Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2870: 6 Signs You're Not Training Hard Enough (And How to Fix It)

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

In this episode the guys break down the six signs that you're not training hard enough — and why intensity is the most important factor for making progress in the gym. They cover what strenuous actually feels like, why using the same weight for years is a red flag, how to know if you left enough in the tank, and why some people are just wired to avoid hard effort. They also talk about the two groups most likely to undertrain — people coming back from injury and older adults getting started with strength training — and why both groups are capable of far more than they think. FREE RESOURCE 30 Days of Free Coaching — https://30daysofcoaching.com Daily coaching from Sal, Adam & Justin on diet, exercise, programming and more. Totally free. MAPS 15 BOGO — https://maps15bogo.com Buy 1 get 1 FREE — limited time (MAPS 15 Minutes, Performance, Muscle Mommy, Strong, Symmetry, Forty Plus) Crisp Power (protein pretzels) — https://www.crisppower.com/mindpump Code: MINDPUMP — 10% off. Up to 28g of protein, low carb, zero sugar, high fiber. Mind Pump Store: https://mindpumpstore.com  Maps Fitness Products: https://mapsfitnessproducts.com  Instagram: @mindpumpmedia 0:00 - Intro 1:24 - Why intensity is the #1 factor for progress — and why we don't talk about it enough 3:10 - Sign #1: Your workout isn't strenuous — what that actually means 8:06 - Sign #2: You use the same weight every time 11:34 - Sign #3: You leave the workout feeling exactly the same as you entered 14:18 - Sign #4: You feel nothing the days after — every single time 16:05 - Sign #5: You know you're averse to hard workouts — and what to do about it 20:40 - Sign #6: No results — the plateau that follows all of the above 21:13 - The two groups most likely to undertrain: injury recovery & older adults  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump. Mind Pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the number one podcast in the world for fitness, health, and entertainment. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, we talk about the signs that you're not training hard enough. By the way, we have 30 days of free coaching.

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Get 10% off. We also have a sale on some workout programs. By any MAPS 15 style workout program, get any other MAPS 15 style program for free. Buy one, get one free happening right now. Go to Maps15bogo.com. All right, real quick, if you love us like we love you, why not show it by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at Mind Pumpstore.com. I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to Mind Pumpstore.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. When it comes to your workouts, there are a lot of factors that play a role

and whether or not you progress, but possibly one makes the biggest impact. Intensity, how hard do you work out? In fact, the data proves this. Of all the factors, intensity is probably the most important. So we're going to talk about are the signs that you're not working out hard enough. How do you know? How do you know if you're working out hard enough to make good progress? That's what we're going to cover today.

This is a good conversation for us to have because we tend to communicate the other side more often. That's right, a lot more often. Yeah, I think that we recognize that a large portion or majority of our audience are probably into fitness or have been into fitness for a long time, even a lot of fitness fanatics that listen to the podcast. And so most of the content has been centered around the overapplication of intensity and volume and just overdoing it. Yeah, overdoing it, right? Which we would agree that we all probably fall in the category and can totally relate. Although, when I think back to personal training clients one-on-one, I did deal with this, maybe 50% of the time. Yep.

You know, maybe half the time I had the other side, which was, you know, my client's not training hard enough. And I'd have to communicate this. And there are several different reasons or ways that would lead me to believe so. but it was more common when I think about training clients. When I think about this podcast, it was less common. And so I felt like that's what we've always kind of came to the other side. I'll never forget. I've told this story before, but it was such a memorable moment for me as a trainer.

I had a client that I was training. Just every day, kind of regular person, no experience with strength training, not really athletic background, just a normal woman. She was in her 40s. I was a young trainer. and it was one of our first workouts. And we went to a rope pressed down. We're going to do triceps.

And I remember we're doing the triceps. So it's very basic exercise. She's pressing it down, bringing it up, pressing it down, and bringing it up. And she suddenly lets go over the rope. The weight stack slams. And she goes, oh, oh, oh. You know, a young trainer.

So I'm like, oh, my God, did I hurt somebody? Would tear muscle? Yeah. Yeah, it's like, oh, I know, that's a huge fear for a trainer. It's like, you hurt your client. Yeah, you don't want to hurt your client. You know, but, you know, tricep press down.

