The Reframe, Issue 03: Hard Work is not Blind Intensity
Most of us came up believing that hard work is the answer. I did. A lot of us grew up in gyms where the workout that left you on the floor was the one that was the ‘most effective’, and the story we told ourselves was that it carried over to better fitness. Do hard things in here and you get harder out there. At work, at home, as a parent, etc. That instinct is not wrong. Hard things do teach, and the coaches who protect clients from anything uncomfortable end up contributing to their fragility. I believe this strongly enough that James and I disagreed on the show about how far to take it. He was careful to say challenging, not suffering. I went the other way. I think bouts of suffering are good for people (not the on the floor, can’t move tomorrow kind, the kind where the thing takes every bit of you). I would like to reframe this one a bit though, because “hard” has been covering for a lot of things that are not hard work at all.
Hard work teaches. Blind intensity just takes. And past a point, even the good kind stops paying and leads to diminishing returns.
You get good at whatever you practice. James put it in a way I keep coming back to: “if someone, you know, metaphorically tries to get really good at unsustainable work, what are you doing in that practice? you’re learning how to be unsustainable.”
That is the difference. Hard work has an intent and a dose. Blind intensity has a feeling. James’s example of what hard work actually teaches was almost boring. “You couldn’t do a dip. Now, you could do a dip after 6 weeks.” The lesson is not the dip. No one cares that you can now do a dip, but the cool thing is that you learned how to challenge yourself.
Now compare that to the session most of us have written (I have). A bunch of intervals, all out. The client gets worse every round, crawls out the door, and texts you that it was brutal like it’s a compliment. What did that teach them? How to fall apart and call it effort. James was blunt about the generic 20 minute AMRAP: “One out of a hundred people will learn how to become more resilient from that physical action that you prescribed. 1%.”
Here is the diminishing returns piece, the part most of us skip. The first hard piece of the week teaches a lot. The second teaches less. Somewhere after that you are not building anything, you are borrowing, and the debt shows up somewhere else. Sleep gets worse. Hunger gets weird. The client is short with their kids.
James knows that better than anyone. The guy won the CrossFit Games, and on the show he said this about chasing the dose: “I know how to speak to this because I was addicted to it, right? And I did it, you know, reflecting, oh, this is sport, this is sport. And then going back to being a dad and being like, oh my gosh, like that’s not good, right? I don’t feel good.” If it followed a champion home, it’s following your client home too.
I said it on the show a few weeks later: hard hard hard doesn’t always equal more resilience over time. It can break you down and make you drastically less resilient.
Where it fits: program design, then the check in. When you write a hard piece, write next to it what it is supposed to teach. If you can’t fill in that line, it’s intensity, not hard work. For most clients I still start with one piece of tough aerobic work a week, held against at least 2:1 easy to hard. Then watch the scores across the rounds. If they fall off a cliff every time, the session is too much for this person, today.
At the check in, stop asking how hard it was. Ask what they learned they could do.
The cost is real. Some clients come to you for the beat down, and they will tell you the program got soft. A few might leave for the gym down the street with the louder music. Let them. The ones who stay will still be doing hard things twenty years from now, which is the whole point.
Try: open one client’s program for this week. Next to every piece you would call hard, write one sentence on what it is teaching them. Anything you can’t write a sentence for, cut it or change it. Then after their hardest session, ask what they learned they could do.
Do hard things on purpose. Then stop before they stop teaching.
This came out of a run of conversations with James on Frameworks, starting with Episode 40. Facts & Fallacies of Fitness
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