How to Push Yourself the Right Way
You probably think you know how to give it your all when you work out. But are you doing enough, pushing too hard or doing too little?
Are you making progress, or just making yourself tired?
First, know that training hard is a requirement for improving your skills and reaching your movement goals. That said, life will not allow you, or me, or anyone, to train with maximum intensity every single day or time. And “hard” is a relative thing.
To illustrate this, let’s break things down into three days and no matter what, your day will fall into one of these categories:
Amazing Days (10% of your time)
Good Enough Days (80-90% of your time)
Not Gonna Happen Days (10-20% of your time)
AMAZING DAYS (10%)
You wake up feeling refreshed, possibly without an alarm. Today is going to be great! Everything falls into place; you have plenty of time to get your to-do list done, and training is 100% happening. Push yourself and aim for new heights on these days. It could be doing more reps, trying a harder variation or increasing your volume.
As it goes, most people have these days about 10% of the time. You might experience them more if you have less stress and your schedule is fairly relaxed, but most people aren’t going to have amazing training days every time they work out. That’s okay. Expected, even!
GOOD ENOUGH DAYS (80-90%)
This is where the majority of your days are going to fall. The good news? It’s the same for everyone, even the most advanced and successful athletes. On these days where you’re physically and mentally able to train, but you might not actually feel like it.
This is common, of course. We don’t always feel like brushing our teeth, or cooking for ourselves, but you do it because that’s what adults do.
The same goes with training. We urge you to step up, start your workout and get into the groove. You can call it quits if it doesn’t feel right, but start. Chances are starting is all you need and you’ll end up having a decent workout.
Most everyone lives in this area and yet, it’s where the magic happens. No one makes progress by only training on the Amazing Days. You make strides by doing the work, even when you don’t feel like it, or your performance isn’t as good as it has been. Learn to embrace it.
NOT GONNA HAPPEN DAYS (10-20%)
These are the days that training is an absolute no-go. They tend to be where our schedules are too full, we have work deadlines or other priority obligations. These could be days that you don’t feel good or something’s come up at the last minute that makes training impossible.
If you are careful with your planning, you can often know these days in advance (aside from waking up sick). This way you can schedule your workouts around them. It's totally fine because you need days off, too.
However, just because you can’t have dedicated training time on these days, you could still spend 5-10 minutes working on your mobility, walking the dog or doing yoga on YouTube, such as Yoga with Adriene.