Like hurting yourself on a press down is pretty darn difficult. It's not like a deadlift or a squat. So I remember she's like, oh, and I'm looking at her. And I'm like, okay, where do you feel the pain? And I'm having her explain it. And she's like, it hurts right here, you know? And she's like, what do you mean? She's like, well, it just, it hurts.

It hurts. I'm not sure if it's good or bad, but I hurt myself. So I'm like, is it your elbow? Is it this? I'm having her move. She's like, well, doesn't hurt anymore. And I realized she felt she felt the muscle burn. Yeah.

And that was so foreign to her. She just, she had no idea. And like you said, Adam, a significant percentage of my clients, one of the things that I had to train them on was knowing how hard to go. Not because they went too hard, but because it's uncomfortable. And they just didn't know, like, oh, is this how far I go? Like this, what does this burn feel like? What does this struggle feel like? And it was it was something they had to learn how to become accustomed to and develop.

a relationship with, there's lots of value of that, by the way, because when you develop a relationship with pain where you can kind of feel and understand good pain, it actually helps the rest of your life. But it was relatively common, relatively common that I had clients that just had no idea how to train hard enough. This was a tough one for me coming into the gym world and from the athletic world and where everything was like, we're trying to maximize our potential for loading and, you know, getting stronger. And, to realize, you know, the general population, where you have to start sometimes.

And it was like, wow, like, because I would demonstrate something and then just the coordination and everything that it took to organize their body in a certain way. They just, they didn't have that. It wasn't just like intuitive. And so, yeah, it was all the way across the board. And it was good for me, really, to have to learn how to communicate, like,

from, you know, the most severe, where it's like somebody could barely even, you know, hold themselves up for too long they had to like brace themselves or uh so you just got like a whole variety of clients and i learned so much but one of them that was just like i remember just stopping mid track like i can't like i can't with this like this lady didn't want to do a kettlebell overhead press because it rested on the back of her arm it's like ow like just deal with it you know like i didn't know i didn't have anything yeah you know it's most uh you know kind of fundamental root.

Exercise is a stress. This is what makes your body progress with exercise. So all exercise, all workouts, unless you're just trying to be active, which is different, well, you're just trying to move. Okay, that's different. We're talking about, like, structured exercise. If you're trying to develop more stamina, more strength, more flexibility, just anything above and beyond what you have, your body will only pursue that, will only adapt

in that direction if it feels like it needs to. And stress is what tells your body that it needs to. Why get stronger or why build stamina or why require more resources? Because that's what all of those kind of require. If we don't need them. Now, if you're working out, your body doesn't know that you're in the gym. It just feels stress. The environment you're in.

And the stress is what gets the body to adapt. So, you know, number one, if it's not strenuous at all, you're not, training it hard enough. Now, here's where it gets difficult. If your idea, if your baseline of what would be considered strenuous, if you look at your life and your life consists of zero strenuous anything, if you wake up in the morning, drive to work, sit at your desk, you know, drive home, sit on the couch. It doesn't take much for you to feel like you're doing something, but it needs to feel difficult. It needs to feel difficult. Otherwise, your body has no reason to progress. has no reason to build muscle, has no reason to get stronger or build any stamina.

So if you feel like it's just not strenuous, you're probably not working it hard enough. Well, I remember having clients that had trained before. So this isn't like a brand new person to lifting weights. And I, they would, I kind of evaluate what they've been doing. When I get someone like that, a lot of times I'll have them take me through like how they train or what they do so I could see versus me like right away. Here's what we're following. Like, hey, take me through what a workout or lift session would look like.

