The Discipline to Do Less

The topic of discipline usually comes up in conversations about physical fitness in the context of needing to do the work. You need to develop the discipline to do your workouts every week. You need to develop the discipline to eat a healthy diet. You need to develop the discipline to get enough sleep. But there's another side to discipline as it pertains to physical fitness. You need the discipline to do less.

This will likely sound crazy to anybody who doesn't workout regularly. Why would anybody need discipline to do less, they are likely to wonder. The fact of the matter is exercise becomes addictive once you get into the habit of doing it regularly. This isn't surprisingly since strength training, like running and other forms of physical exercises, releases endorphins. But I don't think you can fully understand this until you experience it. Suffice to say that once you regularly workout, you want to workout more.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Exercise is definitely an example of this. Your body requires two things to grow: stimulus and time to adapt. Exercise is the stimulus. Recovery is the time to adapt. If you exercise too much, your body doesn't have the necessary time to recover. The sinister thing about this is that it doesn't happen immediately. It often takes a few weeks before you feel the effects of too much exercise. When you do feel the effects, it's often in the form of an injury.

I recently finished going through a modified version (I replaced the overhead presses and front squat days with clean and jerk days) of phase one of Geoff Neupert's Maximorum program. It's a deceptive program. The first few weeks look fairly reasonable. This has lead a lot of people on various kettlebell forums to ask what they should add to the program. I've run through this program as written. I can tell you that you shouldn't add anything to it. The reason is cumulative fatigue. While the program is pretty reasonable for the first two or three weeks, the cumulative fatigue plus the more challenging sets makes the tail end of the first six weeks brutal. Then there are six more weeks after that.

Maximorum isn't the only program like this. I've seen people ask what they can add to Pavel Tsatsouline's Rite of Passage, Dan John's Armor Building Formula, and most other popular kettlebell programs. Rite of Passage includes an optional variety day. It's meant to be a day where you practice movements, do mobility work, and other low impact things. People often turn it into a full blown lifting day and it bites them in the ass. Turning the variety day into a full blown lifting day invites cumulative fatigue to the show up and before you know it cumulative fatigue brings its good friend injury.

Any off days are a great opportunity to do too much. Depending on my schedule, I run either a three or four days a week kettlebell program. Two days a week I do two different martial arts. One art is a form of kenjutsu and the other is a form of iaido. Both are much lower in intensity than combat sports like judo, boxing, or Brazilian jujitsu. This allows me to use them as active recovery days. That leaves me with one or two free days. I admit that I have a problem with filling that day or two with extra work that I shouldn't be doing. It takes real discipline for me to leave those as recovery days where I do, at most, light to moderate cardio. It's too easy to do a "light" lifting session on those days. Those sessions might seem easy, but they interfere with my recovery from my actual lifting days by adding to the cumulative fatigue. Whenever I give into that urge, I end up regretting it after a week or two.

Developing the discipline to regularly exercise is important. Once you're regularly exercising, developing the discipline to not do too much is equally important.