The case against the 6am bootcamp.
The dominant story about getting strong is that you have to grind for it. Get up at five. Drink the powder. Hit the heavy thing for an hour before work. Be the kind of person who does that. The version of you that does it is the better version.
I don't think any of that is true, and I think it's actively bad for most of the people who buy it. Not because hard training is bad, but because the framing makes a kind of training that works for almost no one the default that everyone tries first — and quietly fails at.
The strong people I know mostly do less than they could, more consistently than anyone else.
This is true across every coach and physio I respect. They run easy four days a week and hard once. They lift twice a week, with about as much rest between sets as the average bootcamp coach would consider self-indulgent. They sleep eight hours. They do not get up at five. When they go on holiday, they take the holiday.
The reason this works is boring: adaptation is a slow signal. You stress the system, you recover from the stress, you come back slightly different. The bottleneck is recovery, not stress. Most people who train hard do not have a stress problem — they have a recovery problem they've never noticed because the culture they're in valorises stress and ignores rest.