An email came to me the other day from a reader who is a good ways younger than my 40+ age bracket.

That’s okay. I’m discovering that my grizzled elder-brother Gen X wisdom may serve its own purpose for the younger millennials and the zoomers who have been left to rot by society.

You’ll see what I mean.

While I do not offer private consulting by email for free, I like and encourage questions that I can answer in an email for everyone’s benefit. This one sure fits the profile.

This reader started out with a question about workout strategy and method.

The problems and symptoms turned out to have little to do with what is going on at the gym.

Warning: this one runs longer than usual. But it’s full of gems to reward your patience.

The anonymous reader’s comments are in bold. Here goes:

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I do keep running into problems with lifting, mainly when I try doing what seems like meaningful weight/intensity according to people online, I end up in a deep fatigue hole and it starts to get in the way of the rest of my life.

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This isn’t exactly as clear as glass.

He listened to people online, which is always a mistake, and now he’s feeling exhausted which is affecting the rest of his life. There isn’t much to go on here, though this describes a common enough symptom.

(By the way, notice how we’ve jumped into “fatigue hole” without context. If you ever wondered why I was and am so hard on the idea of “overtraining”, pay close attention to what’s next.)

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Lately I tried working on my deadlift three times a week recently, and a week and a half in my energy levels tanked and my low back felt like it was on the verge of being tweaked.

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Training the deadlift can be done three times a week. I’ve done it for five at a sustainable rhythm. It’s not impossible…

IF you know how to manipulate your intensity and volume

IF you are deeply tapped into your body’s responses

IF you are willing to make decisions by listening to those responses

That is three IFs that, bluntly, most people will not do, even if they know they can and should. Most trainers, much less gym-rats, have no idea about these hidden gems in my work.

I can get away with training like this because I’ve built my whole philosophy and method of training around autoregulation. Everything I do is built around feedback from my senses and inner feelings, which I use to “flow” from set to set and workout to workout.

If I turn up at the gym feeling like crap, and the sets never “catch fire” while warming up, I’ll throw in the towel and go home.

If there’s an ache or pain that makes me suspicious? Brother, I am staring at 50. If I get even the slightest hint that a muscle or joint is not happy, I’m done. That’s it, I’m calling time. There is no workout plan that is worth blowing out an important piece of hardware and the months of recovery that follow.

If you can’t or won’t do these things — or don’t even know that they are options — you have no business fooling around with this kind of training. The psychological and “inner world” tools I teach are absolutely essential to making it work in a sustainable way.

If you’re at the beginner level of doing whatever “workout routines” you score from reddit or youtube or whatever, you have no business playing with this level of training.

It amazes me how many people act like training with intention, for a purpose, exists one more form of entertainment right next to scrolling BS on social media.

If you want to feel inspired, go scroll TikTok. If you want results, take the medicine Dr. Matt prescribes.

But this here, this is the part where I really wanted to work up a good lather:

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I’m thinking though instead of doing that, just picking up some kettlebells and walking around the gym 3x a week, maybe even rucking my home one around town. I think it will be more forgiving on the body and train the kind of full body coordinated stability that I want, maybe even in a more well rounded way than deadlift, and be just as interesting.

This on top of going back to a focus on what was working great before – doing calisthenics at home and just taking them really hard. It’s harder to psyche yourself up for a set of 60 of something but a lot easier on the body and it feels like a way better work to fatigue ratio. It makes me feel sharper and energized even when my body is fatigued while the heavy compounds seem to dull me out.

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You start out asking about your deadlifts, complaining that they’re “too hard” on your body — when you’re clearly trying to train at a level that you aren’t ready for — which is at least a real and concrete problem that could be worked on.

Now you’re talking about kettlebells, rucking, and calisthenics at home?

My friend, I say this with love in my heart, but you’re trying to take an airplane, a ferry ride, and a cruise on your mountain bike. It’s all the same to you because why not? I’m moving around in space and I sweat a little and breathe hard. All good mate!

You don’t know what you want. You don’t know where you’re going. You don’t know where you want to be on the other side of the journey, so it doesn’t matter what you do on the way. You can pick anything, everything, or nothing, and you’d arrive at the same place.

Your attention is scattered all over the place because you have no determinate aim to focus it.

You can’t even state the end result you expect from doing all these buzzwords that came from social media influencers.

Your problem is not your workouts, but your complete lack of clarity, lack of a definite goal, and lack of focus.

Don’t tell me about your workouts or what “inspires you” at the gym.

Tell me WHAT YOU WANT TO DO AND WHO YOU WANT TO BE.

If you can’t do that, and if you can’t get that vision razor-sharp and crystal-clear, none of these fads and fashion-trends matter one red penny.

You’ve blown the transaxle. You’re just grinding metal.

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So I hear these admonishments online to stop training like you’re 25, and I have to heed them … at the ripe old age of 26.

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Sigh.

I truly have no ill will to this reader. Quite the opposite — I’m extremely sympathetic. I wish and want the best for him in life and I want him to succeed in his training.

But gat-dang, they test my patience.

There are admonishments to “stop training like you’re 25” and these are pushed on people in their late 20s? And you’re listening to it?

I have 20 years on this reader. I don’t even feel that my training is that outrageous, although I’m coming to realize that in many ways the things I do — down to the tiny detail work like keeping focused, regulating stress between sets, and being rigorous about rest intervals — puts me well away from the norm in most gyms.

What this reader describes is a problem that would not even phase me. For one, I don’t get beat up from my training even though I “overtrain” by the standards of Best Practices. For two, if I do feel fatigue building up, I have a vault full of strategies for handling it, starting with my own emotional responses and attention and working down to nutrition and restoration techniques.

Notice where the reader’s priorities are by comparison:

“What’s the magic workout to fix me up?”

I read a line in a quote from a Sufi mystic the other day that is appropriate here:

“If the blind need eyes and not light, how can a brilliant presentation seem other than dark to them?”

At least 99% of the fitness world is obsessed with the gimmicks and magic pills that give light and illumination, and meanwhile…

My whole game has been about giving people the eyes to see.

Selling prevention and aspiration is always pushing a boulder up a hill next to Sisyphus, compared to giving the painkillers that people already want.

I could clean up if I just hired a hot girl or two and sold workout PDFs and digital courses, but that isn’t my game.

I want you people to see, not just have your light.

I’ve been going on about the need to be right inside yourself… to get to honesty and clarity and tell the truth … before we get on to the nuts n’ bolts of training and nutrition.

This here is a real-life case study as to WHY I drill that so hard.

Your lesson:

Know what you want and make it as clear as you can in your mind.

None of the rest matters until you get that in place.

On that note:

The new trainings and coaching offer that I am putting together for January will be delivered mainly in the Vital Beyond 40 community. I am going to work with the right people to create real results by changing your BEHAVIORS instead of your BELIEFS.

👉 Use this link to make sure you have your free membership in the community

Matt Perryman