And I remember meeting quite a few clients like this that just stopped when they started to burn. They thought that that was the time to stop was just like, oh, it's burning. I'm good. You know, and so then versus continuing to kind of push through that uncomfortable feeling. And so as soon as they felt any of that kind of burning sensation in the muscle, it was like, oh, that's enough. And then stopping it right there versus kind of going through that. And again, not being strenuous enough, like not causing enough stress or enough damage to elicit. growth and change. In other words, it has to feel hard. Your workouts should feel a certain level of

hard. Otherwise, your body has no reason to progress. And then along with that, Adam, this one, this one shocked me early on, but then later on it was like, this is what I expected. People who didn't work out hard enough when I would ask them to take me through their workout or even just explain their workout. Like, okay, tell me what your workout looks like. They would give me the exercises and the weights that they use. This is the most common. This is, when you talk your story about the lady dropping the trisot. And I think of my example of not training hard enough was the clients. And it was, not always, but more often than not were my clients that did kind of the at-home workouts, you know, that had like a routine or a video cassette that they used to follow or a DVD.

And they had these, you know, array of exercises, give it 15 or 20 different. It was a routine. It wasn't a workout. Yeah, yeah. And it was, and it was always these five-pound dumbbells. It was the same. Yeah, five pound doubles for all the movements. For chest press, for shoulder press, for rows.

To the end. Yeah, all the way through every movement, you're using these same set of dumbbells for all these different muscle groups. And that's what you just do. And that was really, that was really common. And that somebody who, you know, was told that lifting weights is good for them and they need to build muscle and build their metabolism. And it's great. And felt like, hey, I do this three, four times a week. And I've been doing it for years.

And I'm just not seeing the results. That was probably when I think of people not training hard enough, that was the most common. Yeah, what it sounded like to me would be, they would tell me, yeah, what does your workout look like? Oh, when I do squats and I'll use a 30 pound dumbbell and then I'll do curls with the fives and then I'll row the 10 pound dumbbell. And so I'm not really paying attention to the exercises. I'm paying attention to the fact that they know the exact weight they use for every exercise. And I say, how long have you been doing these exercises? Oh, I've been doing it for the last four years.

And how long have you been using those weights? Oh, you know, for four years. if you've been using the same weight every single time, your body has no reason to progress. You're comfortable. It is not going to build any. Why would it build it? It's already as strong enough as it needs to be

because you're doing the same thing every single time. It has no reason to progress. So if you've been working out for a long time without the workouts feeling hard, and you know exactly what dumbbells and exactly what weight to grab for your exercise, because that's the one you've always been using, you're probably not working out.

I'd say the thing that we come across, and I remember we had a caller. It was a while ago when we had a caller like this, and we've had a few that workout from home, and they only have like two or three pairs of dumbbells. I have fives. I've got some, you know, 15s and like 25s, and all their workouts consisted around those three.

You should need new dumbbells soon. Yeah. If you're actually trying to help out of barbell. Those three sets of dumbbells should not last you, you know, five years. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Here's the next one is that you leave the workout feeling exactly the same as you entered. So here's what it feels like at the end of an appropriate intensity workout. One that's hard enough to cause change, but one that's not so hard that you blew yourself out, right?

You should leave the workout feeling a sense of calm energy. So it should feel like you did something. Like, oh, yeah, man, I worked out. But you should feel good and calm afterwards. If you're, if the end of your workout, you feel like exactly as you did walking in, like you didn't really do much with your body. you just kind of moved. You don't feel this sense of relaxed that comes from, you know, something that's strenuous. Then you haven't worked out hard enough.

You should definitely feel different. You should feel that at the end of your workout, something happened. Yeah, this is probably the hardest one to describe to somebody because then you have, I feel like you either land on the two extremes. Either you didn't do enough. No, if you feel like you need to lay on the couch off. Or you got, or you got, sorry. Yeah, or you punish the shit out of yourself and you're destroyed.

And so I find this one of all the points. that we're making one of the more difficult to get somebody to learn how to do that. And I guess it just takes some practice. But when I have somebody who doesn't train hard enough, the way I get them to learn this is I end up pushing them a little far until they feel that, okay, that was you overreach. You were so sore. We were sore for two, three days later after, like, okay, that was, we overreach. So we want to find somewhere between where we started when you first started working with me

and that, and that's kind of like where we want to land. But it's good to find that line, I think. And so, yeah, it does take work to get to that point to, you know, have them understand, okay. Oh, wow. So this is, you know, the soreness and all this is what you experience when you actually, like, boost the intensity. Yeah, after a good workout, and this is, again, just from my experience of training people, but also for myself, I feel like I exerted myself, but I feel a calm sense of Zen. Like, like, the kind of relaxation you get from the fact that your body's tired. Yeah, your work.

