A client of mine had a motorcycle accident a while back. Messed up his hips and knees. A month of barely moving, and for now he's only cleared to train his upper body.

He's still down about 12 pounds, but on our call this week something was off.

He tells me he's been eating 1,500 calories a day. That's too low for a guy his age and size. So I start asking questions.

"How sure are you that it's exactly 1,500?"

Fairly sure, he says. So we walk through a real day. No breakfast. A small lunch. Ten chicken wings for dinner. Another day: a small Caesar salad and a pork chop. And he's been tired and lethargic all day, every day.

I ask how important losing the weight is to him right now. "High priority," he says.

Then he says the real thing:

"I freaking hate lifting. Like, I hate it. I dread it. I'll push it off. I'll procrastinate it."

It's Thursday. He hasn't lifted once all week. It's been like that for weeks - one session in, maybe two.

And then:

"To have every meal be chicken and rice seven days a week is easier than to go hit three workouts at 45 minutes a piece. It sounds ridiculous."

It made complete sense to me. Imagine you hate water and someone has you swimming every single day.

So we kept digging.

What does he enjoy? The bike. The sauna. Dips - he perked up on dips. Push-ups, pull-ups: "I don't think twice about those." What does he dread? The heavy lifts in a deficit. They take everything out of him. He feels like he got hit by a bus after every session.

There it was. He was starving himself, dreading his training, couldn't find a time for it that stuck - and reading all of it as a discipline problem.

So we rebuilt it together. Calories up to 1,800 (I wanted 2,000 - he wasn't comfortable going that high). Enough food to get him out of the fog: energy to actually train, with something left for work, the kids, his wife at the end of the day. Breakfast back in. The same simple meals every day, so there's nothing to figure out at 6pm. Training cut down to short morning sessions built only from upper-body movements he actually likes. The rest waits until the injuries fully heal.

When I first suggested pulling the lifting back, he pushed back: "That's not going to place us back too much, though?" The man who dreads every session was worried about losing it. That's how these guys are built. Stepping back from a commitment feels like failing, even when the commitment is giving him nothing but guilt.

By the end of the call he was excited to train again. His words: "I'm ready to lock in."

I could have gone technical on him.

You're in a deficit, you're running on less fuel, you're not as strong as you were - lower the weights and the sessions stop wrecking you, and you recover faster. All true. And useless in that moment. A frustrated man who's already made up his mind isn't looking for a logical solution. He needs to feel understood first. Then an adjustment he can execute without thinking.

That's what the call was. I don't need a client to be accountable to a program he hates - I've watched that fail too many times. I need him to want to train. So we dug until we found what killed the spark, and rebuilt until it came back.

When a man is excited, nobody has to push him.

How much of your plan do you actually want to do - and how much are you forcing because quitting feels worse?

P.S. What's the part of your training or diet you dread most? Hit reply and tell me in one line. I read and answer every single one.