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Driving the road to your fitness goals is a long and arduous haul that requires exceptional patience, unwavering discipline, and an unrelenting spirit.
It becomes easy along the way to battle occasional periods where you lack the motivation and drive to get yourself moving and feel as though you have exhausted yourself physically and mentally in your efforts to improve.
In the gym, you repeatedly break down your body to be able to return the next session stronger than before.
This process can wear down on you.
We’ve all felt it after a hard session, your muscles are sore, your body aches and you begin questioning why it is that you’re dedicating all of this time, energy, and effort toward something that brings back such slow returns.
Your fitness, in this way, is like putting an investment in the stock market of YOURSELF.
The gains and return-on-investment (ROI) is slow… but, compounding.
But, let me re-assure you, no amount of time is ever wasted in the gym. Either it’s a half-assed 15 minute workout you squeeze in after a long work-shift, or you’re in the gym with no time-constraints crushing it for a full hour-and-a-half performing at your best.
When you’re in the gym and the effort is being put into improving yourself, then you’re winning in any capacity that you are showing up on that particular day.
In my experience, there are definitive steps to take when you reach burn-out:
- Take an honest look at and audit of your routine
- Make edits in accordance to contributing life stressors
- Add variety/novelty and give yourself a fresh, new look
Let’s dive into these points, so that you can come away with a strategic way to push past burn-out and get back into a groove of feeling invigorated to continue onward towards the ultimate and end-destination of pursuing your fitness, a greater you.
Take an audit 📝
Occasionally, you need to view your program objectively. How many days a week do you train and is this a sustainable for you? Or, do you need to tweak the frequency…
For some, training in the gym 5 days/week isn’t realistic.
You may need to examine and take a magnifying lens and fine-tooth comb to how your routine is structured to assess if it is the primary cause of what’s leading you to feeling burn-out. And then, from there, take the necessary steps to rehab it.
Make edits ✂️
Now is when you can pull out the red marker (so to speak) and begin to cross out the parts of your routine that may be less beneficial and can be lost or tweaked to better suit your progress, while also supporting sustainability.
Considerations for the editing process might involve condensing workouts into less, but more powerful and directed work. This could be as simple as eliminating junk volume (or added sets that contribute little to progress) and focusing on the bigger rocks.
For example, doing away with all the bicep curls and focusing on a few key lifts.
Add novelty/variation ☝️
There are one-billion different ways that you can change a workout session to be able to bring a different feel into the workout, introduce new excitement into your training, and keep yourself engaged in the process of getting to your goals.
Routinely changing the accessory work, re-assessing and plotting new training objectives, while checking-in with where you are at currently and where you wish to go.
This is the process that we use in the work that I do with my online coaching clients at regular intervals throughout our program to keep things always feeling fresh.
Getting through burn-out is inevitable if you plan to make this fitness thing a lifestyle.
The process above will make it so that you can mitigate it’s impact on your ability to get all of the amazing benefits of regular strength-based exercise, while keeping you from smoldering at the expense of a regimen that demands too much of your mind and body.
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