Unpublished new work from Dr. Inzlicht’s lab suggests that with the right encouragement, people can incrementally adopt the perspective of the joyful worker. To start, Dr. Inzlicht suggested taking “baby steps of effort”: include a couple 30-second surges, for example. Then take a cue from video-game designers, he said, and keep raising the difficulty of future workouts just enough to keep yourself interested without getting discouraged.
Finding a middle way
Even the most elite athletes don’t seek suffering every time they step out the door. In fact, they rarely do.
In the early 2000s, Stephen Seiler, a sports scientist from Texas who had recently moved to Norway, began analyzing the training habits of elite athletes in a variety of endurance sports including rowing, cross-country skiing, cycling and running. What he found contradicted the “no pain, no gain” philosophy he’d encountered in his own career as a competitive rower.
Across sports, the top athletes seemed to spend about 80 percent of their training time at a relatively low effort. The other 20 percent was very hard. This “polarized” training distribution, as it has come to be known, enabled athletes to rack up large quantities of training without burning themselves out while still reaping the benefits of high-intensity workouts.
This 80/20 split allows professionals and weekend warriors alike to balance pleasure and meaning. During the low-intensity training the athletes chat with friends, enjoy the scenery and generally have a pleasant time. The high-intensity training is hard, but researchers have found that elite athletes rate these workouts as the most satisfying. If you’re exercising four times a week, for example, choose one day to push hard and keep the other three easy.
A simple test of whether you’re going easy enough on the lighter days is the ability to speak out loud in complete sentences — which may require you to slow down more than you expect. As for the hard days, that depends on your level of experience and tastes, but it should include, at least, brief periods of sustained discomfort.
At the end of the day, then, the question of whether your workout should be painful or pleasurable may be misguided, said Dr. Inzlicht: “I really do think it’s both,” he said.
Alex Hutchinson is a columnist with Outside magazine and the author of “Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance.”