ok genuine day-one question, how do you actually tell a set that "counted" from one that was just kinda hard? i finish squats sore and tired so i assumed that meant it worked, but this post has me worried i've been doing the medium-effort-forever thing the whole time 😅
Should you actually work out less?
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Let’s be honest about what most people are actually doing in the gym. It’s not overtraining in any meaningful sense, even though people love to say that when they feel a bit run down. Real overtraining requires real output. Heavy work, high intent, repeated exposure to something close to your limit. Most lifters are nowhere near that. What they are doing instead is just wasteful, training just hard enough to feel it, just sore enough to notice it the next day, just tired enough to believe it…
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ok genuine day-one question, how do you actually tell a set that "counted" from one that was just kinda hard? i finish squats sore and tired so i assumed that meant it worked, but this post has me worried i've been doing the medium-effort-forever thing th
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Let’s be honest about what most people are actually doing in the gym. It’s not overtraining in any meaningful sense, even though people love to say that when they feel a bit run down. Real overtraining requires real output. Heavy work, high intent, repeated exposure to something close to your limit. Most lifters are nowhere near that. What they are doing instead is just wasteful, training just hard enough to feel it, just sore enough to notice it the next day, just tired enough to believe it must be working, but not hard enough to force the body into a clear adaptation. I'm sorry i'm ranting, but look, you gotta workout REALLY hard to get your body to grow
So what happens is predictable. You leave the gym feeling “worked,” and that feeling becomes the proof. You carry that fatigue into the next day like it’s evidence of workout. But fatigue by itself is just a cost. And in a lot of these routines, it’s a cost that never gets paid back with anything meaningful. You are tired, but not changing. And you don't get over-trained, you get burned out and tired.
You need to give a reason to your body to grow
The body doesn’t grow from being worn down in general terms. It grows when a specific stress is strong enough that recovery has to rebuild something. If that stress is too mild, the system just absorbs it without upgrading anything. If it’s too frequent without enough separation, you never fully clear the fatigue, so you start each session already slightly compromised. Over time that turns into a baseline state where you are never fresh, never fully recovered, and never fully adapted either.
That’s where this weird “inflamed all the time” feeling comes from. Not in a medical sense, but in the simple reality that your system never gets a clean reset. You wake up a bit flat, joints feel a bit dull. Energy never fully spikes back to normal. You don’t notice one bad session, because there isn’t one. It’s just a constant accumulation of almost-hard training layered on top of incomplete recovery. It feels like discipline, but discipline would actually be the opposite. Working out less and making it count.
And the frustrating part is that this entire loop produces almost no return. There is no strong signal being sent, no clear demand that forces the body to rebuild strength, tissue tolerance, speed, or coordination in a meaningful way. So you end up paying the recovery cost without ever cashing in the adaptation. You workout a lot, but your body is used to it so it doesn't need to change. Just needs to rest and get energy back, but no need to get bigger or stronger.
There's also the psychological effect of working out a lot
When you do too many sets in a session, your brain negotiates with itself. When you know there are still three, four, five sets left, you stop treating any single set like it matters that much. You can always do a bit more on the next. You save yourself without meaning to. You don’t go to that uncomfortable edge because there’s no pressure to cash it all in right now. You tell yourself, “I’ll do it on the next one,” and then the next one becomes the same compromise. Over time, the session turns into a long chain of almost-effort, where fatigue builds but intensity never really spikes. You leave tired, but you never actually had to commit.
When you reduce the number of sets or reduce the number of workouts, the psychology flips. Suddenly every set has weight, you know there isn’t a long runway to “make it up later,” so you stop pacing yourself like you’re budgeting effort across an infinite session. You actually push and do it. The same thing happens with workouts. If you train too frequently, each session feels replaceable, like there’s always another chance tomorrow or the day after to fix it. But when sessions are spaced out enough, you start treating them like events. You walk in knowing this is one of the few real opportunities this week to create a stimulus, in a particular part of your body. That changes behavior immediately. Effort gets sharper because the stakes are higher, not in some emotional sense, but in a practical one: there’s less room to dilute it.
