by Michael Plank
We’re wrapping up 2024 and people are already thinking about goals for 2025. In our world, that means we hear people talk about getting leaner, stronger, faster, healthier… all the stuff that people come to gyms to do.
Most everyone we work with has seen the nearly unbelievable benefits of going from not working out to working out consistently even just twice a week. So if some is good, more is better, right?
And it’s easy to think that if you’re a) not getting the results you want, or b) you want new results, or c) you want those results to come faster, that you need to be working out more.
So people ask us that all the time: “should I be working out more?”
The answer to that question is nearly always: maybe.
Here are some of the follow-up questions I ask…
- Do you look the way you want to look, or are you moving in that direction?
- Do you feel the way you want to feel (especially mood, sleep, and energy), or are you moving in that direction?
- Do you perform the way you want to perform (especially with workout weights and times), or are you moving in that direction?
- When you get a blood panel done, is your doctor happy, or are things moving in the right direction?
- Are you happy with how you spend your time and energy in your life?
If the answer to all those questions is “yes,” then ignore every influencer you see online and 100% do NOT train more. You’ve got it figured out.
But generally, if someone asks if they need to train more, the answer to at least one of those questions is no. In which case, do they need to train more?
Maybe. For the majority of goals that working adults have, we generally see the best results with 3-4 days per week. So if you’re working with us, and you’re training less than that, probably bumping up and adding a day or two each week is a good move.
But after that, when we hear that question from people, we’ll ask how they’re doing with their nutrition. If that’s not in a good place, then let’s start working on it (coaching is a huge help here). Then, we’ll check in on sleep. It’s nearly unbelievably impactful with nearly any physical goal you can imagine (in fact, there’s more research all the time suggesting that it’s nearly as impactful as nutrition!). Then, we’ll look at stress management and recovery, both from psychological/emotional and physical stress.
If one or more of those things aren’t going great, that’s probably the next place to focus.
And if that seems like an overwhelming amount of things to keep track of and work on, I get it! That’s why we have coaches (and in fact, all of us on the coaching team also get coaching for ourselves). They can help you prioritize where to focus next and how best to spend your time to get where you want to be.
But the point here is that exercise is awesome and the first place people look to get good results. I love that. But just remember that there are other things at play too.
And more is not better. Better is better.