
Last year I bought a strength training program from a Canadian bodybuilder named Jeff, and it kind of made me better at everything.
The program was designed for people who don’t have much time to train – busy people cramming 35-minute workouts into lunch breaks. Because you only have time for one or two working sets per exercise, you have to make each set really good. The usual effort won’t do for these precious few sets – each one has to be high quality and high intensity.
High intensity, in a strength training context, means you do enough repetitions that you’re flirting with muscle failure — the point where your muscles physically cannot move the weight another inch.
The author insists that people almost always overestimate how close their normal effort gets them to this max-out point. You might feel like you would fail on the next rep, but if you test that assumption by continuing anyway, you find you can actually do two, three, even four more before you really hit the wall.
I started focusing on these extra reps as the whole point of the workout, and immediately started getting better results than I had in all my years of gym-going.
Those last few reps are the money makers — the best return for your effort you’re going to get, but many people don’t even know they’re possible. My usual stopping point felt like just about the end of the road, but it was actually the beginning of a hidden, hyper-rewarding territory where exceptional results happen.
This discovery made me wonder how often life works like that – where giving an extra 10-15% can pay off as much as the entire rest of the effort – and how often you have no idea. Imagine you could stay an extra half-hour at work and your boss would start paying you ten times your usual rate, but you didn’t know that was even a thing until you were almost retired.
Now I do all my sets like that. I’m way stronger and I no longer have to prod myself to get to the gym, because it’s so much more rewarding than it used to be. Adding the extra work makes the whole thing easier, because the extra rewards climb so fast at that point compared to the extra effort.
I’d previously had a similar breakthrough with meditation, because of a simple instruction from a teacher. She said “When you have the urge to get up and end your session, that’s a cue to stay with it a bit longer. When the urge comes back, maybe get up then. Or maybe stay a bit longer again.”
This is another example of hidden territory, just a little further on, with lots to gain from it. I was now staying present with the small discomforts and impulses that normally chased me off the cushion and stopped my progress. By staying at least a little longer, my practice improved for good, and I gained a reliable way to keep improving.
At the time, I didn’t yet see the general principle: always be curious about what’s just beyond your usual stopping point. Doing more often makes things easier, not harder.
There must be many situations like that, where you’re getting ripped off because you’re stopping in the wrong place. For whatever reason, you learned to get yourself to a certain point, and that point comes to feel like a stop sign: time to pat yourself on the back and go home. You get what you get out of the endeavor, and it seems like that’s it for you.
However, your usual standard is only where you’ve happened to settle for now, and that standard may be working against you. You might be only a few “reps,” or whatever effort-units, from a massive upswing in payoff. But how would you know?
The only way to know whether your usual standards are serving you is to surpass them on a regular basis and see what happens. And each of us has our accustomed standards for everything: how much sleep is enough, how much screen time is okay, how much effort at work to put in, how proactive to be in your friendships, how much or little to eat, how much news to consume, how disciplined to be with household order and cleanliness.
We’ve all settled somewhere on each of these questions and countless others, probably out of inertia rather than principle. It’s unlikely our standards have randomly landed in their respective sweet spots. For each standard you’ve adopted, there might be a significant spike in the payoff not too far beyond it. (Or perhaps you’re doing too much for little gain.)
Whenever I play around with standards, I often discover a better one. If those extra reps have utterly changed my fitness experience, maybe getting to my desk at 7:30 instead of 8:30 will utterly change my at-work experience (it has).
When you push past the usual stopping point and life gets immediately better, you now have a new standard – not just for how much effort is enough, but for the outcomes you expect.
The real paradigm-shifting moment is when you discover that your new standard, both for your effort and your results, is just someone else’s minimum standard. What is “extra” effort to you might be considered totally necessary to others, and what’s an exceptional result to you might be the minimum they’d accept.
That might be why some people do so much better in a given endeavor. It can seem like people getting wildly better results are built differently, or enjoy advantages that are unattainable to you. That might be true, but are you really maxing out your own advantages? It’s easy to attribute someone else’s success to luck, nepotism, or natural talent, when the most likely explanation is that they’re doing something you’re not.
In other words, another person’s standards might be more conducive to living your values than yours currently are, and maybe you can make them your standards.
All I’ve really done at the gym is discover what the people who are stronger than me discovered years ago. Starting earlier at work, and ditching online distractions, is only revealing what more successful entrepreneurs already know.
The great thing is that standards probably account for more than anything, and they are movable. But you do have to experience a new standard to know if it’s better. Someone urging you to “go the extra mile”, “train hard”, or “be at your desk bright and early — that won’t show you what’s waiting for you across the line. You have to step into the new territory yourself to understand what life there can be like.
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There’s still time for a big win this spring
If you want to explore some new territory, there are a few days left to join the One Big Win group starting later this month.
Following a simple framework, each person selects a major personal win they want to achieve, then makes it happen over eight weeks in small, focused chunks of work called Blocks.
You can do your project along with me and the rest of the cohort, or you can choose your own start date. Registration closes soon.

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Running photo by Filip Mroz
{ 21 Comments }
I’ve already maxed out my sleep standards! My schedule is extremely flexible (aka my bedtime is random) and I’ve reduced time wasted to sleep to just 3-5h per day! #PushTheLimits
Wow. Do you feel like you don’t gain any more beyond 3-5h?
For me there’s a big difference between 7 and 7.5
Although, I sometimes experience that pressure to do more (self-inflicted, by reading posts like this) can result in doing nothing. Doing enough is better than nothing!
