Buzz
I love pushing myself in fitness. I once completed a triathlon, even though I realized halfway through that I didn’t want to do it again. I've even asked my coach for tough weightlifting routines. In fact, I created the Mytour Fitness Challenge, our monthly initiative to try out new exercises. But you'll never see me doing something like 75Hard or a 10-day ab challenge.
This is because there’s a significant difference between a well-designed challenge and a bad one. A good challenge aligns with your personal fitness goals, is reasonably challenging, and leaves you with tangible results—whether mental or physical. On the other hand, a bad challenge is a waste of time and only leaves you feeling worse.
Let’s examine the common pitfalls of ineffective challenges (spoiler alert: most of the ones on social media) and explore what to look for in a truly beneficial challenge instead.
Does the fitness challenge glorify suffering as something desirable?
Let’s tackle the biggest myth promoted by viral challenges: that suffering is an outcome worth chasing. Along the way, you'll encounter other myths, like the idea that suffering is an essential component of exercise, that the more miserable you feel, the more weight you’ll shed, or that enduring things you dislike is the key to building mental toughness.
None of these beliefs are true. Successful athletes don’t suffer their way to success, for obvious reasons. If you were a coach, would you want your athlete to feel awful every single day? Or would you prefer to keep them feeling good, so they can train consistently and perform well when it counts?
Mental toughness can help you push through tough situations, but you don’t cultivate it by making your life miserable. I once worked with a mental training specialist, and she never asked me to do things I disliked to build mental toughness. Instead, she encouraged me to be aware of the thoughts I have when I lose confidence and to find ways to redirect or reframe those thoughts to stay focused and in the zone.
Does the challenge encourage you to follow it without question?
Mental toughness often involves knowing when to quit. You learn that, in part, by sticking it out through tough things and learning that they can be safe. This requires mentorship or other appropriate supervision. You also need to learn when not to do a thing. Blindly following a challenge because the rules are the rules doesn’t build those capacities.
There’s something to be said for trusting a program or trusting your coach, but that should only apply when you have reason to believe the program or coach is trustworthy. Scammers love to sell people a bad product or an unsustainable business model (see: every MLM) and then tell their followers that when they fail, it’s their own fault and not the scammer’s fault. The same idea is at work with draconian fitness challenges. If you’re afraid of failure because you believe it’s a judgment on you as a person, chances are you’ve been conned.
Is it one-size-fits-all challenge?
The job of a training program is to meet you where you are, and take you to the next level. If you currently run a 10-minute mile, a good running program will have you do runs that are easy and hard relative to your current fitness level, and maybe by the time you’re done with it, you’ll be running a 9:30 mile. Similarly, a lifting program will start with weights you can currently handle, and by the end you might be able to lift a bit more.
Online challenges often spell out specific sets or reps or times, they demand a certain number of workouts each week, and there’s no period of time to ramp up to the workload of the challenge and no way to progress if what’s in the challenge isn’t enough for you. There is probably someone out there who can do the challenge as written, but is that person you?
Instead, seek out programs tailored to your experience level that allow you to choose the right workload for yourself. For instance, a weightlifting program that includes bench presses at 80% of your max will be suitable whether you're benching 95 pounds (80% being 76) or 405 pounds (80% being 324).
Does it make unrealistic promises?
Countless fitness challenges make exaggerated claims, saying you’ll get shredded, lose weight, slim down, tone up, get jacked, or develop abs. But there’s no reason to think that following a set routine for a few weeks will give you the same body as the influencer promoting the program. The only people who can get shredded in 21 days are those who were already close to being shredded before starting.
Any training program should offer a clear payoff, but it must be reasonable. If I follow a speed-focused running program, I expect it to improve my speed. If I do a Bulgarian weightlifting program, I expect it to boost my confidence with heavy lifts. If I follow a volume-focused lifting program, I expect it to help me gain muscle. If I do 30 days of ab exercises, I expect...well...sore abs?
What happens once the challenge is over?
Will you simply breathe a sigh of relief and return to your old routine, which has nothing in common with the challenge? That’s a warning sign. Health, fitness, or success in sports are all long-term objectives, not things you achieve in 30 days and then forget about.
Who’s more likely to succeed in the long run: someone who starts working out three days a week, gradually increases to four, then five, and by the end of the year becomes the person out jogging at dawn every day? Or someone who barely exercises, does a 30-day challenge that leaves them wiped out each day, and then returns to their inactive habits?
If you’re training for a specific athletic goal, a good program will guide you through phases of building a foundation (preparing you for peak performance) and intensifying or peaking (preparing you to perform well in a competition). You don’t push through a difficult training block just because it’s tough; you do it because it has a meaningful purpose: more muscle, increased strength, better conditioning, or whatever the goal is. Every phase of training is designed to do its part and prepare you for the next.
Does it promote an all-or-nothing mentality?
Life is filled with gray areas. Disordered eating often involves black-and-white thinking that makes some foods completely off-limits. Our thought patterns in mental health issues like anxiety and depression can also fall into this all-or-nothing thinking. A fitness challenge that fosters this mindset is unlikely to lead to sustainable, healthy habits over time.
Fitness challenges often turn aspects of fitness that should be part of a routine into overwhelming tasks. They ask, Why do three sets of 10 pushups when you can do 100 every day? Or Instead of maintaining a healthy diet most of the time, let’s eliminate sugar entirely for a month.
Many fitness challenges come with a dietary element, sometimes featuring specific foods or meal plans. Just a quick reminder: this is essentially a crash diet, and if you're tempted to try one, there are better ways to channel that energy.
So what does a beneficial challenge or program look like?
A good challenge is simply a fitness program that isn’t meant to be repeated endlessly. It's typically something that makes recovery more challenging, like when I did a Bulgarian-inspired weightlifting program and had to treat eating and sleeping like my job just to keep up. It was rewarding in the end and even enjoyable during the process, but I had to set aside other priorities in my life to make it work. Once it was over, I was glad to return to my regular training routine.
Training programs don’t always need to be extreme like that. They can just be regular training plans. You follow the program for a few weeks or months, and by the end, you’re ready to move on to another one just like it.
Either way, here’s what a good challenge looks like:
The amount of work and its difficulty start at a level you can manage.
If it gets harder as you go, there’s a clear reason (other than just wishful thinking) to believe you’ll be able to handle it by the end.
It serves a specific purpose that aligns with your training goals.
It maintains a healthy balance between your fitness routine and the rest of your life.
If it’s challenging, the tough parts are there to achieve something meaningful, not just to make you suffer.
You feel confident in your ability to assess when and if it’s time to quit.
This checklist eliminates most of the silly fitness challenges found on social media, but any legitimate training program should pass the test.
