For a long time, I believed in the idea that if it didn’t hurt, it didn’t work.
That mindset was reinforced during my years in the military. You get used to pushing through fatigue, soreness, and whatever else is in front of you. You don’t stop unless you absolutely must. Age adds into the factor as well. The mentality of “pain is weakness leaving the body” is doctored in at a young age and early career when I joined the Army back in 1996.
While there is value in that mindset when you absolutely need it to overcome fear or pain; it is not a mindset I would recommend using while doing workouts at the gym.
Not all pain leads to progress. In some cases, it just sets you back.
That’s something I had to learn through experience and it’s also the first thing I sit down with and explain to my potential clients. Soreness and pain are two very different things and it’s critical to understand the difference between the two.
When Pushing Too Hard Works Against You
During my training in the army we always turned training into competition and always pushed to beat the prior workout times.
I got pulled into that mindset too.
In the Army you train for war, you train to condition the body to do the absolute best you can do, and you find that you can push yourself far. However, those training days are not supposed to be every day, in the gym, on your own time. While running in combat gear training for a mission, I felt my foot starting to burn a bit. I knew the right thing to do is to stop, check my foot and make sure I was not injuring myself.
I kept going.
Finished my run, sat on the ground pulled off my combat boot and saw the results. A good portion of skin missing from my heel to the top of my ankle. That is training as a group pushing us to our limits. That is not something you want to do at the gym or on a personal training day.
Gym mentality is different and not meant to be as hard. You can definitely make gains in the gym with half that mentality and a quarter of that work. Work smarter, not harder.
How to Know If You’re on Track
You don’t need complicated systems to figure this out. You just need to pay attention.
Effort level is a good place to start. Most of your workouts should feel challenging, somewhere around a seven or eight out of ten. Not easy, but not all-out.
Your form is another indicator. If it starts to break down, that’s usually a sign you’re pushing past what’s productive. When your form suffers, you engage muscles that do not need to work resulting in more stress on your Central Nervous System and more fatigue feeling overall. Not gains, just fatigue.
One way to tell if you are overdoing it after an exercise is how you are breathing. Can you hold a conversation without stopping to take a breath? Are you breathing through your mouth and not your nose? If you are then you are near your peak ability to breathe. No sense in pushing past that. Peak is perfect. Beyond is like loading your PR on squat day without a warm-up hitting the bar and then getting mad because it took you longer than normal to get through the squat.
And then there’s consistency. If you can train week after week without constantly needing time off due to fatigue or injury, you’re likely in the right range. Listen to your body, its more important than you think.
A Better Approach
The goal isn’t to avoid effort. It’s to apply it the right way.
Train with a plan. Push yourself when it makes sense. Back off when you need to.
You don’t have to empty the tank every time.
What matters is that you keep making progress and stay consistent over time.
Final Thoughts
“No pain, no gain” isn’t completely wrong, but it’s often misunderstood.
Training should challenge you. It should push you out of your comfort zone.
But if you’re constantly pushing to the point where your body can’t recover, you’re not building anything long-term.The real skill is knowing the difference between productive effort and unnecessary strain.
Doug Robinson is a trainer at Merritt Clubs Canton.
