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You're listening to Mondays with Matt. I'm Matt Reynolds, the founder and CEO of Barbellogic and Turnkey Coach. Each week I share lessons from decades of lifting, coaching and business to help you get stronger, coach better, and take action. Let's dive in. Happy Monday, everybody. It's Mondays with Matt. Glad you're here. First off, a little shout out, I was thinking today to original producer Trent, who wrote that music. For those of you guys that don't know, I love the song Bleeding Me by Metallica. It's sort of my PR song that I play. It's wonderful song off the Load album, which was one of the ones that they got. You know, everybody said they weren't hardcore enough anymore because they cut their hair. But that is a wonderful song. It crescendos really well for. For PR and so we couldn't use that because of copyright issues. So Trent wrote something that was a little bit different and gave us the intro. And so we're still using it all these years later. So thanks, producer Trent, original producer Trent. Today we're going to dive in. We're going to talk about voluntary hardship. If you've listened to me for some time, you know that this is a great passion of mine. So specifically voluntary hardship and training. Why comfort could very well be killing your gains. And you know me, I can't just talk about training. I'm going to talk about life. So we'll dive right in and talk about what voluntary hardship gets you. And I'll start with this. I've noticed over the years of coaching people, especially back when I coached at the gym, coached in person, clients, a lot of, say, middle age or older men and women, I just realized people just don't do hard anymore. And I don't think that's gotten better. Right. So I was doing that in the gym from like 2008 to 2015. And in today's world of all of the things that even I love, like GLP1s or all of the technology that we have now, AI whatnot, people will take these things that technology has given us, that life has given us, and they just do easy and easy is fine. Actually, I'm not anti easy. There are times when easy or efficient is fantastic. But if we never do hard, we're not refining ourselves for the thing that life is going to throw at us. And we don't know what that is. We don't know what the involuntary hardship is to come. And so I remember when I was a kid, I wasn't first off, I was Quite lazy. If you've listened to me for a while, you know this. When it came to work, my brother would say, like, if we went grocery shopping as a family, we went home, I would magically disappear to the bathroom until all of the groceries were unloaded. Not very proud of that. I was always shirking responsibilities. However, there was one place that I worked, and by the way, school came really easy to me, so I didn't have to work hard in school. So that wasn't very difficult. But the thing that I did have to work at was sports. And I started to recognize that the more I worked and the harder I worked, the more payoff I got. And certainly I got better and I would make starting teams, but also the coaches really liked me because of my work ethic. And so I started to realize that hard worked. And then when I became a senior in high school, I got into lifting. It just naturally made sense to me that lifting was gonna be hard. It was really hard. And I wasn't any good at it. And so certainly not in the beginning, I was pathetically weak. But I was so competitive, and I would see the guys around me as well as the competition with myself. And I knew that I had to do this thing that was hard to overcome it, but to sort of check that milestone off and go to the next thing. And so I was lucky that when I discovered strength training, I never really did the, you know, go to the big box gym and do the machines for three sets of 10. I didn't do that. I was. I recognized that it had to be hard because it was a high school football type gym. It was squats. I'm sure they were high. They weren't great form deadlifts, power cleans, bench press, some overhead press, stuff like that. And then of course, the. The curls for the girls, all that sort of fun stuff. But it was pretty hard work. And. And so I just learned that lesson. I didn't. I recognized that there was effectiveness in how hard it was that I had to push myself really hard before I really understood the concept of voluntary hardship at all. And so today we want to talk about why comfort is probably killing your gains, or maybe killing your gains. And if it's not and you're choosing voluntary hardship, I'd love to just talk about some of those things that we all love. So if you're here on the live stream, feel free to drop a comment. Some of the things that you choose to do that are hard, that bring you value in your life. I'd love to See those as well as any questions you have. Not just about voluntary hardship, certainly about voluntary hardship, but about anything else in strength, in life, in nutrition, lifting, any of those things. Happy to talk about it. Feel free to ask. We'll answer those in the second half of today's 30 minutes. And so if you are doing the gym, and it's easy, and by the way, I've said this before too, if you're not doing anything, I am not someone who's going to make fun of you. If all, you know to do is walk around the neighborhood with your spouse or your dog or whatever, that's fine. That's something. You're choosing