You're Probably Doing Too Much

When progress slows down or stops completely, almost everyone reaches for the same answer.

More.

More training days, more volume, more intensity.

And on some level, that makes sense, because it's what all of us have been taught and see all over social media. 

Work harder.

"Hard work pays off."

"Nobody cares, work harder."

"Go one more."

It gets drilled into you from every direction, and these days it's all over your feed, to the point where people genuinely believe doing more, or going harder, is always the answer.

But for a lot of people, it isn't. Especially if you're a middle-aged parent, with a job, a couple of young kids, and plenty of other stress already on your plate.

For someone like that, more is usually the worst thing you can do.

How your body responds to training comes down to a handful of things. Your program matters. Your progression matters. But recovery matters just as much, and honestly, probably more. And the thing people forget is that training is a form of stress. So is a stressful job. So is bad sleep. So is chasing two toddlers around all day. It's all stress, it all adds up, and it all eats into your ability to recover from your training.

So when your life is already stressful, and you pile high-intensity work on top of it, day after day, it's just not going to end well. You might get away with it for a few weeks, maybe even a few months. But eventually it catches up with you. You get hurt, or you burn out, and your progress slows down, stalls, or starts going backward.

And then what happens? You take a few days off. Or a few weeks. Or, for a lot of people, a few months. Then you come back, feel good for a while, ramp the intensity right back up, and run straight into the same wall. People repeat that cycle for years. Decades, even. Spinning their wheels the whole time and wondering why they never get stronger, or faster, or leaner, or accomplish any of their goals.

A big part of the problem is how people judge a workout. Most people measure a session by how it made them feel. The more it burned, the more it hurt, the more wrecked they were on the floor afterward, the better they figure it was, and the stronger or faster they assume it'll make them.

In almost every case, that's just not how it works.

The real secret, if you even want to call it that, is consistency. You have to put in the work, over and over, for a long time. And consistency does not mean the most you can possibly do or the hardest you can possibly go. It means what you can actually keep doing, week after week, month after month, and year after year, without breaking down.

That's the whole reason I got faster. I went from a 20:35 5k to a 16:56 over about two years, and I did it mostly by keeping my easy days genuinely easy and only going hard (more like moderate-hard) once or twice a week, not by trying to crush myself every session like I used to in my CrossFit days. I did less than I was capable of doing, but I did it consistently. And that's what really drives progress.

So if you're stuck right now, don't immediately go looking for something to add or somewhere to go harder. Take an honest look at what you're already doing, why you're doing it, and if it's working. If it's not, figure out why and make some changes. And those changes probably should be switching some of your hard work with some easy work.

Mike