What Lifters Can Learn from Smart Sex

By: Nick Soleyn, Editor-in-Chief and Barbell Logic Coach

Workout motivation is a nearly inexhaustible fount of inspiration for online content and the muse for countless influencers, coaches, gyms, and advertising agencies. It is not hard to see why. Working out is hard, exercise takes time, and training takes commitment and consistency. Under all of that is a quieter force pulling us away from something undeniably beneficial: the feeling that working out is selfish.

We treat lifting weights, going to the gym, and buying exercise equipment as things that take us away from our responsibilities. Training is “me time” in a culture that values busyness and productivity, relegating pleasure to the interstitial spaces between working, sleeping, and caring for others. Even for those of us who value training as a critical part of a healthy lifestyle, it can become opportunistic and reactive: we do it when we can and because we believe we have to, making training a lot like eating vegetables—find what pleasure you can, but it would not be your first choice when you are craving something enjoyable.

Dr. Emily Morse, author of Smart Sex: How to Boost Your Sex IQ and Own Your Pleasure, opens her book by tackling the societal and cultural views on pleasure in general. She has said,

“We shame ourselves for pleasure. One major cultural taboo around pleasure is that pleasure is something that you only deserve as a reward, that if you don’t finish everything on your to-do list, you shouldn’t necessarily have pleasure.”[1]

You may have felt this taboo as soon as you read the title of this article. Dr. Morse describes sexual wellness as connected to our physical, emotional, mental, and social lives, even as we learn that sex is something we shouldn’t discuss out loud. I recently read Smart Sex because I was curious: How do people who don’t carry that stigma around sex talk about it? Throughout the book, I was struck by certain parallels between what we do as strength coaches and athletes and what Morse describes in pursuing pleasure as a goal, both in sex and in the rest of our lives.

What if, instead, training was part of a personal pursuit of pleasure? If you made it a goal to increase the overall pleasure in your life and gave yourself permission to do so as part of a fundamentally healthier lifestyle, would that make a difference in how you start to see training? We often do not realize how conditioned we are to neglect pleasure as something selfish, wrong, or even dangerous. This is perhaps nowhere more obvious than when we start to talk about one of the most pleasurable activities we have as humans: sex.

Give Pleasure a Place on the List

Morse begins her book with a foundation that extends far beyond her more narrow subject matter. Her five pillars of sexual intelligence—embodiment, health, collaboration, self-knowledge, and self-acceptance—deal a lot more with knowing yourself, taking care of your body, understanding why you do and feel the things you do, and learning to communicate with others.^[2] There is a good deal of self-learning before getting to the question of what to do with somebody else.

Pleasure, in this broader context, takes many forms and is something Morse advocates that we cultivate in our daily lives. She advises readers to find their “pleasure percentage” (the percentage of waking hours we spend doing things for pleasure). Her ideal target is to aim for roughly 25% or four hours per day of pleasurable activities, which can include anything that brings you joy—gardening, walking, watching a show, intimacy, or even training.^[3] Importantly, she cautions that we might mistake activities we do to avoid discomfort or numb certain feelings for pleasurable ones. Watching a show might indeed be pleasurable, but scrolling YouTube can also be a form of avoiding what’s going on around you in the moment. Part of identifying your pleasure percentage is tuning in to how you feel and learning to spot the difference. A lot may depend on how you treat those activities—your perspective and how you choose to engage them. Training is time we already spend with our bodies and could learn to enjoy more.

The point here is that enjoying our own lives can belong on the list of things we value.

And if pleasure for the sake of pleasure isn’t appealing to you, research links doing things you enjoy with benefits for both physical and emotional well-being. One study linked enjoyable leisure activities with lower blood pressure, better sleep, and greater satisfaction in general.[4] Perhaps unsurprisingly, another study found that people were happier and less stressed during leisure than during other parts of their day.[5] And a systematic review of twenty randomized controlled trials found that “savoring interventions significantly enhanced positive emotions and alleviated negative emotional symptoms.”[6] You can be the person doing all the work and meeting all the obligations and someone who pursues pleasure, joy, reduced stress, and a better understanding of yourself.

Find Pleasure in Training

“Pleasure is productive” is an oft-repeated quote in Morse’s book, and there certainly seems to be something to that. Research on motivation suggests that two people, doing the same activities, can have vastly different levels of motivation, depending on how much they enjoy the work. Anticipation, learning, and mastery can provide reasons to continue that a distant goal does not fully explain. Drawing on earlier research on Olympic swimmers, one paper describes athletes finding pleasure in the mundane details of practice and small improvements in how they perform.^[7] This argument may raise a useful question for us as lifters: What are the things within training that make us want to train again?

For me, squats are not one of those things, and while I appreciate the efficacy that heavy sets of five have, sometimes I really enjoy bodybuilding splits. For many clients, whether they enjoy training is often a big differentiating factor in their consistency. So, as a coach, one of my most common questions is “do you like your workouts?”

This does not mean we should only do the things we enjoy. Voluntary hardship is still important, and doing difficult things is still one of the crucial parts of being a well-adjusted adult. It does mean we can pay more attention to what we enjoy about those tasks. Sometimes just the familiar routine of warming up, zoning out, listening to good music, and managing something that is hard but doable is exactly what we want. Voluntary hardship does not become less voluntary or less useful because we find something to enjoy while doing it.

