There’s a kind of person who needs to hear this. Probably 90% of people stop doing something once it gets hard or never try in the first place. There’s also a kind of person who will run themselves into the ground with this mentality.
The hardest part isn’t doing it, or doing it until your legs fall off. The hardest part is doing it in the way that produces the best result. Sometimes that means HTFU and finish the workout. Sometimes it means “micro-quitting” to not destroy yourself for tomorrow’s workouts. A lot of judgement and experience needed.
If you’re goal is to finally finish the local Turkey Trot (I can’t help but feel like that’s who this article is aimed at) then “micro-quitting” a couple workouts is going to be pretty deleterious. A C25K is what 20 runs total? Skipping one of them cuts out a full 5% of your entire exercise volume. Different story for some AG training for Kona.
Also there are only so many CPU cycles to give to “pushing it” on a daily, monthly and yearly basis and its not just the brain power to focus on athletic goals, but the brain power we put into all aspects of life. You can’t perpetually run your CPU overheated.
Generally I find that during the week, I don’t “train”. I just exercise. I’ll just do whatever workouts work into my day to day life. I am not interested in killing myself mentally nor physically for workouts because I have too much responsibilities at work. Based on this article, my entire week of sport is micro quitting oriented. I just go with the flow. I still get 10-12 hrs of training in Monday to Friday (typically a mid day workout and an evening workout after everyone has had dinner…I just have a snack and literally eat the real dinner solo at 10 pm…I can’t get up early for work, because I have to be on the job before most of the team is up and running as we have some operations in Europe and Asia, so I need to be on as soon as I wake up.
The times I have tried to train with a purpose during the week, it all feels to stressful, so largely I am in micro quit mode all weeks all the time. Weekends, the game is on.
On the weekends, when I have to devote less CPU cycles to work, I actually train, with specific workouts, with specific goals
there’s some interesting psychological research suggesting that what we call ‘willpower’ is a finite quantity in any given period of time. if you’re constantly resisting temptation, or pushing yourself to do hard things, you eventually run out, as you say, of processing power. quit mode sounds like an effective way to do the important thing (exercise) while minimizing the willpower cost.
