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I'd disagree that giving up on that workout was a good idea. I'm heavily involved in the powerlifting community, and there's a well-known phenomenon where people try and talk themselves into taking an extra rest day or two before "leg day" because leg day is so important that they absolutely have to feel 100% when they do it...problem is they do this every week, so instead of doing 100 leg workouts a year at 95%, they end up doing 70 leg workouts at 100%. And trust me, that's not a good trade-off.

The thing to realize is your mind is just trying to trick you into getting out of something, because leg day is hard.

Cardio isn't powerlifting. Every single workout is more or less the same. I worked out three times a day on cardio because the balls of my feet would get irritated after about 45 minutes, so I couldn't just do 3 hours in one sitting. The calculus changes when you're doing 14-21 workouts a week.

I want to do more cardio. Even now, I wish I could get on the machine. I've come to need it just like my morning coffee. I have to keep myself away from it so I don't get injured.

It will take me probably another year before my body adjusts to the massive amounts of cardio I want to do.

If every single workout is the same, where is the progress?

(Or are you just talking about which exercises you do?)

I talk more about it in the comment below, but the latter is correct. Everything around the workout can be heavily refined because I do the same exercise every time. I vary time, intensity, range of motion, and sometimes even the basic approach I take towards performing the exercise, but my gym sessions have revolved around my arc trainer session for a few months now.

Eventually I will find an exercise to add onto my routine, I've experimented with kettlebells, but haven't yet committed to them. My ideal setup would be a home-built power rack so I can do basic compound lifts. For various reasons I've not taken on that project yet.

Tommy Kono would disagree with you. Albeit he was a weightlifter.

Also, I used to lift. Many times, I wished I would have bailed on an ineffective workout rather than push through. If I'm not feeling right, I'm prone to getting injured. I will not work out with a trainer again for this reason. I want a strict routine, doing the same build up every time will allow me both to refine in the direction of greater comfort, and to allow me to sense when something's off.

My lifting strategy is to take it very slowly, do not worry a single bit about making gains on any particular day. Injury is to be ruthlessly stamped out through borderline excessive caution and getting to know your body very, very well. I would rather skip a whole month of lifting than get a single injury, no matter how minor.

In fact, I'd rather not lift at all than have more than the remotest possibility of a lifting injury. That shit just sucks way, way too much. Once the weight on the bar gets heavy, I want to take exactly zero chances. When I get back on that particular horse, I want to still be doing it when I'm eighty years old.

I'd be curious to hear more about this, both why you were wanting to train 3 hours a day and how you approached refining your routine. Any chance you've blogged about this somewhere? (The idea of building a precise routine so your music trigger lands at the right moment resonates with me.)

I trained three times a day because my body can't handle doing one 3 hour session. When I started really going heavy, I was going through a heartbreak and wanted to throw my efforts into something other than wallowing in self-misery. I kept it up even after I pulled out of it. Never let a good heartbreak go to waste.

My routine evolved slowly over time. The key is spotting and removing barriers to doing more. I put my jacket on the machine on the left, my towel goes on the right. My iPhone goes in the cup holder, my gym bag just under the cup holder. My gym bag has an organization scheme, everything in there has a place and there's a routine for putting everything there before I get in my car.

Basically, every little thing I can look at and try to improve, I do, and don't worry about the time or expense. I've gone through three pairs of sneakers to try to find the right kind that won't hurt the balls of my feet. Cheap ones don't work well, so I'm moving on to New Balance. I had minimalist shoes, those hurt my feet, but not enough to where I can't work out. The shoes have to be 8 1/2 or 9 wide, normal doesn't cut it.

My music routine has shifted over time. I used to just play anything, then I went to a specific playlist so I could try HIIT. Whenever the chorus would come on, I'd go really hard. That got unsustainable as my times on the machine went up and now I just do it flat, with my whole playlist so I don't get bored of the music. Maybe in six months to a year I'll be able to experiment with it again.

The machine itself has settings, my approach to these have refined over time as well. I used to set the incline all the way to 20 and slowly increase the resistance over time. Now I set both the incline and the resistance as I'm comfortable and just trust that over time my body will adjust and the numbers will go up.

The key to getting started, I think, is to pick something that can be "routine-ized". I use a machine instead of running because I have a lot more 'knobs' to tweak. Classes I have to take on someone else's schedule, I used to do dance classes but not anymore. I tried the bike machine when I first started going to the gym but gravitated to the Arc machine pretty quickly and fell in love with it.

At first the big battle will be just showing up. I started with the simple goal of going there once every day. Didn't matter if I actually worked out or not, or what I did, just get to the gym that day and I gave myself permission to feel like I'm accomplishing my fitness goals.

Then when it starts getting hard, I gave myself permission to fall back to earlier goals as needed / desired. I can cut workouts short, but not skip them. I always make sure I'm moving forward.

There finally comes a point where moving forward is moving backward. You don't want working out to overtake the rest of your life. But you have to cut back with purpose, not just do it because of reasons. You can put it on the back burner, but know why you're doing that and when you're ready to put it back on the front burner.

I'm injured right now, so I'm allowing other things to take priority. They may keep priority even after I heal up. But getting back in the saddle and getting back to work pushing my limits is always on my mind.

(Very belated) thanks for posting this! This was really helpful to me, I recognized some of my current approach (especially making myself go to gym whether I work out or not), but it's given me a strategy for how I can approach overall improvement.

I agree and would go further by saying that improvement only happens with quantity at the interface between your normal output and your limitations. So those times of uncomfortable struggle against great personal odds... That is where you begin to improve. And like you mention, this is the case with just about everything.