That enjoyment can actually improve your training. A 2010 journal article titled The Pursuit of Pleasure by John Britton argues that we might be better off “placing the personal pursuit of pleasure at the heart of training processes.”[8] Drawing on flow theory and his experience teaching performers, Britton argues that pursuing pleasure can lead trainees into more detailed and demanding engagement with their work. An exercise can remain interesting through increasingly subtle challenges, even when its basic form stays the same. His question to a trainee is “what did you like about it?”^[9] That question leaves room for a difficult or frustrating session to contain something worth returning to.

We don’t necessarily need to search for variety for the sake of variety. There is pleasure to be found in learning to do it well, feeling a technical correction take hold, or handling a weight with greater confidence. The difference might be how we as lifters see the movements. Do we focus on the challenging aspects? Or do we focus on what we love about them? Attention to those details gives repetition some texture.

To return to the vegetables example earlier: suppose you want to eat more fiber. You could identify the most joyless high-fiber meal you can tolerate and white-knuckle your way through it each day. You could also notice that you like berries with breakfast, beans in a soup, or vegetables roasted a particular way. Those preferences help you build meals that meet your nutrition goals and that you actually want to eat. There is no additional fiber in moral superiority.

Training deserves the same consideration. Someone who dreads a workout may dislike its length, feel anxious about a particular lift, or find the pace exhausting. Those are different experiences with different possible responses. The phrase “I need more discipline” tells a coach much less than an honest description of what happens during the session. There may be a useful change to make, or there may be something the lifter needs help understanding.

This is where Morse’s emphasis on self-knowledge and collaboration has a familiar ring. In her account, learning what feels good and being able to communicate it are part of improving an experience.^[10] Making room for those observations can give some much-needed insight into your training.

Notice What Discipline Lets You Avoid

Sometimes what feels good is actually the temporary absence of discomfort. Drinking to calm anxiety, scrolling to avoid social awkwardness, or using pornography for a quick dopamine hit can all be ways of numbing ourselves. The difference is in why we choose those things and what we felt in that moment of choosing. Paying attention to how you feel and why, even when the reasons are uncomfortable, is also part of this same practice. Learning your habits when you want to stop feeling is good data, too.

Avoiding unwanted feelings starts to limit our choices or displace things we value. Some forms are easy to recognize because they already carry a reputation for excess or distraction. Others look like being very good at doing what we are supposed to do.

Being serious can feel safer than admitting that we want to enjoy ourselves. In the journal article mentioned earlier, one trainee reported that, “I feel that if I enjoy something, I have not done it well.”[11] Similarly, a lifter might rather gut it out for another slog of a workout than tell her coach that the goals they set a year ago are no longer what she wants. “Strength is important” and “strength is hard” are truisms that keep many lifters feeling stuck in that way. Following every instruction can be easier than acknowledging anxiety or disappointment.

Taking some time to question your training can help. What do you want from it? What do you enjoy about it now? What have you assumed is necessary without exploring whether it could be different? The answers may lead to changes in your program, or they may help you appreciate a program that is serving you well.

There will still be workouts we would rather skip, and pursuing pleasure need not become another standard at which to fail. The opportunity is to give our experience some standing in the decisions we make about our bodies. We can choose demanding work and take pleasure in doing it. We can also admit when white-knuckling has become a habit that keeps us from looking more closely.

[1] Emily Morse, interview by Jess Cording, “Renowned Sex Therapist Emily Morse Wants You to Know: Pleasure Is Productive,” Forbes, June 13, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jesscording/2023/06/13/renowned-sex-therapist-emily-morse-wants-you-to-know-pleasure-is-productive/.

^[2] Emily Morse, Smart Sex: How to Boost Your Sex IQ and Own Your Pleasure (Park Row, 2023), chap. 1.

^[3] Emily Morse, interview by Clay Skipper, “The Secret to Productivity Is Pleasure, According to this Sex Expert,” GQ, September 28, 2023, https://www.gq.com/story/routine-excellence-emily-morse.

[4] Sarah D. Pressman et al., “Association of Enjoyable Leisure Activities with Psychological and Physical Well-Being,” Psychosomatic Medicine 71, no. 7 (2009): 728–30, https://doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0b013e3181ad7978.

[5] Matthew J. Zawadzki, Joshua M. Smyth, and Heather J. Costigan, “Real-Time Associations Between Engaging in Leisure and Daily Health and Well-Being,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine 49, no. 4 (2015): 605–15, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12160-015-9694-3

[6] Pei-Hsin Chen et al., “Effectiveness of Savoring Interventions: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials,” Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being 18, no. 2 (2026): e70134, https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.70134.

^[7] Seth Abrutyn, “Theorizing Affective Motivation: Motives, Seeking, and the Mundanity of Pleasure,” Sociological Theory 43, no. 2 (2025): 99–103, https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751251329755. The discussion of swimmers appears on pp. 101–2 and draws on Daniel F. Chambliss, “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers,” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989): 70–86, cited here through Abrutyn.

[8] John Britton, “The Pursuit of Pleasure,” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 1, no. 1 (2010): 36–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/19443920903432486.

^[9] Britton, “The Pursuit of Pleasure,” 48.

^[10] Morse, Smart Sex, chap. 1; Morse, “A Conversation with Sexual Wellness Expert Emily Morse.”

[11] Britton, “The Pursuit of Pleasure,” 36.