a thing that's a little bit harder than what you were doing in the past, and that's great. But if you've been doing this for a while and you've been going to the gym, and you're one of those people that just go like, man, I know I should be squatting. Squats are just so brutally hard. They hurt. And it's not like injury hurt. They're just, gosh, you're hard. I'd rather just do the leg press and leg extension, leg curl that is robbing you of gains. And so you want to make sure that you're choosing hardship all of the time in the gym. And the gym is one of the best places to do it. It's relatively safe, and it's got a tremendous return on investment. Now why do we choose it? Well, when we choose voluntary hardship, it doesn't just have to be the gym. There's lots of things that can be done in the physical world. You can go out and work outside really hard, do a construction project. You can choose to run a half marathon. I would never do that. But if that's the kind of thing you want to do, that's voluntary hardship as well, any of those things. But it could also just be just stressful things. It could be having the hard conversation that you don't want to have. It's the cancer. Not literal cancer, but the thing that's eating away at you and your business and your family, having that hard talk with your kids, with your spouse, with a church member, whatever the thing is, choosing to do those things will much better refine you for when life throws involuntary hardship at us. So when the actual cancer comes, when there's a tragedy and someone dies in a car accident, God forbid, when you lose your job, when you lose your house, whatever the thing is, we are better prepared for that. And if you don't ever do Things that are hard, you're not prepared for them at all. So then when involuntary hardship comes, it just hits you like a ton of bricks and often crushes people. I was thinking about this today as I thought about the show today, that there have been quite a few involuntary hardship things that I've had to go through over the past 10 years. I'm not saying it's more hardship than anybody else has gone through, but it's a lot of hard stuff. And because I chose voluntary hardship, the thing we don't talk about very often is it's not just that it prepares you for the involuntary hardship, it's that you can use involuntary hardship to also be a refining process. You've heard me say it on the podcast. If you've read Undoing Urgency, I talk about this a ton in the book. If you don't have it, you can go to Amazon and get it. The guy that goes to prison didn't choose that. And most people that go to prison aren't refined by going to prison, but some people are. And some people can be. And some people are refined by cancer and some people aren't. And some people are refined by divorce or losing their job or financial stress or whatever that thing is. And some people aren't. Some people are. And some people aren't in any of those situations. And so I have found that when you submit yourself to voluntary hardship, when involuntary hardship comes, you are better prepared for it, but you're also able to often use it as a refining process in your life as well. So these are. This is why we do voluntary hardship. Now on the other side, are there ever days that I choose really easy? Yep. And it's not that often, but I don't know. Two, three, maybe four times a year, once a quarter. I'm just tired and I don't think there's anything wrong with a rest day. I was talking to some, some friends this past weekend, went down to. To Branson for. We chaperoned a high school event. It was a dinner and a show, stuff like that. And we got to talk about like Sabbath rest and how we rest. And there are some people that are strict, what they're called Sabbatarians. Like they don't do anything on Sabbath, by the way. If you believe that way, totally fine. Don't have a problem with it at all. But they're not going to go. They don't go get gas, they're not going to get groceries, they're not going to mow their lawn. None of those things. I'M not that for me, because I sit at a computer all day. I really enjoy on my day of rest, which is often not Sunday. Sunday for me is the Lord's day, but it's busy and we're doing stuff at church. Saturday is often the rest day. Well, Saturdays I really enjoy going out and working on my yard or doing a project. And it's usually not backbreaking work. It's the thing that I enjoy. It brings me value. I feel great when I'm done. I feel accomplished when I'm done. The work is never over as a CEO sitting at a laptop. But when you go out and you work on the garden and you plant the garden for the spring on a Saturday, to me, that's still really great stuff. And so I can even do voluntary hardship on days that are theoretically rest and still get a lot of value out of those things. And so when I connect it to or compare it to days that I choose easy, which is I'm really tired and I just choose, like, watch Netflix, binge, watch a show with my wife, order doordash, take a nap. I never feel better at the end of that day. I always feel worse. I don't have an ounce of accomplishment. And I'm probably. I'm so type A that I live by lists. I have lists on my phone every single day. I get up in the morning, I make my list for the day, and I work through the list kind of in chronological order. And when I have a day that I just didn't do anything, and even if that was the plan