How Hard Do You Actually Need to Workout?

In fitness, it doesn’t take much work to get the needle moving.

If the point of exercise is to apply stress to your body that gives it a reason to adapt and come back stronger or fitter…

Then it doesn’t take much to get the needle to move its first few ticks because, when you’re just getting started, anything you do is going to be more than what you’ve been doing. 

No individual workout, no matter how intense, is going to get you in shape on its own.

You can’t show up to the gym for a 36-hour marathon workout and walk out with six-pack abs. It doesn’t work that way.

It’s more like brushing your teeth. You have to do it every day, consistently, for a long period of time, before you get to see the benefits. 

Going balls to the wall and getting so sore that you can’t get off the toilet isn’t going to move the needle any faster.

Plus it makes it far more likely that you’re going to start skipping workouts early on in the process when, at this point, the most important muscle you’re building is the habit of actually showing up.

So if you’re struggling to get started, or you’re intimidated by how hard the workouts will be, or how sore you will be…

Realize that building the habit of going to the gym is far more important at this stage than what you actually do during the workout itself.

Until you’ve built the habit of consistency, and developed the discipline to show up even when you’re busy or you don’t feel like it, the best workout in the world is worthless. 

Start as easy as you need to. Make it so easy that any excuse you could come up with about not going is laughable. Just focus on getting to the gym, being deliberate about practicing good technique, and keeping track of what you do while you are there.

Then the next time you work out, add a couple of reps, lift 5 more pounds, do a bigger range of motion, or improve your technique… Just make sure you’re improving in some small way from the workout before. 

If you do this week after week, the difficulty will add up as you go, and by the time your workouts are hard enough that you’re intimidated by them again, you will have been building your discipline muscle the whole time.

This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Nate Birner

Featured Image by Pexels from Pixabay

About the Author

Nate is the author of God's Fingerprint on Fitness and owner of Fit Goal Culture, a private strength training gym in Cedar Park, TX. He hopes to motivate and empower people to practically apply Biblical principles in a way that keeps them moving closer to whom God intended them to be.

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