Just jog single lap of the park, it’s better than sitting on the sofa drinking beer.
Just do one set, it’s better than waiting forever to get psyched up to push the boundaries and skipping the workout entirely.
Just buy some bananas. It’s better than putting off looking up tasty salad recipes then resorting to cup ramen…
I think of it more of a matter of exploring different standards than “always do a little more.” Rather than pressure yourself to do 10% more to get another 10% back, it’s more about being habitually curious about going past the usual stopping point. Sometimes it’s a waste, and sometimes it’s worthwhile many times over. If it’s much better overall, there isn’t really a conflict about whether to do it, because it it’s easier to do more in that case.
Hi David. You are def onto something. If I just put in that extra effort into sleeping, staying in bed for a few more minutes each day, who knows what the results could be?
;-)
Ok that was snarky. I just thought it was so ironic I had to send it.
I’ve been mulling getting up an hour earlier as a sort of discipline, , but you know what? It scares me. I’m afraid to push past that fear of unutterable discomfort.
I think it is probably fear of discomfort that dissuades us from trying out different standards.
It can be interesting to try something just to see where the real discomfort actually lies. When we’re not doing a thing, the dangers and downsides are just in our thoughts, and often they’re not accurate.
When it comes to sleep, I think most of us are probably underinvesting. I get up a little earlier now, but I’m going to bed quite a bit earlier. Overall, it seems much better on the productivity front and the sleep front. All I lose is my idle evening time, which I don’t use well anyway.
All of this reminds me of ultra endurance athlete David Goggins’ “40% rule,” which says that when you feel you’ve reached your physical or mental limit, you’re likely only at 40% of your true potential, and that the limits we perceive are self-imposed. The idea is to push past discomfort to unlock hidden reserves of strength and endurance.
I think Goggins has bit of a, ha, leaky roof, but whether the number is 40% or 70%, he’s definitely onto something.
That sounds about right to me. Although yeah, David Goggins is not like most of us
I love this idea about testing our limits and reframing our potential. But I don’t fully understand the notion that the more efficient rewards that lie just beyond our previous limits will actually make the task “easier.” Perhaps I need to try it to understand it, but it seems that going past my limit in anything would be a “harder” task than just stopping at my accepted limit.
Because getting more payoff in one of your endeavors can make that whole endeavor easier, or make life in general easier. Ease and difficulty isn’t strictly a measurement of how much effort you put in, but the overall change in your life that happens when you do.
For example, getting better results at the gym makes it much easier to get to the gym consistently. When my results were marginal, going to the gym was more like a healthy thing I made myself do, and I would skip or compromise my workouts regularly. The extra effort of the higher-intensity sets are a small price to pay to make the whole enterprise of strength training easier and better. Being stronger and fitter also makes other things easier. I look better, feel better, etc.
Great post, and I totally agree. But I also am a big 80/20 person, so it’s a matter of finding those things for yourself that are maximized with 80/20 and those things for which the extra effort is worth it. It’s also interesting to me how often 2 seemingly opposing philosophies can both be helpful and true. Thanks for the post!
Yes, definitely. 80/20 is a way of remembering the degree of variability in effort/payoff that’s available when you try different standards.
I like this.
I’m at the gym 2-3X week. Religiously (well, mostly). I do a funny thing. I go from the bike to chin ups and in my mind think “15” (reps). And then I do them.
I don’t think “Hmm, I wonder if I can hang in for 2 more?” I think you’ve opened something for me. It’s obvious that progress only happens on the other side of some discomfort. Maybe I’m playing it too safe?
Try it. If you’ve been doing the same number of reps for a while, that number will get easier, and will be challenging the muscles less and less. You’ve probably got lots of room. You could also add a weight belt if you’re already doing lots of reps (15 chinups is a lot!)
I’m quite annoyed by the comments that imply that sleep is a waste of time. Sleep is the foundation upon which your life is built. Therefore if you’re constantly sleep-deprived (maybe because of some arbitrary rule of getting up at 5 am to work out and work) doing anything takes so much longer, since it’s so much harder to concentrate. Not to mention all the physical healing and memory consolidation that takes place when you sleep… All that to say that in my humble opinion sleeping longer is the way of getting more out of your life. A better mood, a much more bearable inner experience, more efficiency in your tasks, etc.
I think they are joking? I’m not sure.
In any case, sleep is another thing where you can play around with higher standards — getting a little more can make a disproportionately large benefit.
I’m looking for a workout that doesn’t take too much time, what was the program you bought?
It’s Jeff Nippard’s “Essentials Program.” The basic program is 3x per week, doing intense sets but not very many.
https://jeffnippard.com/products/the-essentials-program
I really like this guy. Not cocky, scientifically minded, avoids dogmas, always wants to learn more.
In a serendipitous Google search ~ 5 years ago, I found your article on the destructive effects of leaning into convenience. That prompted me to visit your website and sign up for your ‘e-news’.
This article is welcome evolution. It reminds me of my husband’s company, doubling in size over last year. It’s a privately-held, industry leader for commercial machinery.
To continuously achieve their better than previous standards of performance, they are always stretching their existing muscle-strength by servicing evolving customer demands. They invest in worthy relationships.
Truly meaningful outcomes don’t happen without good support and trusted assistance. To maintain success year after year requires other people pulling for our success. We go fast alone (& often burn out) and far together.
Thank you for your service to human empowerment.️
ahang farta