to not do anything, I feel terrible. And so voluntary hardship, that could be something as simple as simple work outside. You know, it could be the things that I like to do, like the sauna or the cold plunge. It could be a workout, which I always do on a Saturday. I enjoy Saturday workouts. They're not as rushed. I don't have to get to work and get on the laptop, things like that. When I do those things, I feel very accomplished, and it gives me a ton of return on investment. So voluntary hardship doesn't always mean also that I'm choosing hard things that I absolutely hate. I think there are times that you need to. There's times you have to have the hard conversation that you don't want to have. There's times that you have to, you know, really get into the yuck of life. Maybe you didn't have to. Maybe you could have just pretended that it would go away. My sister was telling me about a family member of hers that's on not married. Not is married into our family. That she said that this group of family members will have drama, some sort of fight, and they all go to their rooms and they all go to like their corners of the house and they don't talk for like three or four days. And three or four days they come out and they pretend that it never happened. There was no refining process in that. So you don't actually have to choose it, but if you do and you actually deal with it and you keep short accounts and you handle the problem as they come, that's choosing voluntary hardship when you could have just pretended it went away. I might have said this on a previous Mondays with Matt. I was talking to my therapist. Yep, still do it. It's good for me when you have tremendous stress. We all know about the fight or flight syndrome, but it's actually fight flight. Sorry, fight flight or freeze. A lot of people just want to shut down and do nothing. And that is an option. But the problem doesn't go away. And for me, I found that when I have anxiety that's very much focused around a problem that must be solved. The only way to get rid of that anxiety, even on those days that I feel like I just want to freeze, I'm going to crawl in bed, I'm going to do nothing. I wake up from the nap, I'm just as anxious and probably more so than I was beforehand. Instead, if I decide I'm going to attack the problem, I'm going to work through a solution. I'm going to find a path out that's choosing voluntary hardship. In the end, the anxiety goes away. And so I love voluntary hardship. Now let's talk about it in the gym. If you're going to the gym and you're just choosing those exercises that aren't that hard, and here's how we know, right? Here's how we know if voluntary hardship is the right amount. Are you consistently getting stronger? If you're at an age or you have injuries and you can't do certain barbell movements and you're actually doing some of those machines or dumbbells or whatever, but you're able to go up in reps, in weight, you are able to essentially linear progress and continue to get stronger even on times, in times of like on a diet or, you know, like you're. You're hypocaloric, then you know you're choosing voluntary hardship in the right amount, in that minimum effective dose amount. It's minimum effective dose, but for maximum return on Investment. And when we go to the gym and we show up on the days that we really don't feel like it's. We add weight to the bar when we really don't feel like it or when it terrifies us, especially on a squat, you go down. What happens if I can't come back up? I don't know, but I'm going to figure it out, and I'm going to put weight on it and I'm going to attack it. Yeah, it was super hard 2, 3, 4 days ago when I did this last time, and now I'm going up five pounds or ten pounds. I'm going to attack it anyway with everything that I have. I'm going to turn on bleeding mutallica. I'm going to. I'm going to hit that nose torque. I'm going to put on the chalk. I'm going to get angry. And we're going to do the thing then that is voluntary hardship. So we stick to that program. Often when it's boring, when other things come around and they're shiny and they're new and they're right, and we want to follow those things with our eyes and with our actions, we choose to do the thing we know we need to do because it keeps making us better. I don't want to choose something that is so hard that it will crush me. Is it okay every once in a while? I don't see a reason for it in the gym. Is it okay every once in a while in life? Yeah, sometimes you choose a thing. It's the hardest thing you ever did, and it dang near kills you. But you recover, and in the end you still adapt, and you come out on the other side and you go like, nope. As usual, God provided life turned out okay and it all worked out. And so for those of us, many of us are choosing not to get overly religious. We're choosing voluntary hardship for how it refines us. But for many of us that have a worldview similar as mine, it's also choosing voluntary hardship for who it glorifies. I'm not trying to glorify me in this. Right. There is for me, there is a creator that I'm trying to glorify. This is my king, and I'm trying to glorify him in everything that I do. Easy, hard, voluntary, involuntary. Right. I hope that I would do the same if I got cancer, if one of my family members got sick, whatever that thing is, I hope that I can be refined by it and glorify God in everything that I do. Again, I