Training Should Feel like shit

By: Kyle Spears

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with athletes lately about not “feeling great” during training sessions. Whether it’s during a metcon, a lift, or the entire day in general, the dialogue usually starts with, “This is normal, especially at this point in your training cycle.”

In a work-capacity sport, sometimes the work just needs to get done. Intensity can be sacrificed depending on the day and the priorities of the training cycle, but volume is what truly matters. As our volume drops, so does our ability to retain fitness over a competition weekend and handle the density of workouts across multiple days.

While intensity matters and rep speed is important, it is ultimately the work and the accumulated volume that drive progress. Our bodies won’t always respond the way we want. You might feel terrible during one piece and then surprisingly strong during the next.

If you aren’t feeling beat up at some point in your training cycle, you probably aren’t training hard enough. Since the rise of Instagram, we’ve seen more and more athletes wanting to hurt less, avoid failure, and even skip training pieces because they didn’t feel like they were going to PR or crush the workout.

Social media is an ocean of highlight reels. (Side note: I also don’t condone posting failures. Your Instagram should be your personal highlight reel — a place you can return to for confidence and motivation heading into a competition.) We have to face reality: even the best athletes — including those with 100k followers — have off days in training. No one is perfect 100% of the time. Having a bad session, or even a bad portion of a session, is okay. It leads to growth. You don’t have to post about it. Feel the frustration if you need to, then move on quickly.

Sometimes we have to call a session early, but it’s always important to try the next piece and see what happens.

Volume is king in this sport. While intensity is important, you are rarely going to compete at 100% intensity over a three-day event. You must learn how to push hard without being able to give 100%. There are things you’re capable of when fresh that disappear under fatigue. Learning what your body can do in any given moment allows you to pace yourself effectively in a fatigued state. This can only be developed by training in a fatigued or less-than-optimal state. Learn how to give real effort when it’s hard, and you’ll become a strong competitor.

Rep speed is also very important, but volume comes first. If you’re able to hit a piece at the prescribed intensity, great. If not, you can always adjust it into an EMOM, reduce the density (which can actually increase the intensity), and still focus on moving with speed while accumulating the necessary volume. Changing elements of a session to complete the required work is not only acceptable — it’s smart. This is why we teach athletes to be their own coach. The better they understand their body, the better decisions they can make in the moment.

Training comes in ebbs and flows. Three weeks into a new training cycle, if you’re pushing correctly, you should feel like shit — tired, sore, and not ready to lift heavy or push high intensities. This is exactly why the classic “three weeks on, one week off” periodization model was created. Our bodies get run down and need structured breaks. While there are many strategies to manage fatigue, we still need those deloads.

There will be days — and even full weeks — inside those training blocks that don’t feel great. The goal is simply to accomplish what you can with the best effort possible on that given day. You might surprise yourself mid-session, or you might take a week of lighter work as an early deload, only to come back and crush your next progressions. The body is weird, life is chaotic, and consistent effort is often the only constant we can control.