In my experience, these sorts of explanations are all bunk. If someone shows up for a workout, it means they’ve already got their life under control and there’s only one thing that’s going to get in their way:
Pain. The expression ‘no pain, no gain’ is utter nonsense. There is nothing that feels so good as a great workout that pushes the limits of your strength and endurance and leaves you with a healthy ‘pump’ in all your muscles. But most people never reach this point, even if they hire a personal trainer.
Why? Because of muscular inhibition.
Roughly 9 out of 10 people (I’ve tested quite a few) have some kind of muscular inhibition. Maybe their arch is collapsed, creating an inhibition pattern all the way up the kinetic chain. Maybe a major muscle (like Illiopsoas) is over-contracted from sitting all day, shutting off its antagonist (the gluteus maximus). Maybe their stride is too short on one side, creating a whole chain reaction. Maybe there is a nutritional deficiency, or an organ is shut off for some reason, causing associated muscles to shut down. There could be one of a thousand things creating an inhibition pattern, but the effect is all the same:
Inhibition anywhere leads to compensation somewhere. Compensation leads to over-contraction, which increases compensation. The joint gets pulled, the ligaments and tendons get elongated, the joints gets pulled more and moves out of place. Nerves get pinched and when they’re pinched above a certain threshold, the person experiences pain.
When you’re in pain for even a moment, athletic performance breaks down. I’m sure you’ve experienced it at some point in your workout career: your body broke down and you were left sitting by the sidelines, watching everyone else have a great workout while you, a little embarrassed to admit you had failed that day, just couldn’t keep up.
Enter the western mythology of success:
‘Only the strong survive’, ‘no pain, no gain’ and all sorts of Successories posters showing people running up staircases with captions like ‘The victor keeps on running when everyone else stops’. Its almost like you’re supposed to feel guilty for not trying hard enough, even though trying isn’t the problem, pain is.
But pain is perfectly normal. Its your body’s way of telling you there is some underlying imbalance. These imbalances can be caught and fixed from day-one if you know the muscle tests for each muscle in the body.
But there is another, bigger reason people fail, and perhaps this is why we’ve been in the same ineffective medical paradigm for 2400 years…
#2. PAIN (not enough…)
The wiring of our nervous systems is such that pain takes precedence over all other impulses. We will do infinitely more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. This is where apathy comes in: if we’re not in ENOUGH PAIN to justify making a major change, we’ll maintain things the way they are.
While being in a little pain can shut down an entire exercise program, not being in enough pain will leave you unmotivated to make the major changes necessary to get out of it long-term. And this is where most people sit: they’re in just enough pain that they can’t stay on a given routine long enough to see some results, but little enough pain that if they go back to doing nothing, the pain goes away.
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