When I look around in most every gym I’ve ever been in, I see two things.
1- People addicted to exhaustion. They’re on the treadmills for 2 hours of jogging. They’re doing 55 sets of leg extensions.
2- People afraid of effort. They’re technically moving, but it’s “thin” movement, going through the motions without concentrated effort.
This is really the same mistake seen from two directions. Both of these come from a single source of confusion.
There’s a mind-worm in the culture of exercise and sport that treats exhaustion as equivalent to productive gains-summoning work.
Not so.
If you want to summon gains, exhaustion, fatigue, and excessive stress are not your friends.
Folks under 30-35 or so don’t have to worry so much about this. They’re still getting youthful energy on Easy Mode. Beat yourself into the dirt and as long as there’s some productive work in there, you can see progress.
If you’re past 40, forget that. Father Time is coming for the tithe and you’d best pay up if you want to keep those muscles and low body fat percentage.
My advice to you is all about getting the effective signal out of the noise of exhaustion.
Many strength workouts are full of “junk volume”. They’ll have you doing 5 exercises for a single muscle group, doing 10 sets each, like we used to see back in the 90s and early noughts.
This makes sense if you think that getting tired means progress.
It doesn’t.
So what happens is you end up wasting all your energy doing that mess, where a fraction of the work, done the right way, would give you more returns.
Instead of going for tired, here’s a more helpful way to think about it.
Your muscles and fat stores work like radio transmitters.
They send out and receive signals, like a radio station.
Your goal with your workouts and your eating is to send the right signals.
Muscles grow from contracting against resistance. Not getting tired, not getting pumped, not even going to failure.
Fat stores shrink when you’re eating less calories than you burn off. Not avoiding the right Bad Foods, or fasting intermittently or otherwise, or any other distraction the supplement and pharma companies sell you.
There are some important asterisks on both of those, but they’re both true.
If you’re over 40, you can’t get away with training and eating the way you could at 25.
In my world, we’re cutting back on the fatigue and focusing on pure signal.
55 sets guy and no-effort machines guy are making the same mistake: they’re both avoiding the kind of productive training that sends a positive signal to grow muscle and/or reduce fat.
I want workouts to be low-stress. I want diets to be sustainable and easy to follow.
The irony is, the more we dial that in, the better the results.
Believing that you have to blast yourself to paste, in the gym and in the kitchen, is why so many people fail.
When you focus on pure signal, while cutting out the exhausting static in the background, you get results.
If you’re tired of messing around with getting tired and seeing no changes, send me a message and let’s see what we can do to fix it.
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Matt Perryman