Should you quit when it gets too hard?
Is it worth all the struggle? Whatever "it" is?
Every pursuit has a ceiling: a point where the amount of work put in greatly outweighs the progress made.
In the beginning stages of training for something—a skill, capacity, strength, etc—gains (aka progress), come quickly and easily. Sometimes there’s a learning curve that makes the thing more difficult to understand initially, but once you’re started, things get easier.
Those are what we call our young training years. Once you get “older” in training years (aka when you have more experience), progress is slower to come.
This can be attributed to declining interest, physical adaptation to training stimulus, or maybe some magic other thing we don’t understand. But mostly we make lots of progress at first, but then hit a wall that seems impassible.
Eventually we might overcome that plateau and make a small gain (ex: adding 5lbs to a lift after 6-12 months, or a tiny increase in time or range of a position), but nothing like the big gains we made in the beginning.
Often these plateaus are blamed on improper/ineffective training, lack of sufficient recovery, or (again) lack of motivation. So the prescription often ends up being “do more of the thing, better.”
But what about the average person?
Should they continually bash their head against the barrier of diminishing returns?
Should they train to become “elite” in any given pursuit?
My opinion:
No.
But they should try damn hard to get as close as possible.
There is a benefit in chasing a goal, but there is very little benefit in chasing being the very best in any given sport or practice unless you have the blessing of having the right genes to allow you to train hard enough, live in the right place to be competitive in your desired sport/pursuit, have access to the right coaching, and have the money and support to bankroll it all.
That’s not me telling you that you can’t do it, but instead that there must be a convening of factors to allow one the opportunity to compete/participate in a sport/pursuit at a high level.
It’s like how all actors who want to be on film end up in LA or stage actors in NYC.
Right place, right time (plus a healthy serving of luck).
And, of course, you have to want to do it. You might have all the right limb lengths to be a sprinter, but if you hate running, then who needs it?
There is a tendency in American culture to believe that we must be the best at anything we do. That it's not worth even pursuing if we can't be "the best." It's so pervasive that even if we don't think we need to be a champion, we still think we should be able to do, or train for the most extreme version of anything we try.
It can be exciting to watch YouTube videos and see people do inhuman things like lift incredibly heavy weights, hold gravity-defying positions, or run at supersonic speeds. We can admire those things and we can desire them as well.
But the reality is that you don't have to be the best to try something. You don't even have to be good. In fact, it's better if you suck at it. There's less pressure and you can have more fun.
And, at some point, a skill might not be worth pursuing anymore. It's okay to walk away from something that doesn't have value to us anymore. I'll use the handstand as an example: I've trained a lot of people to do handstands (myself included). The average person with little-to-no gymnastics experience can usually work up to a wall-supported handstand and, with some work, to a free-standing handstand from a kick up for a few seconds.
But to work up to a 60 second handstand, or a controlled press up to a handstand...that takes A LOT more work. Usually years, with multiple hours per day of training. For some people, that's fine: they have the time, the energy, and the desire to do it.
For most people, though, it's simply not worth it — 2-3 hours per day for 1-2 years to make a microscopic improvement in one aspect of the position? Not super motivating.
That doesn't mean the handstand isn't worth pursuing at all, but that there is a ceiling at which the amount of work one must put into the practice in order to progress far outweighs the visible progress.
There is value in working toward a skill: it's a measure of progress, it's physically, mentally, and emotionally challenging (hopefully in a positive way), and it leads to an outcome that generally makes us feel good about ourselves. And usually there's a cool trick you can show people and post on social media 😜.
It doesn't all have to be grinding work, though. You can have fun with moving your body. In fact, I'd say that's the primary goal: fun first, goals second. Big goals are cool, but so are little benchmarks that help us stack wins.
Moving our bodies doesn't have to be an onerous burden that we slog through to reach some far off goal. We already have enough of that in life. Movement can be something we do for fun, not just for a grand result.