Creating a Wellness Routine to Prevent Burnout
Create a routine that helps your life, not make it more difficult
By
November 16, 2025
In our pursuit of lifting weights, becoming stronger, and improving our health there is a component that we sometimes overlook the importance of. It’s satisfying to see the number on the scale change or see our body composition improve, but if we neglect our wellness then our foundation is unstable. This means that we can make progress, but it could be more difficult to build and also more difficult to maintain if we achieve our goals. According to the NIH, “Wellness is a holistic integration of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, fueling the body, engaging the mind, and nurturing the spirit”. As shown by the definition given, this is beyond bodyweight or physical appearance. This demonstrates how we can see athletes and celebrities who have high success in their craft suddenly lose it all due to bad decisions or just walk away completely. Their skill is high, but personal wellness is low. When I was competing in powerlifting, this was something we would see often. One day someone would have a bad training session and they would have an outburst in the gym and then leave or they would finish the session and never come back. Wellness encompasses eight mutually interdependent dimensions : physical, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, vocational, financial, and environmental. This doesn’t mean that these eight areas need equal balance across the categories, but we should strive to find the balance that feels most authentic to ourselves. Addressing wellness is a critical part of how we help members have success. The following are some of the areas we help bring attention to them.
Stress Management
Stress has gotten a lot of attention in recent years and with good reason. Some acute stress like lifting a heavy weight helps us build a tolerance and makes us more resilient for the future. Chronic stress like stress from work or a bad relationship, that hangs onto us has been shown to bring us disease and harm us. Every year it seems that stress management becomes a little more difficult for people since we’re constantly plugged in and there’s now an expectation of urgency with every call, text, or email. For many people, things like work from home and unlimited PTO have become a catch all to say “you’re never really not working”. This isn’t sustainable. We can hope the work place changes, but until then we need protocols to implement that work in real life. Here are some that have helped our clients with minimal interruption to their daily life.
Sleep Hygiene
We all know sleep is important, but most people in America aren’t receiving enough quality sleep each night. This makes everything else more difficult. Sleep is when our body does a majority of its recovery and produces growth hormone. Lack of sleep increases our cortisol levels leading to the feeling of increased stress. Many people don’t realize how poor their sleep is until they begin making progress in their sleep quality. Here are the biggest game changers for better sleep.
Consistent Exercise
It sounds obvious that the people running a gym would say exercise helps with sleep, but it’s true. Sometimes people struggle with sleep because most people now have a job where they sit at a desk and barely move throughout the day. Simply put, some people are struggling to sleep because their physical body isn’t tired. As humans, we’re designed to move. For most of us, our current work conditions are in a spare bedroom of our comfortable house. Create an exercise routine that matches the season your life is currently in. At times exercise should be very intensive while at others it should be lower intensity and aiding more in restoration. Exercise doesn’t mean you have to go to the gym every day, but rather get a walk in outside or do a stretch routine. Whatever gets your body moving is a positive. If you work from home, set periodic breaks with exercise in them.
Community
One of the biggest takeaways from the Covid 19 lockdowns was that we all need a community as part of our wellness. As people were isolated, depression and addiction numbers sky rocketed. In our current society, it’s become popular to avoid face to face interactions with things like work from home, self checkout, and online food delivery. With a loss of community, we’ve increased our loneliness. Our social connection can provide us a sense of belonging to something bigger than just ourselves. This can improve our confidence and self esteem which could reduce the risk of mental health issues. During periods of stress or crisis, your community can provide a safety net helping to lower anxiety and depression. A community can also encourage a healthier lifestyle. Think of groups that meet at the gym to exercise or the people at local farmer’s markets. Lastly, by having a community you can have a larger network of resources which could mean better health care, better food, or better education. Your community will expand to help when called upon. The gym is one of the most positive communities I’ve ever been apart of. I’ve seen it help people overcome depression, drug addiction, loss, eating disorders and more. Having a community available to you is like having a whole team to cheer and guide you forward.
Wellness might not be the piece that helps you increase your bench press, but it could be the reason you have to celebrate the good news of increasing your bench press. In a world of macho bravado, we’ve neglected a piece of our foundation and it’s left many yearning for a bigger meaning. If the biggest thing you do in life is lift a heavy weight or earn a high income, you likely fractured your wellness in pursuit of that journey.
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