Gym Trap #34: The Isolation Effect

I’ve seen it hundreds of times in the last fifteen years. In this trap, there’s actually no “bad guy” or “bad gal,” either. 

It’s a classic case of positive intent gone wrong. 

Here’s how it goes. A person comes into the gym because building a life of fitness is brutal alone. It’s either confusing, lonely, or both, so the gym becomes a saving grace of both structured training and a community context. It’s wonderful.

But, then, things get serious. 

The gains come a little slower than the first two years and the fear of stagnation leads to a common assumption: “I need specific training.”

And, that’s how it starts. 

Soon, this student who has found a home and a sustainable movement practice that has yielded great returns is training alone. While the training is more specifically written to them, they end up training a more perfect program with less intensity. It becomes easier to miss days. The lack of fun that comes with hyper specificity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Often, he/she misconstrues the lull in motivation for a lull in motivation for training altogether. In reality, it’s a lull in motivation for training alone in a vacuum, but we knew that already, didn’t we? 

Isn’t that how all this started in the first place? 

I’ll let you in on a secret. Psst!.. We know that any group training program is imperfect for the individual. We know that! But, it’s only slightly less optimal all things created equal. But, do you want to know what is horrible for performance? Not training because it’s lonely and boring!

Poor compliance to an optimal program will always lose to invigorated compliance to a suboptimal program. 

Almost no one needs a program written specifically for them. If your goals don’t involve standing on a stage on a certain date with a certain quantifiable performance metric, your training environment matters much more than the scheme in the spreadsheet.