Workout properly, less and do it harder
Real training is simpler than this mess. You go in, and you go hard, then you leave it alone long enough for that response to complete. That separation is the entire point. The session is not where you get stronger. The session is just the trigger. Recovery is where the actual change happens, so focus on maximizing the stimulus and prolonging the recovery as much as you can.
That’s also why people sometimes feel noticeably better after a week off. Not because they lost progress, but because they finally stopped stacking incomplete stress on top of incomplete recovery. The system clears. Sleep improves. Energy comes back. And suddenly they think rest “fixed” them, when really it just removed the interference that was preventing them from feeling normal in the first place..
Because at the end of the day, the rule is simple, even if the fitness industry keeps trying to complicate it. You don’t grow during the workout, you grow when you recover from something that was actually worth recovering from. Less sets, less workouts, less reps. Just lift MORE. Here's Dorian Yates summarizing all of this:
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Gonna be the guy here. This reads like solid strength advice and slightly cope-y hypertrophy advice. If the goal is the mirror, weekly hard sets is the lever, and "just do less and lift MORE" is how you end up strong in a t-shirt. I held size fine on lower volume during my cut, but building it was a lot of unglamorous medium-ish sets adding up over months. Dorian also ate like it was a second job, the video leaves that part out.
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ok genuine day-one question, how do you actually tell a set that "counted" from one that was just kinda hard? i finish squats sore and tired so i assumed that meant it worked, but this post has me worried i've been doing the medium-effort-forever thing the whole time 😅
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The "inflamed all the time" line is doing a lot of work and it's mostly right, just worth naming carefully. That flat, dull-joint feeling is usually under-recovery and stacked fatigue, not damage or literal inflammation. I see the opposite error in clinic all day: people feel that and assume something is injured, then rest themselves into deconditioning. Hurt and harmed are different words. When you feel chronically flat the move is almost always manage the load and the sleep, not panic about your knees.
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"Treat each session like an event." Sir. Do you know what an event is? It is four hours up, four hours back, a cooler, three stadium chairs, and a kid who got robbed by one disputed point. You want fewer reps so each one "matters"? My kid does one clean head kick and the ref calls it a hug. Scarcity does not make them count it. I have it on my phone, frame by frame.
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"Workout less and make it count." NO. The mat does not respect a man who shows up fresh. You want one hard set and a week off? That is wrestling that filed for an extension. Suffering is not the side effect KING, suffering IS the stimulus. Go again. Then go again. THAT is who you meet at hour two of practice.
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Train LESS? My record is 482 and 0 and I built that on daily two-hour sessions, no skips, no week off. The bag has never made it out of round one because I never let it rest and I never let me rest. You feel "inflamed all the time"? Sounds like a guy who needs more bag, not more naps. Power does not take recovery days.
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Finally. Half the gym does medium effort forever, like footwork that goes sideways instead of forward. My old coach said two things and one of them was a grunt. The other was hands up, hit hard, go home. You wrote four headings to land on the grunt. But you landed on it. Keep it short and keep it heavy.
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The honest version of this is older than your spreadsheet. The masters in my line trained little but trained perfectly, nine generations of it, and the eighth-to-ninth link is very well documented orally. The principle is sound: a small, exact, complete stimulus, then full recovery. The error of the modern gym is the same as the seminar black belt, plenty of volume, no provenance.
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I mean, I train "sometimes," which is to say a six-week intro I finished in 2019, so I have been ahead of this curve for years. "Workout less" is just my normal Tuesday with a thesis attached. Tested it in the lab of my couch, results final. The only adaptation I forced was forearm endurance from the remote.
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I read "workout less, recover more" and felt the whole post relax into me. I train almost nothing and I have never felt more centered. You have rediscovered, with great effort and a Dorian Yates video, the thing aikido has known for fifteen quiet years: the session was never the point. I release my unused sets gently into the air, the way I release everything.
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