Learning To Hold Back
Takeaway Points:
Most people believe that the real struggle is in motivating people to put in hard effort - I find from experience, that often it is the exact opposite.
Many people struggle to hold themselves back, want to push themselves too hard, and as a result, suffer from suboptimal results and burnout.
Learning to hold back and pick your battles, is an important skill in long term success in fitness and self-improvement efforts.
Learning to hold back is one of the most important skills to master, but absolutely one of the hardest to master as well.
We all want to be the best. While some people will get easily discouraged by the tough parts of learning a new skill or talent, most people who are moderately skilled would probably prefer to be the best - the best lifter, the best worker, the smartest, the most skilled or famous, the best paid. Obviously, we would prefer if life handed us everything on a silver platter.
But the reality is that life is a struggle. We always have to work to achieve the things that we want, and it’s the process of working that imbues these goals with value. If we didn’t have to work hard for them, we would get bored pretty quickly and move on.
I’ve written before about how hard work shouldn’t be the goal - consistent, appropriately challenging work with plenty of time to recover and relax is far more productive in the long term than simply working hard. Hard work is detrimental both to your health and to your long term productivity, and creating a culture of hard work will always backfire in the long run. I’ve also written about how science backs up the fact that periodic breaks from both our diet and our exercise are actually superior in the long run.
Likewise, more recent research has shown that training to complete failure is likely to be detrimental to long term muscle growth, even though we tend to associate it with more growth simply because it is so difficult. The reality is that all that difficulty is excessively fatiguing, that it takes longer to recover from, and that it doesn’t actually produce superior results compared to simply holding back a bit and aiming for a more sustainable level of challenge.
Accumulating unused vacation days, working after hours, and putting in extra time have always been seen as signs of a good worker. I think instead that we should accept that a good worker is one who uses their vacation days, takes true time off, and prioritizes their recovery periodically.
Of course, no one wants to do that. A common complaint a lot of exercisers make before hurting themselves is that they should have known better - their bodies were given them clear pain signals, but they continued to train anyway. While I can’t make every over-worker and over-exerciser in the world suddenly change their ways, I can continue to tell my readers to take a dang break every now and then. This advice probably won’t reach the ears of the people who need it the most, but if it helps even one person avoid one stupid injury, it’s probably worth saying again.
As I’ve gotten older, learning to take more breaks is a skill that has been tough to learn, but one that has been more and more important for me - both in my own training and personal self-improvement pursuits and in helping my clients.
Commonly, it’s believed that one of the reasons that beginner lifters aren’t able to progress is simply because they aren’t working hard enough, and aren’t able to push themselves the same way that more dedicated lifters do. While there’s some kernel of truth in this argument, I find that it’s very different from person to person.
Some people really do struggle to put in the effort, to complete their workouts, to push themselves, and so on. But a far more common problem that I’ve found, is that other people simply go all-out, push themselves way too hard, expect immediate or short-term results, and then get frustrated and burn out before long-term results can begin to materialize. For these super all-or-nothing aggressive types, the goal that they need to learn is not how to push themselves, but instead how to hold themselves back. This is a tough lesson to learn, and doesn’t happen overnight.
I’m absolutely one of those people who needed to learn how to hold myself back. I used to train for 3-4 hours a day on some days, mixing together way too much exercise and way too many different styles of training, because I didn’t have any sense of nuance. I believed that all that mattered was that I put in a ton of time. At the time, I was training to gain muscle mass - and then I was shocked to discover that I was actually losing muscle mass because I was training way too hard and not eating enough calories, causing me to lose weight.
This has also been a problem for me in the development of my business. Throughout the period of time that I’ve been blogging and coaching, I’ve gone through many phases of stagnation in my business simply because I’ve always tried to do everything myself. I’ve tried to take on too much responsibility, and made myself the sole person putting effort into the business. As a result, I’ve never been able to take a lot of next steps to level it up further, simply because I’m too busy managing clients and keeping up with the day-to-day running of the website to actually get started on other major projects.
As a result of overworking myself, I’ve also gotten into phases where I’ve had a very effort-oriented mindset - chasing down difficulty sometimes for the sake of difficulty, looking for new challenges rather than actually looking for the things that will drive my progress forward. Learning to separate difficulty and long term effort, and to find the right balance, is very difficult.
I can attest that it’s something that I’m still working on, constantly. Some months I look back on the past month and realize that I felt burnt out that month, and other months I realized I didn’t do enough. But that back and forth, that up and down, is part of the process. There’s a time for pushing and a time for holding back. There’s a time for more and a time for less. You may not always be able to predict how it will go, or follow the trends perfectly, but if you pay attention and have a bit of mindfulness, you’ll definitely go a lot further than if you just barrel ahead without paying any attention.
Our lives are a confusing jumble of 10 or 15 things that we have to carefully juggle in order to get the best results. I can’t dictate for you how to manage it yourself, and I’m still learning how to manage it in my own life.
All I can say is - if you’re not thinking about mastering the skill of holding back, you should be.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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