When Making Training Harder Isn’t the Same as Making It Better

For a long time, I believed better training meant harder training.

More fatigue. More effort. More discomfort. If something started to feel easier, the assumption was that it had stopped working.

That belief didn’t come out of nowhere. Strength culture has reinforced it for decades. Training is supposed to create adaptation, and adaptation requires stress.

On paper, that logic holds.

I’m still not against hard training. I’m not against fatigue, failure, or building tissue. Strength training works. Getting stronger generally makes people more resilient. But there are diminishing returns to that approach, and after years of training and coaching, I don’t think effort alone is the limiter most people are dealing with.

The more interesting question isn’t how hard you train. It’s how well what you build actually transfers.

Transfer shows up in how you move outside the gym, how you manage fatigue, how resilient you feel, and how much effort everyday tasks actually require.

There’s a long-standing idea in training that to force adaptation, you intentionally make exercises less efficient. You slow things down. You add pauses. You remove momentum. You put yourself in mechanically disadvantaged positions so tissue has to work harder than it wants to.

That idea makes sense.

When someone relies on timing, bounce, or compensation, inefficiency exposes gaps. It builds muscle. It builds tolerance. It creates capacity.

Used intentionally, inefficiency is a useful tool.

Where I’ve started to question it is when it becomes the default answer to everything.

At a certain point, piling on more tissue or more effort doesn’t seem to solve the problem. People get stronger but don’t always feel better. They perform well in controlled environments but seem to lose that strength once things get less predictable.

When I look closer at those situations, the issue rarely seems to be effort.

It seems to be organization.

One pattern I see a lot is people relying on muscle to uphold their structure all the time. Everything is braced. Everything is engaged. Every movement feels like work.

That can make someone strong, but it’s expensive.

Muscle is good at producing force. It’s not great at constantly substituting for alignment, position, and load transfer. When structure isn’t trusted, tissue tends to do more than its share. Fatigue builds faster. Pain shows up in places that “shouldn’t” hurt for someone that strong.

This might be part of why there’s been such a swing toward connective tissue and positional work in recent years. Not because muscle doesn’t matter, but because efficiency does.

At the same time, relying on structure isn’t automatically better.

Think about what happens when you stand or sit for long periods of time. People don’t actively hold themselves upright forever. Joints lock out. Weight shifts to one side. The spine settles into whatever position requires the least effort.

That’s still the body using structure—but passively.

The cost is low in the moment and shows up later.

You see the same thing in training, especially with beginners. Put someone in a plank and they rarely maintain what we’d call a neutral position. They drift into extension, not because they’re lazy, but because the body is solving the task the fastest way it knows how.

Relying on structure isn’t the same as organizing it.

Sometimes muscle needs to do more work to uphold integrity. Other times, muscle needs to get out of the way so force can transfer cleanly through the system.

Efficiency isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing what’s appropriate for the task.

This distinction really clicked for me during WeckMethod certifications, particularly around coiling mechanics.

During plyometric work, Chris Chamberlain would emphasize the coil itself rather than intrinsic cueing. Instead of telling us how to brace or what to tighten, he’d say something like:

“If you just coil, you’ll land where you should automatically.”

When the global position was right, everything else seemed to fall into place.

The landing felt cleaner. Timing improved. There was less scrambling to fix things mid-movement.

What started to make sense afterward is that coiling isn’t about adding more tension. It’s about organizing the system before effort ever shows up. When the body is already rotated, stacked, and biased in a direction, force doesn’t need to be manufactured locally. It already has somewhere to go.

Instead of reacting to load or impact after it happens, the system is already prepared for it.

That’s where the idea of funneling started to make sense to me.

Funneling isn’t about relaxing or doing less. It’s about placing the body so effort can move through it more effectively. The effort doesn’t go away; it just stops being scattered.

Instead of creating tension everywhere, you allow tension to emerge through direction and position. Once that happens, force can travel from the ground up with less leakage. Slack comes out of the system not because you’re squeezing harder, but because energy has somewhere to go.

Think about the last time you did a barbell squat. How many internal checkpoints did you run through?

Knees out. Core braced. Hips back. Tripod foot.

Those cues aren’t wrong. But when holding a basic position requires constant internal correction, it suggests the system isn’t organized enough to trust itself.

And I understand how we got here. We’re a largely sedentary society that relies heavily on passive structure. When movement capacity is low, control becomes the workaround.

Kettlebells keep pointing me back to this idea.

You can muscle everything and get crushed. Or you can let the bell inform where your body should go—not doing the work for you, but guiding position and timing.

In single-arm swings, cleans, windmills, or hand-to-hand transitions, coiling principles are built in. If you fight the bell, effort skyrockets and efficiency disappears. If you organize around it, the work feels powerful instead of exhausting.

The same can be said for mace training, like so,

The implement doesn’t reward force applied in the wrong direction.

Flow doesn’t show up because effort disappears. It shows up because effort is better directed.

I still think inefficiency has a place. It exposes weaknesses. It builds tissue. It creates capacity.

I’m just less convinced it should be the end goal.

Lately, I’ve been more interested in how training teaches people to use what they’ve built. How it reduces unnecessary effort. How it changes the cost of movement rather than just increasing tolerance for work.

Harder isn’t always better.

And I’m not sure the real question is how hard we should train, but how often we stop to ask whether the work we’re doing is actually teaching us how to move through the world with more options—or just more effort.