“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”
– Tom Hanks
A League of Their Own
At least once a day, I give a client a coaching cue and they shout back at me, “That makes it HARDER!” And I always respond with some incredibly charming quip, usually, “Well, duh.”
This interaction is much more light-hearted than the title of this article, which may come off as harsh. But let me ask a serious question:
When did we suddenly decide that all this exercise and nutrition stuff was supposed to be easy?
More and more diet plans and exercise programs are being billed as simple steps and easy fixes. We’re pushing tiny habit changes. We’re championing flexible dieting. We’re preaching the minimal effective dose.
All of these things are fine and they DO work. But only if YOU work.
We absolutely cannot forget that, when it comes to fitness, all positive changes take some degree of hard work and suffering. We’re essentially trying to escape homeostasis and our bodies will cling tooth and nail to where is it or where it used to be.
I’ve gone on record saying that you should leave the gym feeling better than when you came in. I’ve also said that fatigue is not a worthy goal. I still believe the latter, but I can’t say I still believe the former.
You often here that fatigue masks fitness because we can’t perform at our best when we’re tired. Well, fatigue also builds fitness when imposed properly. Too much fatigue will lead to overtraining (harder to do than it sounds), but enough fatigue to briefly create a decrease in performance is usually just what the doctor ordered when it comes to pushing yourself to new levels.
Here are 3 instances where calculated fatigue IS the goal.
1. PEAKING FOR MAXIMAL STRENGTH
There are many reasons to NOT get tired when training for strength.
Strength is a skill. New skills are poorly developed in a fatigued state.
Big barbell lifts require pristine technique. Technique goes to crap in a fatigued state, increasing the chance for injury.
But the more advanced your are, the more you must impose higher levels of fatigue to keep making progress.
Where most trainees start to falter is by freaking out when they start to get tired and everything starts to feel heavy. But here’s a newsflash: it’s OK when everything starts to feel heavy, difficult and awful.
Let me explain.
The concept of Block Periodization as described by Dr. Vladimir Issurin breaks training into three distinct blocks while preparing for a competition:
- Accumulation
- Transmutation
- Realization
This sounds complicated, but it simply means you systematically accumulate fatigue, recover at the right time (i.e. peak) and dominate your scheduled competition. This effect is illustrated nicely in this chart:
The down-sloping line below the Transmutation block shows how your performance actually gets worse during that training cycle because you’re fatigued, but you bounce back during the Realization block. You have to push the boundaries in order to induce supercompensation and reach new levels of performance.
That’s why I often tell my lifters that I want them to feel like the same weights are getting harder during certain training cycles. If everything is feeling light and easy all the time, we’re either undershooting the volume or their training maxes.
The truth is that you’re going to have to train through some sort of fatigue at some point. If we only trained when we felt 100 percent, no one would ever train.
As a personal example, I remember squatting 485 for a brutally-hard set of 2 reps just 4 weeks before hitting a PR of 530 pounds. I was tempted to freak out about how terrible the 485 felt but remembered that I needed it to feel hard in order to adapt a few weeks later.
2. CONDITIONING FOR FAT LOSS
By now we should all understand that high-intensity conditioning is superior to low-intensity conditioning for fat loss. Long slow cardio isn’t the devil, but it’s simply not as efficient as the quick-and-dirty stuff.
What gets lost in translation when speaking about high-intensity interval training (HIIT) is how insanely hard you have to work to get all the benefits we talk about in the research.
The often-misquoted and misrepresented Tabata studies (which spawned legions of 20-seconds on/10-seconds off groupies) actually had subjects sprint on a bike at 170 percent of VO2max. Do you have any idea how hard that is? Neither does anybody else.
What’s clear is that these pro-HIIT studies prove that for best results, you must give every single last ounce of effort you have. This will not be comfortable. It may even be a bad idea if you’ve gotta bounce back for another workout or practice the next day. But if fat loss is your goal, saddle up and don’t hold back.
If you’ve never been in a research lab and seen a Wingate test or other insanely hard protocol being performed, it’s hard to appreciate how quickly the mind gives out before the body. It literally takes a team of researchers screaming and yelling at the subject to get them to finish a single 30-second Wingate test, let alone 8 rounds of 20 seconds of a Tabata protocol.
What’s the point? HIIT has to be incredibly hard and fatiguing to be effective. This throws the whole “feel better when you leave than when you got to the gym” notion out the window.
Yes, it’s going to feel awful and yes, it’s going to work.
3. ASSISTANCE WORK
Assistance work, especially when trying to increase muscle size, needs to be trained at least somewhat close to failure to be effective.
Training to failure is usually bad news when it comes to the big barbell lifts, but for lighter exercises like direct arm work or single-leg work, muscular fatigue should be the goal.
That’s because hypertrophy occurs primarily by one of two ways:
- Mechanical stress (i.e. heavy weight)
- Metabolic stress (i.e. the pump)
Most exercises don’t cater to both types of stress. For example, heavy back squats and bench presses are great at applying mechanical stress, but technique will break down too much before adequate metabolic stress occurs. On the flip side, the biceps muscle group isn’t well-equipped to handle heavy loads, so chasing the pump with higher reps is the better option.
The bigger and stronger you get, the more fatigue you must impose to keep growing. And you can’t just keep adding weight to your biceps curls and triceps pushdowns. You have to increase metabolic stress with more reps, slower tempos, constant tension and other intensity techniques. In other words, you have to make it harder without making it heavier.
FINDING YOUR FATIGUE
The idea that you can make consistent progress by doing nothing but easy workouts and leaving the gym feeling like a million bucks is a cruel joke. Novice lifters can get away with it for awhile, but once the newbie gains run out, you’d better get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
The next time you think about complaining when your performance starts to dip a bit, remember that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Stay the course, trust the process and welcome the fatigue. The hard is what makes it great.