When you enter the fitness space, you’ll encounter people and a culture that are dead set on doing more, more, more. But the truth is, you don’t need to work out six days a week, and not every workout needs to leave you wrecked. In fact, approaching fitness this way sets you up for injury and overtraining, which isn’t sustainable. By adopting a perspective of sustainable fitness, you’ll support your health in the long term and achieve the results you’re looking for. This article explores why destroying yourself with every workout isn’t healthy, what makes a good workout, and what sustainable fitness looks like in practice.
What Is a Good Workout?
A lot of people still equate a “good workout” with how sore they are the next day, how drenched they were in sweat, or how many calories they’ve burned. However, those actually aren’t great metrics for long-term health or progress. If your workout is constantly wrecking you, can lead to overtraining, and it’s not actually doing what you think it is.
A good workout should support your energy, challenge you, and also be something you can recover from. A good workout improves your strength, endurance, and mobility in a way that fits your lifestyle. It’s not about chasing exhaustion or punishing workouts. A good workout builds resilience, both physically and mentally. If you’ve been stuck in that cycle of thinking you need to feel destroyed to have trained “hard enough,” it’s time to reframe what success looks like.
What Is Sustainable Fitness, Really?
The key word here is “sustainable”: something that can be maintained and continued. Sustainable fitness is implementing a workout routine that keeps you consistently showing up week after week for years. Most importantly, sustainable fitness doesn’t wreck you. Digging your energy into the ground and potentially injuring yourself through intensity is not far-sighted. A sustainable fitness routine prioritizes energy and vitality, especially over thinking you need to look or feel a certain way.
It’s important to consider that sustainable fitness involves activities you should enjoy doing. This means hiking, biking, swimming, running, etc. Strength training is the most impactful way to workout. Not everyone likes strength training, but everyone actually needs to do it. If you consider yourself in this category, focus on strength training 1-2 times a week. If you hire a trainer, they can design your routine to help you build strength and decrease the potential for injury doing the activities you love, and you will feel the difference.
Principles of Longevity-Focused Training
Longevity-focused training is built on the principles of consistency, recovery, and intentionality. Focus on movements that build strength, support joint health, improve mobility, and allow for adequate recovery. Training this way ensures you can keep showing up, stay injury-free, and remain strong and active for life.
Principles of longevity-focused training include:
- Prioritizing strength and mobility over intensity
- Training consistently without burning out
- Allowing for full recovery between sessions
- Incorporating movement you enjoy
- Fueling your body adequately
Signs Your Current Workout Routine Might Be Doing More Harm Than Good
It’s ok to feel a little sore or tired after a workout every now and then. However, if your current routine is leaving you constantly exhausted, struggling to sleep, or dragging through every session, something’s off and is actually a sign that your training intensity might be too much and is no longer serving you. That’s not what consistent, healthy training should feel like.
Here are some signs your workout routine might be doing more harm than good:
- Your workouts leave you consistently feeling exhausted and sore after
- Dreading workouts
- Unable to sit down or walk consistently
- You’re exhausted often
- Your workouts feel like a source of stress.
- Not sleeping well
- Never recovering from your last workout
- You’re obsessive with working out (and possibly food intake, either too little or you can’t stop eating)
If you are experiencing any of these things, you need to reassess and switch your routine.
How to Build a Sustainable Workout Plan
First and foremost, figure out what form of movement/exercise you like best. If you love strength training, a 4 times a week split (two lower body days and two upper body days) is probably best for you. If you like to go to the gym 6 days per week, check in with yourself to see if you are overtraining. This requires learning how to listen to your body.
If you think you’re overtraining by lifting six days a week, consider adjusting your routine to include four lifting days and two light mobility days to support recovery. Better yet, think about incorporating activities you enjoy, like hiking or biking, instead of training six days a week. This creates a fun and balanced fitness plan that supports long-term consistency. If your primary focus is strength training, make sure you’re also going for regular walks, as there are numerous benefits of walking.
If you don’t like strength training, start with one full body workout per week. This is the minimum effective dose. A suggested starting routine would look like: a squat radiation, RDL, overhead press, single arm row, and hanging knee raise. Do the activities you enjoy on the other days and try to walk daily.
Most importantly, eat enough to fuel your activities. And make sure you eat a protein centric diet that has a lot of fiber through fruits, veggies, and whole grains.
Our Personal Experience With Overtraining
If you have been in the fitness sphere long enough, especially as a professional, you have most likely experienced times when you were overtraining. For us, those days were at the peak of our powerlifting days. We were training hard and teaching group fitness classes, sometimes 15 a week, while competing. This resulted in multiple injuries from overtraining that sometimes took us out of competitions.
For one of us, this resulted in a torn SI ligament that has taken years since with peptide therapies and lots of pain to recover from. However, I found that after I could not train as much due to my injury, I lost a lot of weight doing less because my body wasn’t as stressed and fatigued.
Small Shifts You Can Make Today for Long-Term Results
If you’re focused on aesthetics, the body that you want will take you 10 years. This means you need to have patience and it’s crucial to focus on what is sustainable. If your routine might not be as sustainable as it could be, consider small, intentional shifts that add up.
These small shifts include: prioritizing sleep, adding 20 more grams of protein to your day, and choosing weights that challenge you and allow your body to recover, and most importantly, stop chasing intense, sweaty, crazy workout highs. Those are good to have every now and then, but only if you can stay consistent and recover properly.
Train for Life, Not for Harm
A general rule of thumb is that consistency will give you better results and sustainability over high intensity. Focus on longevity, there is no such thing as quick results. Also, make sure you are training for you and not for anyone else. Sustainable fitness is not trendy, but it works by creating momentum in an easeful way to keep showing up.
Looking for a strength training program that incorporates progressive overload and mobility days? Our flagship program, STRONGER, has your back for 12 weeks. You only purchase once to have lifetime access. LEARN MORE HERE.
Want to learn more about how to incorporate sustainable fitness into your life? Listen to episode 240 of the Stronger Than Your Boyfriend Podcast: Not Every Workout Needs to Wreck You: Learning to Train for Longevity
