Why Does Fitness Hurt So Much? | Jordan Wallace, Paul Warrior and Tim Briggs

Workouts like ‘Mr. Joshua’ or ‘Fran’ combine heavy breathing, big ranges of motion, and muscular fatigue (e.g., deadlifts into GHD sit‑ups into running), driving you quickly into high heart rates and energy depletion that feel far worse than single‑modality efforts.

Experienced athletes deliberately avoid going fully anaerobic too early; they know which movements they can push on and which they must treat as ‘moving rest,’ so they can keep working hard for the whole workout instead of blowing up in the first minutes.

They organize training into strength (maximal lifts), short anaerobic power intervals, 4–20‑minute mixed ‘sport’ pieces, and longer aerobic work—then bias each block differently depending on the season (e.g., more sport‑style workouts as the Open approaches).

Using ‘work capacity across broad time and modal domains,’ the sport rewards people who can lift well, move their bodyweight, and endure long efforts; a great powerlifter or runner alone will be exposed quickly because there is ‘nowhere to hide’ across events.

Named workouts (Fran, Helen, etc.) and the Open give hard numbers—times, reps, rankings—so you can see improvement independent of mood or body‑image, unlike purely aesthetic goals which are subjective and easily distorted.