know that not all of you fall into this, so. All right, so comfort feels safe, but it is the silent killer of gains. If you're watching this, you want to get stronger. Everybody does, Right? Well, wanting to get stronger. I have days like this all the time. I want to train, but I don't really want to train. Like, I like the idea of training. I like the idea of what it's going to get me. But right then, in that moment, in the middle of the stress, in the middle of the work, in the middle of all the craziness of life, do I really want to go put my squat shoes on and put a barbell on my back? No. I just want to be. I want to get to the spot where I'm after the workout and I feel good and I accomplish something, but I don't even really want to accomplish it. Not in the moment. Right. But I choose that because it makes me better. And so your body only adapts when it's forced to. How do you get stronger? More weight on the bar. Right. How do you get more hypertrophy? We want more and more sets close to failure. Right. Within five reps of failure, three reps of failure, or something like that. And the more of those, if you only do one set of failure, that's something. But. But if you do three sets or five sets close to failure, doesn't have to be absolute failure. It's doing that hard thing over and over and over again is the thing that gets you the best return on the investment. So sticking to the same three sets of five or three sets of eight to 10 or whatever, the thing is not really going up in weight. My cousin did this for years. He's probably not gonna listen to this. Still, a good buddy of mine, he's like, hey, as long as I can sit down and do 225 for 10 on the bench press, I'm good. Well, that's the standard. Well, so I guess as he gets older, you know, he'll maintain his strength. Okay, but he's definitely not gonna get stronger, and it's not really that hard. And so what if you just did 2:30 for three sets of 10? Or what if you went up significantly more weight and did three sets of five or three sets of six? Or what if you did three sets of 11 or three sets of 12? Like any of those things work because they're harder than what you did last time via progressive overload. And that's how we get stronger and bigger, put on more muscle mass, improve Our quality of life experience, strength, all those things. It's that simple plus hard equals effective. And Mr. Hambrick and I talked about this for a long time. Most guys really want, if you really gave them the true serum, they want simple and easy. And then they wonder why they don't get any stronger. They wonder why they don't change year to year in the gym. You see people in the gym like this all the time. For those of you who are still going to public gym and you shouldn't be because you should train at home. You see the people who come and they, they consistently come to the gym, but they do the same thing every day. Every Monday is the Monday's workout, Wednesday's Wednesday, Wednesday's. And they never get stronger and they never change their body. And they're always a little bit skinny, fat, they don't put on a lot of muscle and you know, they don't lose a lot of fat. And they're probably, they're not choosing voluntary hardship in their nutrition, any of those things, right? So this stuff happens, certainly as a great example in the gym, but it's the same thing. Comfort in business, comfort in marriage, comfort in life experiences will all kill long term growth. We want to choose the hard thing because nobody else is. And the more we get into an AI technology driven world where everybody has it easy and the day will probably come when abundance is significantly more than it is now, we'll see what happens. But that it's that concept of the cream rises to the top. Well, now there's less and less cream and lots more of like the non fat milk, right? And so I want to rise to the top. I want to teach my children to do the same, to choose hard, to do the hard things. I had this conversation with Kinsley just, just this past week that, you know, she's 15 going on 16 years old. She's dealing with all sorts of little life and hormones and craziness that a kid of that age has to deal with. And when she has something really stressful, I don't wanna talk about it. I don't wanna talk about it. Just don't talk to me about it. And I go like, well, we don't get any better unless we talk about it. We've gotta work through the problem, we gotta work through the issues, right? And so, all right, how to start embracing voluntary hardship in your training, specifically, most of these you can carry over to your life. Practical steps. Here we go. Number one, choose the hard things on purpose. Every session, ask yourself what's the one thing in this workout that scares me a little bit, do that thing right. Run the program. Number two, stop program hopping. Pick one good program and run it for 12 weeks, 14 weeks, 16 weeks, somewhere in there before you make a change. And when you make that change, don't change the whole thing unless it absolutely didn't work at all. Change one thing. That's the minimum effective dose. Progression 3. Amazingly enough, use minimum effective dose. Find the smallest hard dose that produces the big result that actually moves the needle, and then do it consistently when it stops moving the needle. Change one variable, not multiple variables. Number four, track and measure what you're doing. By the way, this