Half of them never got sore. Their legs grew the same amount.

Today’s letter

The three weeks that decide whether you quit in week two

Race season starts again this fall, and a Hyrox block runs twelve to sixteen weeks, so the gyms right now are full of women in week one. You can pick them out on the stairs two days later, going down sideways, holding the rail. The rule everybody repeats is that if you can still walk down normally, you went too easy.

That rule has a birthday. In 1982 Jane Fonda began producing her aerobics workout videos, and two phrases from them went everywhere: feel the burn, and no pain, no gain. She used them for the idea of working out past the point where the muscle aches. The saying itself was already three centuries old by then and had nothing to do with muscles at all. Benjamin Franklin printed a version of it in 1734, in Poor Richard’s Almanack, as advice about money.

“Why can’t I stick to anything?”

She is not a quitter, and her history says so. Kids raised on shift work, a degree finished at night, a mortgage carried through two bad years: she has done harder things than a twenty minute workout. So when the plan says three sessions a week for twelve weeks, she believes she can do three sessions a week for twelve weeks.

Then day one arrives, and day one is built to hurt. The class goes hard from the first minute, because that is what a first session is supposed to feel like. Two days later she cannot lower herself onto a chair without using her hands, session two gets skipped, and by the third week the plan is over. Nobody told her the first session was the problem, so she assumed she was.

Here’s what gets me.

None of that was her fault. The soreness was never the measure of the work.

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Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study that set out to test whether the pain does anything at all.

Researchers at Northern Arizona University and the University of Utah took fourteen healthy adults, eight men and six women, none of whom had done any leg resistance training in the previous year. Everyone was put on the same machine, a leg cycle that drives the pedals back toward you while you push against them, for twenty minutes, three times a week, for eight weeks.

The difference was the start. One group went straight into the full session, which is the version almost everyone gets. The other group got three weeks of ramping up first, beginning at five minutes on the lowest setting and adding a little each time. By the end of the study the total work done was equal for both groups. Only one group ever got sore.

What they found

Northern Arizona University, 2011. Flann et al., Journal of Experimental Biology.

The damaging first week (they got sore)

Creatine kinase, the blood marker for muscle damage, peaked around 580 units per liter in week five, against a normal reading of 150 or below. Soreness scores were much higher early on. Thigh muscle volume rose 7.5 percent and strength rose 26 percent.

The three week ramp up (they did not)

That same marker never once crossed the normal line, and the soreness scores stayed low the whole way through. Thigh muscle volume rose 6.5 percent and strength rose 25 percent. The gap between the two groups was too small to count.

Same total work, same muscle, same strength. One group simply paid for it in soreness.

In other words, the pain bought her nothing. It was not the price of the result. It was a side effect of starting too fast.

Her discipline had nothing to do with it. Neither does yours.

So why does the first week hurt so much more than the tenth?

Soreness appears to be the body’s answer to a pattern of loading it has not met in a while, and it is worst when a muscle is lengthening under weight: the lowering half of a squat, the step down off a box, the last lunge of a set. Those are the contractions that produce the highest force, which is also why they build strength so well. Give a cold muscle all of that force at once and it leaks creatine kinase into the blood, and the ache lands a day or two later. Introduce the same force in small steps and the muscle adapts without the ache. In this study the growth signal measured inside the muscle rose by a similar amount either way, which suggests the building was going on in both groups, sore or not.

She never stood a chance in that first week. Neither did you, I’d bet.

That’s the part no one says out loud… a plan that wrecks you on day one is not a harder plan. It is a worse start.

Try this today

If you are starting something this week, a race block, a strength class, the rowing machine, anything, borrow the ramp from the study. Do the first session at about a third of what you think you could manage: five to eight minutes, the lowest resistance, the lightest weight on the rack. Stop while it still feels easy. Add two or three minutes, or one more round, each session, three sessions a week. By week three you are at the full twenty minutes and you have not missed a single day. Keep the effort where the study kept it, at somewhat hard, never all out. Soreness is not the target. Pain inside a joint is a different thing from a sore muscle, and that one is worth taking to a doctor or a physical therapist.

The ramp is not the easy version. It is the version you are still doing in week twelve.

Promise me you’ll try it today? Saying it out loud is half of what makes it stick.

I’m in. I’ll try it today →

This works because a muscle answers to the work you give it, not to how much it hurt afterward. Nothing about the gentle start makes it a lesser program. It only removes the week that knocks you out of your own plan.

The seven people who ramped up finished with the same legs as the seven who limped through week four… and not one of them ever had a reason to skip a session.

You have been told since 1982 that the ache was the proof, and you believed a workout tape instead of a study, the same as everyone else did. That is not a character flaw. There’s still time for you.

If a plan broke in week two and you have carried that ever since…

It was never your fault.

— Cole

P.S. How many workout plans have you started and stopped inside the first month? Just the number, hit reply. I’ll tell you tomorrow where most women land.

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