Fitness Advice I No Longer Follow

When I started my fitness journey, there was one particularly noticeable repercussion that sort of bothered me. And it wasn’t the extra wash loads, or even my new-found, borderline toxic, emotional attachment to my Garmin. It was the sudden and unsolicited advice that suddenly came at me. Do more. Push harder. Never miss a session. Eat more protein. Eat less protein. If you are not exhausted afterwards, did it even count?…

Like a good little sheep, I largely followed what the wholly un-qualified around me were preaching. But after years of running, strength training, HYROX, and generally treating exercise as a hobby that occasionally gets out of hand, I now have what I call advice boundaries. I am considerably less interested in following trend-lead fitness advice, and much more interested in doing what actually works.

Here is the fitness advice I no longer follow.

You need to train every day

I used to see a rest day as something you earned after a particularly hard week.

Now I see it as part of the week.

Training more is not automatically training better. If you are constantly tired, your performance is flat and every session feels like an effort, adding another workout is unlikely to be the answer.

Some weeks I will train hard. Other weeks life gets in the way, I sleep badly, I have plans or my body simply needs a break. Missing a session is not going to undo months of training.

Consistency matters. But consistency does not mean doing exactly the same amount every single week.

If you are not sore, it was not a good workout

DOMS used to feel like a report card.

If I could barely sit down the next day, clearly I had done a good job. If I felt completely normal, I wondered whether I should have worked harder.

Now I am much more interested in whether a workout actually helped me progress.

Sometimes a great session leaves you sore. Sometimes it leaves you feeling energised. Sometimes it is deliberately easy because it is preparing you for something harder later in the week.

Being able to walk down the stairs normally is not a sign that your workout was pointless.

You should always be pushing yourself

There is a difference between challenging yourself and making every session unnecessarily difficult.

When I was newer to training, I thought the goal was to finish every run faster, lift heavier or leave the gym feeling completely destroyed.

But if every session is hard, nothing is easy enough to help you recover.

Easy runs should be easy. Strength sessions do not all need to be maximal. Some workouts exist to build fitness gradually rather than provide a dramatic endorphin rush.

Ironically, learning when not to push has made it easier to push when it actually matters.

You need to earn your food

This is probably the piece of advice I most strongly wish I had ignored sooner.

Exercise is not a transaction where calories are currency.

You do not need to run because you ate dessert. You do not need to skip breakfast because you are going out for dinner. And you certainly do not need to punish yourself for having a weekend that involved more food than your usual Monday to Friday routine.

If you train regularly, food is part of your training. Carbohydrates are useful. Protein is useful. Fat is useful. And sometimes food is simply enjoyable.

The goal is to fuel your life, not spend it trying to compensate for it.

Your fitness tracker knows best

I love data. Give me a Garmin and I will happily spend an unreasonable amount of time looking at my pace, heart rate and recovery metrics.

But numbers are information, not instructions.

There are days when your watch says you are ready to train and you feel dreadful. There are days when it tells you your recovery is questionable and you have a brilliant session.

Technology can help you spot patterns. It cannot tell you exactly how you feel.

Your body gets a vote.

You need to choose between cardio and strength

For a long time, fitness advice was divided into camps.

You were either a runner or a lifter. Cardio was apparently destroying your gains and strength training was apparently making you slow.

Then hybrid training came along and made the whole argument feel slightly outdated.

I like running. I like lifting. I like HYROX. I have no interest in choosing a single fitness identity.

The trick is not necessarily choosing one form of exercise. It is learning how to combine different types of training without turning every session into another opportunity to exhaust yourself.

You have to train even when you have no motivation

I used to believe discipline meant doing the workout regardless of how I felt.

There is some truth in that. Motivation is unreliable and sometimes you absolutely do need to put your trainers on and get moving.

But there is a difference between not wanting to train and genuinely needing to rest.

Sometimes the most disciplined thing you can do is admit that you are tired, take the evening off and go to bed.

Not every skipped workout is a failure of discipline. Sometimes it is good judgement.

The harder the workout, the better the result

The fitness industry has become very good at making intensity look impressive.

Sweat. Exhaustion. Heart rate screenshots. Before and after photos. People collapsing happily on gym floors.

But fitness is not a competition to see who can make a workout feel the worst.

A hard workout is useful when it is hard for a reason.

Sometimes the most productive session is the one that feels almost disappointingly manageable because it leaves you able to train well again tomorrow.

You need to look like you train

This one is perhaps less explicit, but it is everywhere.

The assumption that being fit has to look a certain way. Visible abs. Defined arms. A particular body shape. A particular size.

The more I train, the less interested I am in using appearance as the main measurement of fitness.

Can I run further? Can I run faster? Can I carry something heavy? Can I recover between efforts? Can I get through a race and still feel like myself afterwards?

Those things tell me considerably more about my fitness than whether my stomach looks flat on a particular morning.

You need to optimise everything

There is now a fitness solution for virtually every part of your day.

The perfect pre workout meal. The perfect recovery drink. The perfect sleep routine. The perfect training split. The perfect supplements. The perfect shoes.

Some of these things are useful. None of them are magic.

At some point, optimisation can become another form of procrastination.

You do not need to have everything perfectly dialled in before you can make progress. Training consistently, eating reasonably well, sleeping enough and enjoying what you are doing will get you surprisingly far.

You should never miss a week

Perhaps the biggest change in my approach is that I no longer think of fitness as something you either do perfectly or abandon.

You will have busy weeks. You will go on holiday. You will get ill. You will have weddings, birthdays, work deadlines, late nights and weekends where the only exercise you manage is walking to brunch.

None of it matters as much as you think it does.

Fitness is not built in one perfect week. It is built over months and years.

And that is probably the advice I believe most now: you do not need to do everything perfectly. You just need to keep coming back.