Your energy is expended. But not fried. There's a difference, right? Fried is like, oh, my gosh, I need to lay down. Or, oh, this is not good. It's more like, I did a hard workout and I feel good. I feel really calm. You should, again, if you leave your workout and it's kind of like the same,

like you just did a routine that you're used to all the time, your body has no reason to change. Nothing's going to happen. Which brings us to the next one, which is every single time you work out, you feel nothing the days after. Now, this does not mean you, you need to feel sore after every workout. That's a terrible gauge of workout success.

But if you never feel anything always, like if you've been doing your workout for a while or you do workouts in the next day, every time you work out, you feel like you did nothing. Push yourself a little harder, see what happens. You know, feeling a little something is normal after your workouts. Now, the crippling soreness typically means you did too much.

But again, you should feel something. Just like a little tightness, a little, like I was worked. You should be able to point to what you did. Feeling sore after a workout doesn't determine a good workout. It usually follows one, though. Yeah, yeah. It's like, I think that that's a better way of saying that is that it doesn't determine whether you had a good workout or not.

Yeah, because you don't have to get sore. But it does usually follow one. Yeah. And so I think feeling that little bit of sore, that's, well, I'm always looking for that. I want to feel like a little bit of soreness in the, but it's not so much that it impedes on the next workout, right? So that's to me the level.

Yeah. Right. If I'm, if I'm, if I'm, Yeah, regular function, right? Walking or getting up and out of a chair. Like, that's really difficult for you to do because you're so sore. Or you're sore by the touch of someone touching your chest. Oh, that's hurts.

That's like, that's overreaching. But I want to feel, I want to make movements or anything go, oh, I could tell I worked out yesterday. And so that's kind of what I'm looking for. So it doesn't determine a good workout, but it usually follows on. And sometimes it feels like a little tightness in the muscle. It doesn't have to be soreness, but you'll go, like you worked out your hamstrings. and so the next day or the two days after, you go to stretch your hamstrings and you go,

oh, I can tell I worked out. If you feel like nothing happened after every single workout, then what I recommend is push yourself a little harder and see what happens, see how you feel. And if you feel a little bit, keep going in that direction, and then you'll probably start to see some progress kick into gear. Here's another one, and this is just,

you've got to know yourself. You know that you are averse to the feeling of hard workouts. And you know if this is you. Hard workouts aren't comfortable. So I want to encourage people right now. First off, I want to empathize with you because it's not comfortable. It hurts, right? It burns.

It's exhausted. You got to push. You got to grind. You got to pull. You're sweating maybe. It's hard. But you will develop a relationship with your workouts if you do this right over time to where it's not an undesirable feeling.

Okay. And I know that sounds crazy to somebody who's listening who's new to this because they're like, man, when I go and do a hard workout, I hate the feeling. I hate pushing myself. I hate how hard this feels. It feels uncomfortable, which is true in the beginning. But as you practice this over time, your relationship to that kind of pain, now we're not talking about overdoing it. I'm talking about doing it appropriately. Your relationship to this kind of pain changes to where it's a different category of pain. If I'm sick or I hurt myself, that belongs over here. And that sucks. And I don't like the way that feels.

But a good hard workout, I've been doing this long enough. And I have had clients that I've trained for a long time where this actually starts to feel good and desirable. And yes, it will happen if you do this consistently enough and you do this right and you start to connect it with results, connect it with muscle and fat loss and just feeling better in your everyday life. When this starts to happen, the struggle of a workout when it's done appropriately starts to become desirable. and when you enjoy that feeling, then it's not a problem. But in the beginning, it could be hard for some people.

And I know this one. I would get brand new clients and I would train them and they were just not used to. You have to get through it until you actually start to really feel the results from it. Totally.

Yeah, the work that's actually beneficial and moving you forward and progressing. How does that quote go? The thing that you need to be doing most is the thing that you continue to avoid or something like that. There's a good quote that. Something like that.

