Lucas Wilhelm Hedenbäck argues that most fitness advice is built for steroid users and backfires for normal people. Training, work, and stress all tap the same nervous system resources. When you exceed your "stress budget," cortisol rises, testosterone drops, and progress stalls. He recommends cutting to 3-4 intentional sessions weekly instead of 5-6, paired with sleep and stress management.
Most fitness advice online is made by bodybuilders on steroids for bodybuilders on steroids. And if you're a normal person with a business, stress, responsibilities, and a real life, that advice is quietly destroying your results. Let's be honest, the internet tells you to train 5 to 6 days a week, go balls to the walls every session, add more volume, push harder, never miss a workout. And that model works if your recovery is chemically enhanced, i.e., PEDs, your stress outside the gym is close to zero, your job is eating, training, and sleeping. But that's not the reality for most people. Your body has a finite stress budget every single day. Training is stress, work is stress, deadlines are stress, travel is stress, poor sleep is stress. And here's what most people miss: your body doesn't care where the stress comes from. It all hits the same nervous system. So when you stack hard training, high workload, poor sleep, and mental pressure, something has to give. And it's usually recovery, hormones, energy, mood, or Or your progress. So when recovery can't keep up, your body downshifts. Your cortisol stays elevated, testosterone drops, thyroid output slows, and inflammation rises. You don't feel overtrained, you feel flat, tired, unmotivated, sore all the time, like you're working hard for nothing. And most people respond by training more, and that's the trap. For 99% of people, the solution is almost always the same: less volume but more intention. 3 to 4 high-quality sessions per week is more than enough. Because when you lift heavy, focus on progression, recover properly, and leave the gym with energy, not destroyed, your body adapts instead of just surviving. Muscle grows, hormones stabilize, energy returns, and your life improves. Muscle isn't built in the gym. It's built during recovery. Sleep, food, sunlight, low stress, nervous system regulation. If those aren't dialed in, more training just digs a deeper hole. High performers usually don't train more. They just train smarter. They don't chase fatigue. They chase adaptation. They respect recovery because they understand that recovery is the real gains accelerator. So if you feel like you're doing everything right but not getting the results you should, the answer isn't more effort. It's more structure. Because that's the foundation of the Superhuman Protocol. Train with intention, recover like it matters. Build a system that works with your life, not against it. Less training won't make you weaker. Lack of recovery will. And this was exactly the case for my client Landon. When he came to me, he was going balls to the walls. He was working out 6 times per week, running a business, having a wife, family to take care of, running on energy drinks and no sleep to push him through the day. He was stuck in the grind mindset. More effort is always the answer, which unfortunately is not true. Direction and intention will always beat pure volume and pure effort. So when Landon came to me, some of the first things we did was shifting his whole structure. Less effort, more intention. 3 to 4 sessions per week, prioritizing his sleep, respecting his stress budget. And 4 months later, these were the results. So if Landon can do that, you can too. Train less, more intention. Respect your stress budget and you'll see more results than you've ever had before. That's my promise to you. If you have any questions about this, drop them in the comments. Leave a like and I'll see you in the next one.