works awesome in life. Not just. Hence my list that I keep. Write it down. Metrics don't lie. If you're not progressing, you're probably avoiding voluntary hardship somewhere, right? And five, build the habit of showing up. The real gain is in the discipline, not just the PRs, right? You don't have to be a pro strongman like I was in the past. I'm not a pro strongman anymore. You just have to be willing to be truly, intentionally uncomfortable on purpose a few times a week. Right? All right, final, final close here. Voluntary hardship in the gym is training ground for voluntary and involuntary hardship in every other area of life. In the gym translates to in life. The man who chooses the hard thing under the bar becomes the man or woman who chooses the hard thing in their nutrition, their marriage, their business, their children, so on and so forth. Comfort is killing your gains. Voluntary hardship is the path to real strength physically, mentally, and spiritually. So this week, go do the hard thing on. On purpose. I promise the results are worth it. All right. As I said, I would love to see comments of anything that people are doing for hardship that they love. You know, I do the stuff that some people have called stupid. I like taking cold showers and cold plunges and saunas. And I do think some of that stuff helps. Sometimes I think that I'm just choosing it because it's a hard thing, but it's for me, it's the way I address it feels to me like I'm choosing just a little tiny thing of voluntary hardship. That's some discomfort in life. It's. I've gotten used to parking at the back of the parking lot and walking all the way up to the store. My wife's like, there was stuff way closer. Like, yeah, I don't want to go closer. I want to walk right? Or taking the stairs or, you know, those are really tiny things that still are quite helpful. So all right, really quick, couple housekeeping issues items and then we all answer questions. Okay. Number one, we will not be doing Mondays with Matt next week because I'm going to be in Las Vegas, my least favorite city. But I'm going to be with some of my favorite people. Barbalogic is there for the Real Coaches conference. We are a major sponsor this year in Real Coaches conference down in Vegas. So next Monday I will be traveling to Vegas and so I will not be here. So we're going to take the week off and I'll be back in two weeks. And second of all, before I take questions and I'll dive into questions here in just a second we've got really excited announcement. This is the first time we're saying this but we have new pricing structure coming up in Barbell Logic. And so most people think coaching is either cheap and useless or expensive and out of reach. We have changed that. We've thought a lot about the way we price things at Barbell Logic. So starting soon, actually I think today or tomorrow starting soon, Barbelogic is launching new pricing that gives you options. Number one, for $199 a month that's incredibly cheap, you get a real coach, real programming, real accountability. With two check ins per week you can have as many workouts, three, four workouts a week in there. But two check ins, video check ins just like we do in Barbell logic. And for 319amonth you get unlimited access, full support whenever you need it, as many workouts as you complete in a week and 12 weeks of guided nutrition added in that price to keep your new training, your training and nutrition habits aligned. This is for new clients only, testing a new pricing product. So again, 1,99amonth for two check ins a week. 3,19amonth get you unlimited check ins per week plus guided nutrition. 12 weeks of guided nutrition. So now it's not whether you can afford coaching, it's how much support do you want? If you want to learn more, go to barbell. Barbelogic.com Matt, you can use my name to get updates on this new pricing and more. That's Barbell Logic or barbell hyphen logic.com mat all right, let's dive into questions. As always, I had four or five come in over the week. We have a few coming in on the comments already and have 10 minutes or so. So I'll dive into those. Mr. Shoot, one of my favorite coaches on the planet says if you enjoy the hardship, is it still hardship? I think it can be right. Um. I don't know. There, there's. Yeah, there's, there's good hard work outside in the sun, back breaking labor, that's still difficult. I mean, look, I enjoy lifting. I really do. And Scott always said it was like a spoonful of sugar, a spoonful of medicine. Not sugar, spoonful of medicine. Now I'm singing Mary Poppins. A spoonful of medicine for him. He hated it, but he loved what it got him. I still like to train, but I don't always want to train in the moment. And I still like to do the projects outside or around the house or down at the cabin or whatever. And so I think they can be hardship, but you can still enjoy it. And I think that over time you get to the point where you actually enjoy work for work's sake. There is value in the work itself, not just what it brings you. And so, yeah, I think you can enjoy hardship and it still be hardship. But I do think there are times and we have to be careful with this. There are times you still have to choose the thing you don't want to do. So if we only choose hardship that we love, that we never choose the thing we hate, that we know we need to do, guess what happens when involuntary? Nobody chooses the cancer, nobody