What Keeps You Training? – Beast Over Burden

What Keeps You Training?

Why continue to lift, run, track macros after you’ve hit your goal? How do Andrew and Niki find motivation after decades training?

It different from person to person, but over time the process of working out and doing hard things becomes a habit and something you derive joy from.

This doesn’t mean you’re feeling pleasure every second of training, but you your enjoy the process and the results and you identify as someone who trains. As Arnold says, it’s like brushing your teeth: you just do it every day.

You don’t stop because the PRs are gone – there are no toothbrushing PRs.

There is some interplay of discipline and motivation. Motivation waxes and wanes. The discipline needed to continue should (generally) go down. This isn’t the case when you hit those rough patches and you have to really dig down and think about what you want out of training.

Training Motivation

Andrew mentions the fear of soreness from squatting after a week without squats (those who know, know). Try not squatting for a week and then come back and squat and see how you feel the next day.

More importantly, Andrew talks about how he feels terrible after a few days without exercising. You grow used to the habit, to the point where not training leads to you feeling bad.

This applies to nutrition too. If you eat consistently healthy over a long period, you will feel bad eating large doses of processed foods.

Niki enjoys being a superjacked women and identifying as that.

As Niki has been unable to set 1RM PRs on the squat and deadlift like she used to enjoy doing, she had to look toward the tonnage going up. Beyond that, though, seeking hard workouts has helped.

While a hard workout does not equal a training plan, training has to be hard for progress. You can take this idea too far, but our tagline is simple, hard, effective for a reason.

So, what keeps you training?