TL;DR
Momentum takes time to build and very little time to lose. Protect the habits, health, and people that make progress possible. Push when the opportunity is there, but don’t confuse pushing hard with ignoring the warning signs. If you’re rebuilding, accept where you are and earn your way forward.
Momentum is one of the hardest things to build.
In training. In business. In life.
It’s also one of the hardest things to keep once you have it. And when you lose it, getting it back is a hell of a lot harder than you think.
The problem is that you usually appreciate it most after it’s gone.
When training is rolling, you expect another good week. When business is growing, you start planning around that growth. You get used to things moving forward. Eventually, you stop paying attention to everything that made that possible.
Then something changes.
You get hurt. You stop doing the work that mattered. You chase something that looks better. A few missed sessions become a few missed weeks. A business decision that seemed reasonable pulls you away from the people you’re supposed to serve.
Now you’re trying to get back to a place you used to complain wasn’t good enough.
I’ve done all of that.
I Thought Keeping Momentum Meant Never Stopping
Back when I was competing, I thought keeping momentum meant never stopping. I trained through tweaks, rushed recovery, and treated missing a meet like something I couldn’t afford to do.
I could always find a reason to keep pushing.
The next meet was coming. The training cycle was already underway. I had worked too hard to back off now.
That wasn’t momentum. That was borrowing against it.
Looking back, I think about what two weeks here and two weeks there might have bought me. I can’t prove how many more years I would have competed. But I know the alternative I chose: the injuries kept stacking up until my body made the decision for me.
In When to Back it Down, I wrote about how a major injury could force a lifter away from a main lift for weeks. I admitted that was how I had handled it. Instead of making the adjustment myself, I waited until there wasn’t a choice.
That’s a stupid way to manage something you claim matters more than almost anything else.
You protect your equipment. You check the rack. You make sure somebody can spot you. Then you ignore the one thing you can’t replace when it breaks.
I’m not telling you every uncomfortable session is a warning to stop. Hard training is uncomfortable. You have days when you feel like shit and still have productive work to do.
But if something keeps getting worse, your solution can’t always be to get more fired up. Sometimes you need to change the session. Sometimes you need somebody qualified to help you figure out what’s happening.
Being willing to work has never been my biggest problem. Knowing when more work was taking me further away from the goal was a different story.
The Session You Can Repeat
There’s an entry in my Mashed Up Meathead training log from October 2015 that says more about this than another story about a big lift.
I had squatted the day before. During the next day’s back session, I wanted to do some pulls. But my legs and the rest of my body weren’t cooperating, so I didn’t.
I still trained my back. The session included pulldowns and rows, with attention to how I performed the movements and where I felt the work.
The important part was the decision. Wanting to pull didn’t make pulling the right choice that day.
That is a lesson I wish I had applied more often when I was competing.
A productive session has to fit into something bigger than itself. What does it let you do next week? What does it cost you? Are you building toward the goal, or just satisfying the need to prove you can still go hard?
You can win the argument in your head and lose the next six months.
Momentum in training means stacking good sessions while you’re healthy enough to keep stacking them. Some sessions will be heavy. Some will build the things that allow the heavy work to continue. Some will need to change.
You don’t have to love every one of them. You do have to understand what they’re for.
Getting Back in Shape Is Work, Too
Even now, when I take extended time off, I know it can cost me two to three months of work just to get back in shape.
Not to get stronger. Just to get back to the starting line.
That’s my experience, not a recovery timetable for everybody reading this. But the point matters: the time you lose isn’t always limited to the time you were away.
You come back with the memory of what you could do. Your body comes back with what it can do now.
Those are often two different things.
You remember the weights. You remember how much work you could handle. You remember getting through a session without having to think about every part of it.
It’s easy to let those memories write a program you aren’t ready to perform.
Then you do too much, spend the next several days paying for it, and wonder why you can’t get consistent.
The comeback isn’t a sprint back to where you were. It’s a slow, ugly crawl through work you thought you were finished doing.
Accepting that doesn’t make the work easier. It keeps you from making it harder than it needs to be.
Start with what you can repeat. Build from there. Let the work you’re actually completing tell you when to add more.
Your old numbers will still be there in the logbook. They don’t need to be on the bar today.
We Learned the Same Lesson at elitefts
From 1998 on, elitefts grew every year. In 2008, we were up 5%.
Then 2009 hit, and we were down 7%.
We didn’t see it coming, and we didn’t know how to fix it.
After years of growth, it’s easy to confuse what you’ve built with something that will keep working on its own. When the numbers turn, you find out how much you actually understand.
We cut expenses. We got careful with every dollar. We brought in people outside our culture to reach new markets, and it backfired.
I was responsible for those decisions.
The growth didn’t come back until we got back to who we were. That took a lot longer than one good quarter.
To understand why, look at how this company started.
There were lifters and coaches with questions. We shared what we knew and brought other people into the conversation. The Q&A gave people access to experience they might never have found in their own gym.
By 2008, our second gym and showroom was an old tractor dealership in Ohio. Different generations of lifters came together there to train, help each other, and pass along what they had learned.
That was the culture. You could see it in what people did for each other.
When you’ve built a company around those relationships, you can’t treat them like something separate from the business.
I’ve written about this in The Business of Strength: the free information helped build trust. That trust helped build the company.
If you lose sight of why people trust you, reaching more people doesn’t automatically solve the problem.
Growth Can Hide What You’re Neglecting
A good month can make a bad decision look smart.
A PR can make a bad training cycle look smart.
You got the result, so you assume the process must be right. Maybe it was. Maybe you got away with something. You need to be willing to look.
In training, ask whether you’re recovering, whether your technique is holding together, and whether the work is taking you toward the goal.
In business, ask whether you’re serving the people who made the company possible. Are you still delivering what you said you would? Are you listening? Are you protecting the standards that earned their trust?
You need answers while things are going well, not just after they fall apart.
This doesn’t mean you never change. We’ve changed plenty at elitefts. Products change. Technology changes. The way we deliver information changes.
But change needs a purpose beyond being tired of doing what already works.
The same applies to your training. Don’t throw out a productive plan because you’ve become bored with the work that’s making you better.
Keep Your Foot on the Gas, but Know What You’re Driving
Years ago, I wrote that when things are moving forward, you smash the pedal to the floor and run it as hard as you can, because sooner or later it’s coming to a halt.
I still believe that.
When you have momentum, recognize it. Show up. Do the work. Take advantage of the opportunity instead of assuming it will still be there whenever you feel like getting serious again.
But use some judgment.
Training through a problem until it becomes a major injury doesn’t protect momentum. Neither does chasing growth at the expense of the culture that built your business.
You have to protect the ability to keep going.
That means doing the unexciting work. Making the adjustment before you’re forced to. Staying consistent when the novelty wears off. Paying attention when things finally feel easy.
And if you’ve already lost it, quit arguing with where you are.
You don’t need to punish yourself for falling behind. You need to start doing the work you can build on.
It won’t all come back because you want it to. One great session won’t erase months away. One good business decision won’t immediately undo a year of bad ones.
It comes back the same way it came the first time.
One session. One day. One decision at a time.
Live, Learn, Pass On.
