The Power of Constraints
Simplifying Workouts for Better Results
Humans love complexity. Despite what I believe to be our core mission on this planet, to create order from disorder, we love doing the opposite. That’s doubly true for people starting something for the first time. They don’t know what’s important yet, so they flail around in the general direction of the proper course of action and hope for the best. Beginners take a clumsy shotgun approach and get drawn and quartered by all the things they try to implement at once.
Freedom is a great thing in the right context, but it can be a barrier in the wrong one.1 Sometimes, as is the case with workout beginners, we need to limit our options so that we can focus on moving forward in a single direction.
What Are Constraints And Why Do We Need Them?
Constraints are limitations you place on yourself to limit actions that are not in line with your intended outcome. They act like gutter guards in a bowling lane or blocked off areas of a video game because the developers don’t trust you with that much freedom. The right constraints only allow for “correct” action, thereby preventing you from getting mired in things that don’t matter and don’t bring you closer to your goals.
Let’s get more granular about why constraints are important.
Constraints Reduce The Inertia or Psychological Load of Starting
When faced with the prospect of working out, do you think it would be easier to get motivated to do a workout that was only 2-4 exercises and had a time restriction of 30 minutes, or a workout that had 6-8 exercises and was over an hour long?
Aside from the obvious differences in doing the workout itself, overcoming the inertia of starting is easier when the mountain isn’t so steep. As James Clear says, we need to “master the art of showing up”, and one of the first steps toward doing that is lowering the psychological barrier to starting. Well-placed constraints can remove some of that friction.
Starting Strength is excellent at this. They distilled their workouts to such a degree that it seems manageable for anyone. This, for instance, is an example of their strength program for a complete novice.
Remove Ambiguity and Friction of The Workout Itself
In the case of the example above, not only will you be more inclined to do this workout, completing it will be far easier than a more complex, longer workout. Very few beginners have the tolerance for workouts that drag on for an hour or more and have tons of different exercises, each with their own potential logistical issues in a busy gym. Reducing workouts to 30-45 minutes is an easy way to improve adherence to the entire program.
Simple, repeated workouts also allow us to learn the movement, easily measure progress to determine whether we’re actually getting stronger, and mitigate constant soreness, which can be counterproductive to performance and results over time.
Minimize Distraction and “Shiny Object Syndrome”
If consistency is the biggest predictor of success, discipline and patience are a collective close second and all are inextricably linked to each other. You may be tempted to switch programs when things “aren’t working”, because you believe the outcome you seek is behind the next shiny workout door. It isn’t.
Trust me when I say that to collect meaningful feedback, you need to give a program enough time to bear fruit. That could be weeks if you’re measuring performance, but it could be far longer if you’re looking for drastic strength or aesthetic improvements. But progress will be far slower if you “switch things up” every time you get bored.
And I get it, novelty is exciting, but you’ll require constant acclimation to new exercises, soreness will fetter your performance, and you’ll have a difficult time attaining and measuring progress due to the infrequency with which you return to exercises.
Novelty can be a good thing in the right circumstances, but you’re a beginner that is prone to distraction. We need to pull out all the stops to keep you on course.
How To Create Workout Constraints
Now that we’ve covered why constraints are important for beginners, or anyone for that matter, let’s go over how to implement them.
Use Implementation Intentions
Constraints by their nature are designed to reduce ambiguity. Perhaps one of the best ways to do that is through implementation intentions, which are clearly expressed statements that designate details like when, where, and how we’re going to perform an action.
If you want a quick, easy, and modern way to implement (😉) implementation intentions with regard to your workouts, place them on your calendar. Each calendar event can clarify when, where, and for how long you’ll be working out. Personal training cements this further by adding a second party to ensure your adherence to these intentions.
Taking this even further, a pre-existing structured workout program removes any ambiguity about what you’ll do once in the gym. If you want to remove even MORE ambiguity, have backup exercises ready to go for anything that’s unavailable.
Limit Yourself To Readily Available Equipment
In a perfect world, we would go to a gym and have unrestricted access to all of the equipment all of the time. Unless you’re prepared to go to a 24-hour access gym at 3am, that’s a pipe dream.
A busy gym can throw a wrench into even the best laid workout plans. That’s why I often suggest that people build their workouts using readily available equipment. For most people, that means dumbbells and machines. Racks, barbells, and plates can get expensive for a gym when you need to buy enough to serve everyone that wants to use them. Racks are fought over with the intensity of two stray dogs fighting over a meaty bone after days without food. Because I value program consistency over occasional optimization, I might tell clients to forget the racks altogether.
Dumbbell programs work well because they exist in the middle ground between hardcore lifters that only want racks and barbells and people too afraid to use free weights, which often leaves them underutilized. They’re also easy to share with others, because nothing needs to be switched out. Coupled with a handful of machines, you can get an effective workout with minimal interference.
Minimize The Number of Exercises
No gym newbies need to be doing long workouts. For a three times per week program full of compounds like squats, hinges, presses, and rows, three to four exercises per day is plenty. To take this a step further, I would argue that for anyone that simply wants to get the health benefits of resistance training, wants to be generally strong, and wants to at least look like they spend some time in the gym, a three times a week full body program with a handful of compound exercises is all they would ever need.
Adding exercises to a program unnecessarily creates a greater mental barrier to starting, adds time to the workout that carries diminishing returns the longer the workout drags on, adds more potential logistical issues, adds more things to track, etc. If you’re the kind of person that doesn’t like repeating the same thing for long stretches, however, you can periodically swap out exercises.
Minimize Or Time Rest Periods
Social media has ruined many things for us, but I’m not sure there is a more aggrieved victim of its tantalizing force than rest periods. What was supposed to be two or three minutes of rest—enough to catch your breath—becomes ten minutes of doom scrolling.
Most workout apps and watches have built-in timers. Use them liberally and adhere to them devoutly. When the timer goes off, start the next set. No exceptions. Make adjustments if the rest isn’t long enough, but the timer is your master. You’ll find that your workouts are suddenly shorter and you have more time for everything else in your day.
Most people that don’t love working out adopt a “get in, get out” mentality, yet they fall into the black hole of their phone screen all the same. Speaking of distraction, this is a good segue into the last way to create constraints.
Simplify Workout Tracking
There are a ton of great apps for tracking workouts these days: Hevy, Strong, FitBod, Jefit, StrongLifts, etc. You may also use apps through a coach like Trainerize (my software of choice), TrueCoach, TrainHeroic, etc. These apps can absolutely make tracking your workouts easier, but they aren’t without pitfalls.
Tracking workouts in the same place where you have nearly unlimited potential for distraction works for some and doesn’t for others. If you want to store your workouts digitally but find the prospect of learning an app unpalatable and overwhelming, simply track your workouts in the notes app of your phone.
But if you really want to remove distractions and simplify tracking, get a nice notebook and track your workouts there. Despite the price, I love these. Great quality and lots of fun colors and animals to choose from.2
There are no wrong answers here. For some people, recording your numbers in an app is easier. For others, removing distractions and simply recording your workouts in a paper notebook works best. Do whatever you need to do to make your life easier to keep you showing up and engaged.
Summary
For anyone struggling with consistency, improving that should be your primary goal. Constraints are the restrictions we put in place to ensure proper future action and provide the best possible avenue for success. To engineer a well-constrained environment or approach, you must think about it. It doesn’t happen by accident.
Use the strategies I outlined above, and keep showing up.
Highly recommend the book The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz as it covers the topic of freedom of choice and why too much choice can be counterproductive.
I am not getting paid for this. I don’t have that kind of influence yet. I just think these are great.