Lucas Hedénbäck argues that mental, physical, and environmental stress all tap the same recovery budget. When you're already stressed from work or life, adding frequent intense workouts creates a deficit that blocks progress. He cut from 5-6 workouts weekly to 1-2 while running a corporate job and startup, and gained strength faster because his body could actually recover.
If you have above average stress in your life, working out less is actually better for you than working out more. And this is coming from someone that used to work out 5 to 6 days a week, yet I look like this. Now I work out 1 to 2 times per week and I look like this. And in this video, I'm gonna explain exactly why this is. The mistake that I made and the mistake that you're most likely making is thinking that your body will separate different stressors in different categories, when in reality it all hits the same system. And this is the problem because you can only— the results you're getting is gonna come down to how much you can adapt and recover from the stimulus that you provide, that you're giving your body. And if you have a business that you're running, you have family, whatever it might be, you have a bunch of things on your table 24/7, your stress budget is already like, a lot of that is already, a big chunk of that is already allocated towards work, towards mental stressors, right? We separate stress in 3 categories: mental, physical, and environmental. Which means that if your mental stress is very high, you need to manage the physical and environmental very well in order to make sure that you're not spending more than you have available. If I think of this as a budget, right? And this is the problem a lot of people make. They have busy lives, they're running businesses. I was working a corporate job at one of the biggest banks in Sweden. I was also trying to start my business. I had all these stresses on my table and I tried to work out 5 to 6 days a week at the same time and I was absolutely drained. Like I was in such a big stress debt that it was a joke, right? And everything changed for me when I started to understand that that I have to manage this budget better and make sure that I'm not spending more than I have available. And when I started approaching it that way and understood that, okay, I can't recover from that much, I'm gonna train less, I'm gonna train at an amount that I can actually recover from, everything changed for me. I actually started to progress insanely, not just from a physical perspective, but strength-wise and everything when I started working out less. And it became effortless to get the results that I had always desperately wanted, right? It was when I stopped chasing them and started focusing on, okay, just like health, that everything, everything changed. So takeaway, if you're trying to get in shape, work out less if you have a busy life. Trust me.
