When I talk to customers, clients, and readers a lot of people bring up motivation as their biggest stumbling block.

So you’ve got a plan, you have the skills and knowledge to execute the plan, but you just don’t have that oomph to get the ball rolling. I get that, believe me.

I think I struggle with motivation just as much as the next person. When I fall off my lifting routine due to travel or circumstances out of my control it’s damn hard for me to get going again.

One thing I believe about motivation is that it’s not this *thing* that can be giveth or taketh. I don’t think motivation really exists at all. You don’t need motivation to do anything. You either do the thing, or you don’t do the thing.

But, there certainly can be reasons to do the thing or not do the thing. If it makes you feel good you’re more likely to do the thing. If it makes you feel bad, you’re less likely. If there is another thing you’d rather be doing then you’d probably do that thing instead of the other thing that you’d rather NOT be doing. And so on.

Motivation, in so much that it exists at all, is not static. Buying some new workout gear might give you a reason to get after it for a week or two, but then the buzz wears off. On the other hand, the momentum of six months of regular workouts makes it a lot easier to drag yourself to the gym on Monday after a tiring weekend. Inertia is way more important than whatever motivation is.

I’m going to teach you how to build motivation the Cardigan Mark (Schneider) way.

One of the very most important concepts I try to instill is the idea of pregression and progression with exercise. I don’t care if you can’t lift 300 pounds right now because if you can lift 3 pounds I can eventually get you to lifting 300.

So here’s the big trick with motivation: Stop trying to do The Thing™.

Let’s say you have your workout plan, you have your gym membership, you have your clothes, but you can’t bring yourself to drive to the gym after work and go into the gym and do it.

Fine, no problem.

Start with driving to the gym. Park in the lot. Put your car in reverse and drive home.

Do that for a few days until it feels like a waste of time to drive to the gym just to turn around.

When you’re ready, drive to the gym, park, go inside, say hello to the front desk person get a drink of water and go home if you don’t feel like lifting.

Repeat this until you find yourself in the weight room with enough inertia to just pick up that first weight. For me, if I can get myself to do one rep I’ll probably do the whole workout. Not always, but usually.

Maybe you work out at home. Put your gym clothes on. Sit down in your home gym area. If you decide not to work out, take them off again. Keep doing that until you pick up the weight.

Yes, this might take you 7 weeks to actually do your first workout. I don’t care if it takes that long. If you’re reading this and motivation is your roadblock it has probably been 7 months or more anyway. Build the inertia and let it carry you.

The point is to take action, instead of waiting for that ephemeral motivation fairy to come grant you action.

Helping Jen, Martin, and her crew prepare for their launch of The Bigness Project, got me thinking about the importance of clearly defining what it is you’re training for. Maybe that sounds obvious but I can’t tell you the number of times I see someone whose training is out of alignment with what they really want. Sometimes it’s because they started out wrong, but other times your wants, desires, or needs change without your actions keeping up with them.

If you want to put on 40 pounds of muscle and look like a bodybuilder come summer time then chasing a 600 pound deadlift probably isn’t the quickest, safest, smartest route to your goal. Could getting a triple bodyweight deadlift make you jacked? Possibly? But you’re not going to end up looking like a bodybuilder unless you also get lucky and have amazing genetics. Training like a bodybuilder will make you look like a bodybuilder though.

On the flip side, if you’re training like a bodybuilder and thinking that it’s going to get you to a 600 pound deadlift you’re going to be really jacked and woefully disappointed that you haven’t hit your deadlift goal.

Bringing it down to Earth, if you’re training for general health, resilience, and capability then chasing any one particular lift or going deep into a particular training style may not be all that effective. Training for general physical preparedness is no less a goal, and your actions should reflect it.

In the case of The Bigness Project, Jen had this realization that when the pendulum swung towards training with a focus towards capability it almost became verboten to even talk about training for aesthetics. But you know what? Physical training as a healthy way to modify and accessorize your body is no less a noble goal than training to be able to do a pull-up. Neither one is strictly necessary in every day life, but damned if life isn’t better with it.

Taking a moment to reflect every so often and see if your actions are lined up with what you’re actually after can be super valuable. Try it – you might be surprised.

Here’s a funny thing about fitness:

We don’t know how muscle grows.

Sure, we have some good ideas as to what conditions create muscle growth, or hypertrophy, and bodybuilders have been using these method for centuries at a minimum to build bigger muscles.

But no one actually understands the full depth and breadth of the interactions on a cellular level to the point where they can say definitively: this is how muscle growth occurs.

The closest thing that we really have to a map of the territory is Brad Schoenfeld’s seminal paper, “The Mechanisms of Muscle Hypertrophy.” Read the paper if you like, but the conditions can be summarized and memorized very easily:

1. Mechanical Tension: The muscles lengthened under load.
2. Muscle Damage: Micro-traumas to the muscle tissue.
3. Metabolic Stress: Byproducts of muscle energy utilization build up in the muscle.

When you have one or more of these conditions the result is that the muscle grows. Really, it’s as simple as that.

Therefore, it stands to reason that if you can increase one of those factors, you might get more hypertrophy. Might.

In the 1970s a young Japanese man started experimenting with restricting blood flow return in the hopes of increasing the build-up of metabolites and stimulating greater muscle growth. As the story goes he applied his techniques very successfully when he underwent knee surgery for torn ligaments and after six months in a plaster cast his muscles hadn’t atrophied at all thanks to his protocol. He later went on to study the method at the University of Tokyo where it was dubbed “Kaatsu training.”

The broad strokes are simple: Restrict return blood flow around the muscle group, and then perform a lot of relatively light reps to build up metabolites.

For reasons that should be fairly obvious this works best on discrete muscle groups that are easy to occlude, like the arms or legs. It would be hard to do on your lats.

Now this is where I have to tell you I have always been extremely hesitant and critical of BFR training. The weight of evidence is clear that it is effective. In short, it works. But the reality of occluding blood flow is always going to increase risk, and the limited nature of the body of research may not fully amortize the risks in a wider population. I would suggest you pursue this method with extreme care. I would argue that it’s abnormal to occlude blood flow beyond what is caused by the swelling of muscle under normal training circumstances, and there may be second-order effects that haven’t been picked up. Personally, I would never use this with clients. Additionally the risk of injury or damage under improper execution is extreme, and as with any complex procedure there is always risk that someone will screw it up.

Now that you know where I stand on it, and you are taking your own personal responsibility and making an informed decision, here’s how to do it:

The Method

You’ll need a way to occlude blood flow. What prompted this little experiment was a Dutch company launching a Kickstarter for inexpensive and very functional BFR straps sending me a pair to try out. I have no financial ties or incentive with the company, but I can tell you they work and the price is fair for a tool that makes it easier. You could use any old gym band, but it can be extremely uncomfortable to get the tension right.

Speaking of tension, the goal is a 7 out of 10, where 10 would be extremely painful and completely constricting bloodflow. If your limbs get tingly or numb it is too tight.

One way to approach it is to superset opposing muscle groups and then do three sets of 30-15-15 reps. So like in the video you might start with curls, do tricep extensions, and then go back to curls.

You do this in one continuous set, paying attention to keeping a slow-ish methodical tempo throughout. Obviously if you’re starting with a set of 30 you’re going to want to go pretty light. The goal here is not to create a ton of mechanical tension, it’s simply to build up those metabolic byproducts.

When you’ve completed all 60 reps, release the cuff. Don’t release it in between.

Here’s a short video of an arm session with the Marshall Roy the other day: