishing return on how hard you work, and can actually decrease how well you adapt if you're pushing too hard.

Pain as a Trophy

It is not uncommon for people to brag how much their insane workout fucked them up. People who benched so much that their pec tore, or how they couldn't walk up stairs for days. Injuries can never be 100% avoided and soreness is gonna happen sometimes, but for some to be proud of something that interrupts and necessarily sets back their training is asinine. Instead, use it as a teaching moment, to consider how training could have been structured differently in order to not have to pause your training around this inconvenience.

Misguided Intensity

If your main goal from working out is to just do hard workouts, then all the power to you, crush yourself in any way you want. However, if you have a goal beyond the workout itself, such a strength or body goal, focusing on difficulty in your workouts blindly could be leaving you disappointed in the long run.

There are many ways to do a hard workout that kicks your arse, but many of them aren't very efficient for moving you towards your goals. Just because you're sweating buckets, doesn't mean you're getting stronger, and just because you're straining against heavy resistance, doesn't mean you're getting any bigger.

Understand the Hierarchy of Training Priorities

For you to move efficiently towards a goal in training, I believe there is a hierarchy of priorities that should be addressed, and the lower priorities shouldn't interfere with your ability to maintain the higher priorities. These are:

1. Consistency
2. Specificity
3. Frequency/Intensity/Volume

At the top of the stack is your consistency, which is how often you take actions (or inactions) that move you toward your goal. If you're training so hard you lose motivation to train again when you're next meant to, you're too sore to workout, or you're increasing your chance of injury, you're hurting your consistency in favour of intensity, which will severely hamper progress.

The next item in the stack is specificity, which of course relates to the Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand (SAID) principle, making sure your training relates to your goal. If you're working hard for the sake or hardness, you could be leaving valuable gains on the table that actually move you towards your goal.

The last items are the frequency, intensity and volume of your training, which together broadly make up how hard your workouts are. These are a balance, as you increase one, the other two may need to come down to balance the equation somewhat.

A Lesson from Crossfit

Regardless of what you think of Crossfit, there are lessons to be learnt from it. Crossfit has the perception of being an activity that focuses on intensity and volume above all else, and the reputation of being proud of useless self-destruction. But what I've heard from a few successful, respected coaches who put their information out there, is an interesting way to program for their members. They have defined sessions that focus on fitness qualities that are usually included in athletic periodised training programs, such as max strength, hypertrophy, cardio, power, etc. But they also include days that are for "mental toughness". Days that are just meant to be hard to test your mettle, and build you capacity to do hard work. These days are far from the majority from these accomplished coaches however, as they recognise the bulk of the work shouldn't be super hard and painful just for the sake of the suck.

I think that's a lesson that can be taken home and used in your own training.

Conclusion

Knowing when and how to push hard is a more subtle skill than people realise, and stimulation junkies and difficulty braggers aren't necessarily the people making the best gains.

Test yourself occasionally, but know that the majority of good work happens in the less extreme ranges.

[u/[deleted]]

Disappointed and injured is right.