chooses the divorce, nobody chooses for their dad to die. But those things happen. And we have to know how to handle that in moments that we can't stand any of it, but we still get through it and we're still refined by it. So that's a great question, old man with guns. Outside of training, would you still try to make life easier or not at all? You think it's never a good idea? No, I actually do think it's okay to choose comfort. I mean, look, obviously if I travel, I'm going to fly the best way I can. I'm going to stay in the nicest hotel that I can afford. I'm not going to drive an old beater car that's going to break down all the time. I'm drive something comfortable. Like, I think it's perfectly fine to do those things. But I think if we only do those things and we never choose hardship, and here's the reality, Scott and I talked about this all the time. Think about what your grandpa did. Most of your grandpas were farmers or they had some sort of manual labor job. Their job, which was on some level involuntary, even though I guess they chose often to have that job. It was hardship for us. Much of what we do is sitting In a cubicle all day, working on a computer. It's not really that hard. Now it may be stressful and so maybe there's some hardship there, but it's not that hard. So what we want to do is make sure we're continually choosing hard things that refine us in life, especially if our daily life, our jobs don't require that. I've got buddies at church, they man, they're hardworking construction guys. Their jobs are hard. Do they need to choose hardship as often as I do outside of their job? Probably not. Do they lift? Most of them? Do they still do that? That may be all they do. That's really, you know, voluntarily hard in their life is their work and their training. For me, I have to do more than that because I sit at a computer all day. Right. So. All right, let's go to some questions that came in over the last week. Feel free to ask more in the comments. Question dup, that's daily undulating, periodization type of training, block training, west side conjugate and all the Russian literature you've said you were reading as you got into lifting seem pretty complicated. How does this square with the simplicity of the training you advocate? That's a great question. It is somewhat complicated and I think for most that's why all of those things are advanced programs. When you start really simple over time it's simple, hard and effective. And as time goes on, you make minimum effective dose changes. Change a variable, you write it out for two, three, four months, it starts to slow down, you change another variable, you continue to do that. Well, you do that for 15 years. You've changed variables many, many times, but you did them one thing at a time. Eventually you end up with a program that's not that simple, but it's as simple as you can do and still make progress. So what I wouldn't do is jump into something that's very complex, like a small of squat routine or something, you know, where you're squatting five times a week and it's all super heavy when you don't need to do. Matter of fact, I would argue that almost no needs to do that, even a top level powerlifter. And so yes, sometimes it absolutely over time will become more complex, but it's still as simple as it can be for you to still make progress. The minimum effective dose of simplicity may end up being somewhat complex or somewhat complicated. But until it has to be, it shouldn't be. Because if I can go in and I can do three exercises, a workout or three Exercises in a body weight, movement or something and add £5 to the bar. Why would I do anything else? That's the simplest, most effective program you can do and that will work for a while. And when it stops working, you're gonna have to change something. You're gonna change the exercise selection, you're gonna have to change frequency. Go three from three days a week to four days a week. You're gonna have to change the weight or the rep scheme or how many sets are close to failure. Which is really the way I would define volume now more than just reps on the, with the barbell. So all of those are, are excellent options. All right. When evaluating a program for someone who doesn't have a coach, how should he, he or she evaluate it? Let's assume this person has already done LP and run out some basic intermediate program. They're looking at a range of more advanced options. Things like 5, 3, 1, Smallob, as I mentioned earlier, block, DUP, west side, et cetera. How do they pick or use a large language model to help generate a program? Yeah, actually LLM probably do really well here. It's just you can say apply minimum effective dose principles. I have. This is how I've been training. Now apply a change in a single or at most two variables at a time to make the next incremental step in how hard it is or how complex it is to continue to make progress. If it's a complete change of program, it's not going to work. And I'm looking at the next question. So that will lead me into the next question. But this is why you don't jump from linear progression to block or DUP or Westside or smolov. Right. That a 531 is actually probably not a bad option or even a 3 day LP to a 4 day upper lower split where you're. You get additional volume from some accessory movements after the two main lifts. Squat and deadlift on one day, press and bench on the other day, twice