For over a year I’ve tracked my strength and fitness goals through Push, a brilliant bodybuilding app that uses AI to generate workout plans, track progressive overload, and help you beat your PBs.
I love the app, gave it a glowing 4.5 stars in my Push app review, and hold it as one of the best fitness apps you can download right now.
After using it in the gym for six days a week, over the course of an entire year, I decided to try an experiment. Playing around with plan generation, Push suggested that, based on my recovery, I should try reducing the number of days I work out to help me progress.
On the face of it, the premise is quite simple, fewer workouts means more time for recovery, and the better condition you approach your next workout in the better you can apply yourself to the task at hand. Excited to see if more recovery would help, I gave it a shot… and I hated it. After just a few weeks of working out four times a week, I’m going back to six days on the iron for a variety of reasons. Here’s what happened.
Push gone wrong
What follows is absolutely not a knock on Push at all: I still think it’s a brilliant app and have faith in its AI-powered progressive overload. If anything, my failed attempt to switch up my work regimen is a stunning indictment of my own lack of time planning, motivation, and discipline. A skill issue, if you will.
I work out in the morning before work. I’m extremely fortunate to work remotely and live next door to a gym. Despite this, I always cut my timings in the morning as finely as possible. The four-day plan Push served up for me still involved working out the same muscle groupings for the same number of sets over the course of a week, as such the workouts were fewer, but considerably longer.
What should have aided recovery and improved results in the gym instead turned into a string of unfinished sessions. I’m a creature of habit and have spent years building up a bulletproof morning routine of pre-workout caffeine, meditation, exercise, and recovery.
Trying to shoehorn a 90-minute workout into the 60-minute slot I’d created was never going to be easy, and for whatever reason I just couldn’t make it stick. As I said, this is largely an indictment on me personally: I’m sure hyper-productive people used to creating rigorous discipline, such as David Goggins, could have figured it out, but I’m not David Goggins, I’m Stephen. I like BBQ base Dominos, procrastination, and sitting down for just a bit too long before I leave the house for an appointment. I am weak.
All Push, no shove
So Push’s amended plan with fewer, longer workouts completely scuppered my routine. For four days a week, I would go to the gym, try and squeeze in as much as possible, fail, and then come away miserable, bereft of my underachievement. But there was another problem. On the three days a week I wasn’t working out, I was suddenly completely devoid of the safety and structure I’d built my whole routine on. After spending nearly eight years working out six days a week before work, I started finding myself in bed at 8:55 am on a Wednesday morning, crawling to my desk in my pajamas absent caffeine, a shower, or any kind of motivation. I was a mess.
I know what you’re thinking, “Stephen, surely you could just go to the gym, run, and have a good stretch, to improve your cardio fitness and finally achieve the goal of touching your toes.” It crossed my mind too, but I just couldn’t muster the willpower to go to the gym to do anything other than lift weights. By the end of my failed Push experiment, I was doing the four-day workout weeks seven days a week, and just skipping the rest days built into the program.
A lesson learned
Beneath all of this self-deprecation and my glacial motivation, there’s a serious lesson to be learned. As the new year turns and we all set out to conquer another year of fitness goals, take heed of my mistakes.
Whatever you’re trying to achieve in fitness for 2025, do something you enjoy. Think about the routines you want to build, and the pillars already in place in your life that you can lean on. Don’t be afraid to experiment and tweak things, but if it doesn’t work out, don’t be afraid to move on to something new.
I undertook my four-day workout week in the hope of finding better recovery and improved results, instead, I found out that I actually love having a reason to go to the gym every day, and that old habits really do die hard. So for 2025, it’s back to six days a week in the gym for me, and back to the pursuit of finding other ways to improve my recovery and push through the next set of plateaus.