You Don't Get Stronger in the Gym

The work breaks you down.

Sleep builds you back.

My son was born and I struggled on multiple levels for months.

I was showing up physically, but I wasn't all there. I was at the gym before five, coffee in hand, running the morning classes. But I was not really there. The way I have described it since is that I was walking and tripping my way through a dream. I felt like I was running on a delay. People would tell me things and I would forget them, I was failing at standard tasks, and I couldn't keep things straight. I drove to work and could not tell you about the drive…I was basically teleporting.

Before I noticed all of that, I noticed my training being impacted. Movements and weights which should have been an easy win felt heavy, and the entire concept of overall wellness felt daunting. I would finish a workout session feeling like I hadn't actually accomplished anything. At times, I felt like I was wasting my time. How was I supposed to help people with their wellness if I couldn't even handle my own? So I did what most people do when the numbers stop moving and shit gets hard, I assumed I was soft, weak, and just had to suck it up, so I pushed harder.

That's when coaching got tough, the early classes were challenging in ways I had never experienced. Not the art of coaching, but the talking and being present in the moment with clients. Being articulate and useful to a group of people before sunrise took everything I had, and when you are already working at a deficit, it made the rest of the day that much more difficult.

He wasn't a hard baby…maybe I was just weak (slightly kidding). We were not going through anything special, the same struggles most new parents are presented with, and it was still enough to take me apart at the seams. It showed me how small of a margin we have when maintaining our health. It also gave me a ton of empathy for new parents and a ton of respect for the new parents we had over the years still showing up. I also realized how many people are walking around right now in exactly that state, assuming the problem is their discipline, blaming discipline or perceived lack thereof.



For me, it wasn't my discipline, I was not undertrained or lacked the "toughness" for lack of a better word, I was under-recovered. Those are two different problems which have a lot of the same symptoms, but they need opposite fixes.

You Don't Improve in the workout

The Ardent Way: Restoration | Part One of Three

The workout breaks you down, and your recovery builds you back.

The act of training doesn't make you stronger, it actually makes you weaker, and breaks you down. A hard session causes damage, depletion, and stress on your body. It is a signal to your body that it needs to adapt to keep up.

The rebuild happens post workout, outside of the gym. A lot of the recovery happens while you are asleep.

While sleeping, your body is working to repair itself. Growth hormone, testosterone, and IGF-1 climb. Your tissue starts to repair. Protein synthesis elevates. Your immune system is working while your brain clears out metabolic waste from the day. This is a nighttime operation happening when you are asleep. Missing out on sleep, you are missing some of the most important functions aiding your recovery and adaptation to the effort you put into your workout.

One night without sleep raised cortisol by roughly 21 percent and dropped testosterone by 24 percent in healthy young men. Muscle protein synthesis fell about 18 percent (Lamon et al., Physiological Reports, 2021). One night of little to no sleep. Not a month, not a week, but a single night. This makes me shudder when I think of my early 20s in the military and then college. Staying out until the early hours, getting very little sleep, and then waking up for PT. Ok, there wasn't PT in college, but there was sleep deprivation, binge drinking, and post bar gyro pizza in the early years.

Take that behavior, minus the drinking, and stretch that over weeks, and you get the version I was living after our son was born. A depletion in strength, power, and endurance. Reaction time decision making gets worse. When you look at young athletes, sleeping under eight hours has been associated with roughly 1.7 times the injury risk (Kaczmarek et al., Journal of Clinical Medicine, 2025).

You do the work, don't recover, and then wonder why you are not adapting or making progress.

That is not a character flaw, or lack of discipline (unless it is due to what I was doing in my early 20s). That is thinking the work in the gym or on the track is where progress happens, but that is just an input to the equation.

Don't reward yourself with rest

Most of us treat rest days like we treat dessert, you have to earn it. Both are problematic.

Get it backwards long enough, and rest starts to feel like prioritizing sleep is going to take away from your family time, so you prioritize the workout, and take away from the sleep.

We need to normalize turning this around. Sleep is not what you get after the work as long as it doesn't cut into your other responsibilities. Sleep makes the work you put in count. It is an input, the same as the session itself. You're not going to skip half of your workouts and expect the same results if you were hitting every one. Why would you expect that when you are getting four hours of sleep a night?

This is not just an athlete problem

If you do not train or workout, this still applies.

It is the parent who cannot figure out why they are snapping at everyone or getting annoyed by their six-year-old's reactions even though they are age-appropriate. The nurse coming off nights who cannot tell whether they are actually sick or just wrecked from multiple 12-15 hour shifts in a row. The guy who is struggling to lose that last fifteen pounds while sleeping five and a half hours each night and blaming his willpower or the bottomless chips and salsa he devoured at happy hour on Thursday.

Lack of sleep raises your risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic problems, and mood disorders. It worsens blood sugar control. It weakens your immune response. Adults generally need at least seven hours on a regular basis, and most American adults are not getting it (Watson et al., Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2015). Our constant contact, phones, optimizing our time…shit there are a lot of reasons which we won't get into, but most of us do not get enough sleep.

I do not know when it happened, but at some point we started treating lack of sleep as evidence of a serious person. It is not the flex society has made us think it is, the real flex is getting 7+ hours of sleep a night.

More is not Better, Better is Better

If I could turn back time (Cher voice), I would tell the version of myself standing in the gym at 5 a.m. with a four-month-old at home.

Adding more was the wrong move. Not because effort is bad, or pain is just weakness leaving the body. All of the research, not what the influencer says, states effort without recovery does not produce anything. It just accumulates cost.

A program developed by someone who understands that looks different than one built to make you tired. It has rest written into it on purpose, in specific places, for specific reasons. Not as a reward for doing the work.



That is what most people have never actually seen, so we put one up.

We are going to send out an example of fifteen weeks, start to finish, with the reasoning attached. No sets, no reps, no loads. An example of what prepping for an event, maybe it is HYROX, maybe it is an out west hunt. It could be anything. This will be an example, not a prescription. But it will show you what the difference between hard work and purposeful hard work looks like on paper.

Where we are heading

Part Two is about the clock your body already runs on and the one recovery tool you can use while you are awake.

Part Three is the premise. More is not better. Better is better.

For now, one question, and be honest about it.



If you felt like your training stopped working tomorrow, would you add another session, or would you go to bed?

Sources

Kaczmarek, F., Bartkowiak-Wieczorek, J., Matecka, M., Jenczylik, K., Brzezińska, K., Gajniak, P., Marchwiak, S., Kaczmarek, K., Nowak, M., Kmiecik, M., Stężycka, J., Krupa, K. K., & Mądry, E. (2025). Sleep and athletic performance: A multidimensional review of physiological and molecular mechanisms. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 14(21), Article 7606.

Lamon, S., Morabito, A., Arentson-Lantz, E., Knowles, O., Vincent, G. E., Condo, D., Alexander, S. E., Garnham, A., Paddon-Jones, D., & Aisbett, B. (2021). The effect of acute sleep deprivation on skeletal muscle protein synthesis and the hormonal environment. Physiological Reports, 9(1), Article e14660.

Watson, N. F., Badr, M. S., Belenky, G., Bliwise, D. L., Buxton, O. M., Buysse, D., Dinges, D. F., Gangwisch, J., Grandner, M. A., Kushida, C., Malhotra, R. K., Martin, J. L., Patel, S. R., Quan, S. F., & Tasali, E. (2015). Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: A joint consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 11(6), 591–592.