This article is the result of an interview with an acquaintance who was enthusiastic about training but had to confront their own training regimen at one point. Here, they share their story:

For me, it started with being dissatisfied with how I looked. I have always been very thin and received comments about it throughout my childhood and middle school. As I started training and saw progress, and especially as I saw others on Instagram and TikTok who were better than me, I became inspired to increase my training volume, go on diets, eat more protein, and become more serious in my workout routines.

When is it good enough?

The problem arose when the initial sense of accomplishment was replaced by guilt for not training enough. This feeling could arise even if I had trained four times that week because it wasn't five. Furthermore, progress was fastest in the beginning, and as I got into shape, it became difficult to experience the same level of progress. I often thought that my progress was slower than "everyone else" I followed on social media.

All the stress and pressure surrounding it made it very exhausting, and I became overly concerned with eating the right food and doing the right workouts. It was around this time that I realized that even though I enjoy training, it's not healthy for me to base my entire life around it.

Fitness influencers - both motivating and stressful

My feed was filled with fitness influencers, and initially, it really motivated me. I found the motivation to train even when I didn't feel like it. However, over time, I noticed that the genuinely good feeling after a workout was replaced with more dissatisfaction when I saw others' progress on social media. It became easy to feel inadequate and think that I should have trained harder or eaten more protein and so on.

Social media doesn't show the whole story

What people post is themself at their best. Fitness influencers also have bad days, but we followers usually don't see those, so it seems like these people have perfect lives with perfect progress.

My advice is to focus less on what others are doing and be more satisfied with your own accomplishments at the gym. Easier said than done, of course, but it's the best tip I have. You have to try to be content with your own progress, no matter how slow it may seem compared to everyone else's seemingly rapid improvement. We don't train to outdo everyone else but to become slightly better than we were yesterday. You should enjoy training because it brings you something, not just to become like someone (unattainable) else. Use fitness influencers for inspiration, but you shouldn't compare yourself to someone who has fitness as a full-time job.