Your workouts aren't hard enough

Or is it too much of one thing, and not enough of a mysterious other?

All exercise needs to be hard for it to be effective—but what does hard mean?

Bone-crushingly heavy weight?

Endless miles?

A rhabdo-inducing metcon?

Does tying a knot count as hard?

Hard can take many forms, but for simplicity’s sake, we can break down hard in exercise into two forms:

1. Tiring: what most people think of when they think about exercising—doing an activity until our body feels slowed, exhausted, and out of resources.

2. Challenging: when an exercise makes you ask “can I do this?” Activities like a difficult form of balancing, lifting a heavy weight, or climbing a challenging route.

Both forms of hard are good, but often the first type (tiring) gets conflated with the second (challenging).

Using lifting weights as an example: grabbing a weight and lifting it 10, 12, even 15 times is hard—your muscles burn, you feel sluggish, you feel like you couldn’t do another rep—but usually the first 5 to 8 or more don’t feel all that hard. Sure, they aren’t easy, but they’re not really challenging.

Challenging is a weight that makes you wonder if you could even get it off the ground.

Challenging makes you wonder if you could even jump that high.

Challenging makes you wonder if you could even hold that position for two seconds.

You’re probably asking yourself:

Tyler, why should I add more challenging to my workout when tiring is already really hard?

Well, brave reader, there’s a lot of tiring in exercise, and that’s good, but there’s not enough challenging.

Challenging is the bridge between what we can do right now and what we might be able to do in the future.

Add some challenging movements into your program and see how quickly challenging becomes manageable, and eventually becomes something that can be used as a tiring exercise.