Getting Started #8: What to Do When Training Gets HARD

You’ve heard it before. A good training program is simple, hard, and effective. But what does hard mean exactly?

Most novices have never done anything physically hard in their life — especially physical tasks that require maximal amounts of force production. So they must learn what hard means, in the context of strength training. The first encounter with hard often comes as a shock. With practice, determination, and encouragement from a good coach or training partner, however, a novice lifter can learn to overcome, set PRs, and become a lifter for life.

Key Takeaways

Learning to grind. Late in linear progression, the weights get heavy enough that reps slow down. Matt and Scott describe a 40-year-old client squatting around 275 who needed to learn to fight through slow reps instead of giving up on them.

Not every rep should be a grind. Grinding every work set for the rest of your life will beat you up until you can’t recover or progress. But there’s a phase, toward the end of LP, when learning to grind is necessary.

The five-second rule. A heavy deadlift might take a few seconds to break off the floor. Matt asks for five full seconds of effort before you give up, and he often counts down out loud: 5, 4, 3, 2. Most lifters finish the rep by 3 or 2.

Use video to check your effort. Watch the bar speed. The way a rep felt and the way it looked are often very different. Plenty of reps that feel crushing move smoothly on video.

Get a cheering section. A coach or training partner can recalibrate what you think you’re capable of, and even experienced lifters ask for a countdown. Matt compares getting through the hard part of training to getting through the hard part of a relationship: the first time it gets hard, you decide whether to stick with it.

Related: how to stay motivated to exercise, what to do when your beginner program stops working, the best beginner barbell program.

Want a smarter path past the novice phase? See how Barbell Logic online coaching works.