Yeah, yeah. It's another paradox. The thing you should be doing most is the thing that you tend to be avoiding or something like that along those lines. And so this is one of those ones that you have to ask yourself, like, are you the person that tends to avoid a hard workout like that at all costs or try not to as much as possible? You probably need to lean into that more.

I can think right now, what does I say? The magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding. There you go. There you go. Yeah, I can, off the top of my head, I can actually picture right now a few clients that I've trained where the first, couple months of our training was me getting them accustomed to pushing themselves. It was like they were so averse to the difficulty of the workout. And the avatar that this fits in.

Just timid. Yes, these are people that never played sports. They never pushed themselves physically. So this is just foreign to them. And I mean, I can think of one guy in particular when I was training them, you know, we'd get to, we do some reps. And right when it starts to get hard, you could tell he's like, I want to run out of the room. That's the look he would have on his face. Like, I can't do this anymore. And we would stop. In the first couple months of my training was like, him just developing a relationship

with intensity so that he doesn't, it's not so adverse. And now, after I trained him for a while, probably a year, he started to enjoy the challenging workouts. And in fact, I used to point this out to him. I remember it's like a year into our training. And I would tell him, say, do you remember how much you hated doing a exercise. You about how much you hated feeling what you're feeling right now. And it was even hard for him to remember. And he's like, really? I said, yeah, dude, as soon as it got a little

difficult, you'd want to throw the dumbbells it down and I could tell you hated being here. And now look at you. Now it's like you want to push yourself harder because you have a different relationship with it. So if you know this about yourself, if you know, and you know this is you, it's like, I hate sweating. I hate feeling tired. I hate it with my legs burn. I hate it my arms burn. I don't like pushing things that are hard. If this is you, odds are you're not working out hard enough, but you can change your relationship to this kind of pain by slowly pushing a little harder each time. You don't have to go full bore, but little by little, start to challenge your tolerance for pain and the strenuous effort, and you will get to the point

where you start to enjoy it. Now, the last one is the result of doing any of these, right? So if you fall in any of these categories, it's the, no results. It's the plateau. And this is like somebody who is not training hard enough. And for any of these reasons, it will result in a plateau. I mean, if you're somebody who needs to be training hard enough and you're not, then you're certainly not. Because if you're seeing progress, you're not in a plateau. And you don't need to change that.

You're not the person who technically needs to train harder at all. In fact, that should be the goal, right, is to do as little as possible to elicit the most change. And so if I'm doing enough strenuous work to elicit change and my body is adapting and changing, then I'm good. but if I'm not, then I'm not seeing any results. The people that all of this tends to fall under, if I were to paint the picture of an avatar, it's typically people who had previous injury, and so they're really afraid of hurting themselves.

Maybe they had a bad experience, or maybe they just had a bad injury they're coming from, so they're just really afraid to re-injure themselves. And then the other category of people that falls under are people in advanced age. People in advanced age who start strength training are really afraid of pushing themselves. They just don't.

And so I see this in the gyms all the time. You see older people working out, and their intensity is too low to cause any real progress. Now it's better that they're moving versus not moving. So it's better than nothing. But when I would get clients in advanced age, one of the fast, besides showing them proper technique and all that stuff, it was like, I'm just going to, I'm going to train them with appropriate intensity.

And there's strength. Here's a deal. If you're listening and you're older and this is you and you're getting started, I'm going to tell you something right now. All the studies demonstrate. you will build muscle and get stronger. Your body will adapt. And if you're not seeing anything like that,

because you're afraid to test yourself, push yourself a little bit. And I think you'll be shocked. You'll be shocked at what can happen. Look, we have something called 30 days of coaching. It's free 30 days of coaching from myself, Adam, and Justin. And essentially what you get is you get coaching every single day sent to you with a different topic, whether it be diet or exercise or exercise type or workout programming.

And you get this sent to you. It's 30 days. It's totally free. We've had it for a while. It's very, very popular. Everybody gets it if you go to 30 days of coaching.com. So it's the number 30 days of coaching. com.

It's totally free. Go check it out. You can also find us on Instagram. It's Mind Pump media. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance,

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