a week each. So four times total. That's a good movement, a good, a good program. And then you can move to something like a five through one. Top set of five, week one and some back offs, top set of three, week two and back offs, top single and back offs week three. That's a great next incremental step. And going into the next question which says how do you evaluate if a program is hard enough, both on paper but also as it's executed because any program can be sandbagged. This is a great question. How do you know it's working. Are you able to keep improving performance primarily via strength, like weight on the bar? Or if it's what you're after in the moment, are you able to get more reps than you did last week with the same weight? Are you able to do more sets close to failure with the same weight? Does your tonnage continue to go up? Those sort of things like, this is why metrics don't lie. Am I able to do more this week than I did last week? And I'm looking at the trend lines, so if you don't that week, that's. Sometimes you can just have a bad day or a bad week, but over the course of two, three, four, five weeks, it should continue to go up and to the right for whatever variable you are pushing on in the moment. So that's how you know it's hard enough. If the weight keeps going up, it's hard enough and you're able to do it. It's hard enough, right? If you are going up 10 pounds per workout and you can do that for two or three months, go up 10 pounds per workout. If it's only 2 pounds and you're able to do that for 10 or 12 weeks, do that. That's still perfect, right? You're still making great progress. All right. And then if some. For someone who has developed the habit of quitting workouts, how do you overcome this and build a new habit of completing workouts as prescribed? Once this new habit is formed, how do you make reasonable decisions during a workout? If a workout is truly inappropriate, it's kind of two questions, like if a parent died, a dog died, lost a job, whatever. You just got into the workout. Okay? So if I'm quitting workouts, one of the things that I am constantly in competition with myself. I'm playing little games all the time with myself when I get up in the morning. By the way, I still really enjoy coaching online coaching, but I often have things that I'm looking forward to as a CEO. You know, strategy projects, whatever I'm working on in the business, I don't let myself work on those things until the online coaching's done. Or worse, until the emails are done and the basecamp notifications are done. That stuff comes first. This Monday mornings, I get up and do a weekly report for the company. I don't really want to do the weekly report, but everybody needs to know what's going on in the business. So before I work on the more fun stuff, I get it over with. For workouts, I do the same thing. So if I really don't want to work out, I give myself something to look forward to. Hey, if you complete this workout, you hit all your reps, hit all your numbers, then, then I'm going to eat this for lunch. And it's usually not Taco Bell or crap. It's like, okay, instead of having a protein shake or, you know, a rotisserie chicken sandwich, I'll have something that's a little better, right? Something that I can look forward to. And so that's the way I'll do it. So I'll give myself something to look forward to. When I get this done, I'll get to go do this. And I don't let myself do that thing that I really want to do until I got through the voluntary hard thing. Now, once the habit's formed, how do you make reasonable decisions during a workout if it's truly inappropriate, right? So something really bad happened. So again, the example is in the question where a parent died, dog died, you lost your job, something terrible like that happened. I would say skip the workout, it's fine. And if you're somebody that has, I mean, I've got clients who've never missed a workout. Sometimes it's go in and just do the main lifts and get out and you know, punch that, punch that time card that. Take a blue collar day, get in, get out. And sometimes it's for some people it's better to go in and train. They feel better in a deeply stressful situation. In the end, they get those endorphins going and things feel better. For me, if I'm deeply, deeply stressed, I often will kick it to the next day. What you have to be careful of is often a deeply stressful day will lead to another deeply stressful day to another. The next thing you know, it's been three or four days and you haven't trained. And so this is the way we sort of evaluate if they work. So there you go. I'm a few minutes overdue over time. I appreciate you guys watching, listening. Give me your ear on this Monday or if you follow up later on YouTube and listen to it in your car. Thanks for listening. Thanks for giving me your time on Mondays with Matt Again, reminder, new pricing. There is at barbelllogic.com Matt $199 for two check ins a week. 319 with guided nutrition for unlimited check ins@barbelllogic.com Matt I think right now you put in your name email address. But that new pricing rollout will come out in the next 24 hours. You're the first ones to hear about it right now. And so, man, I hope you jump on it. That's an incredible deal. Don't know how long we'll do it. We just want to see if it works. And so thanks for listening. Hope you guys have a great week this week. We'll see you in two weeks, Sam.