Are you training hard enough?

Most men train to comfort, not to a stimulus

The most common reason a man trains for years without much to show for it isn't his program or his genetics. It's that he isn't training hard enough. Not lazy — he shows up, he does the sessions. The sets just aren't actually hard.

Kris sees it constantly with new clients. They send their training videos in, and the sets are smooth: controlled, comfortable, the last rep moving exactly like the first. It looks like a workout. It mostly isn't one.

Here's the reframe. A set only counts if it was genuinely difficult near the end. A set you finished feeling fine was a rehearsal, not a stimulus. Your body changes in response to a demand it hasn't already met — and comfort is not a demand.

What "hard enough" actually means

The useful concept here is reps in reserve — RIR — meaning how many more reps you could have done when you racked the weight.

For building muscle, most of your working sets should end with about 1 to 3 reps left in the tank. You stopped — but the next two or three reps would have been a real fight, the kind where the bar slows and your form has to be held together on purpose.

If you finished a set and could honestly have done another 6, 8, or 10 reps, that set did very little. It sat well inside what your body already handles with ease. Effort is the input that drives the result, and that set had almost none of it.

The signs you're undertraining

You don't need a lab to diagnose this. The signs are obvious once you know to look for them.

You finish nearly every set feeling comfortable — none of them are a fight. You never grind a rep; the last rep of a set looks identical to the first. Your weights and reps haven't meaningfully moved in months. And you leave the gym feeling like you "got a session in" but never like you genuinely pushed.

If two or more of those are true of your training, intensity is the thing holding you back — not your split, not your exercise selection. A stalled logbook and comfortable sets are the same problem viewed twice.

So how hard should you train?

The practical target: take most working sets to roughly 1-3 RIR. The last two or three reps should be genuinely difficult, with your form still solid but clearly being tested.

Going all the way to true failure has a place — occasionally, and mostly on safer isolation movements like curls, lateral raises, or leg extensions, where missing a rep is harmless. On heavy compound lifts — squat, bench, deadlift — training to failure is rarely worth the form breakdown and the risk. Stop a rep or two short.

The simple rule: every working set should feel like it asked something real of you. If a set didn't, the weight was too light or the reps too few — and it's not going to move the needle.

The opposite mistake: training too hard

The other error is real too, just less common. Some men take every set to absolute failure, chase soreness as the goal, add weight by ego, and never let recovery catch up.

That isn't intensity — it's recklessness. Form collapses, the rep range stops meaning anything, recovery falls permanently behind, and progress stalls exactly the way it does for the comfort crowd, just from the other direction.

Hard does not mean reckless. Hard means the last reps are genuinely difficult with your form intact. Slamming into failure with broken form on every set is simply another way to waste the session.

How to actually train harder

Pick honest weights. If your program prescribes 8-12 reps and you breeze through 12, the weight is too light — go up until 12 is a fight. Light weights are the most common hiding place for low effort.

Push the last reps. A set is not over when it starts getting tough — that is the moment the set begins working. Train the last two or three reps, not the comfortable first eight.

Film a set and watch it back. This is something Kris has clients do, and it is the fastest reality check there is. Bar speed, the effort on your face, your form under fatigue — video does not lie the way memory does. Most men are genuinely surprised how easy their "hard" set looks on replay.

And learn the feeling. Occasionally take a safe isolation lift to true failure, so you have a real reference point for what 1-3 RIR actually feels like — then you can find that line on every other set without guessing.

Why a coach catches what you can't

Here is the honest problem underneath all of this: most men cannot accurately judge their own training effort. The comfort crowd is sure they're working hard. The ego crowd is sure that reckless is hard. Self-assessment of intensity is unreliable in both directions.

A coach watching your actual training videos and your actual numbers can see what you can't — and will tell you plainly. Kris does exactly this: clients send their sets in, and if a set was soft, he says so. Not to be harsh — because you cannot fix effort that nobody is willing to name.

That blunt, accurate feedback on how hard you're really training is one of the quietest, highest-value parts of coaching. It's what Kris does with men 25-40.