Most off days aren't actually off days — and once you understand that, everything changes. If you've ever told yourself I'm just not feeling it today before a workout, a writing session, or any demanding task, there's a good chance you were wrong. The real problem wasn't your energy level. It was that you hadn't warmed up yet. Learning how to push through an off day starts with recognizing that your perception of how you feel and the actions you take have a two-way relationship — and you can use that to your advantage.
How Do You Perform Well on an Off Day?
Here's a story that makes this click. Imagine it's a Saturday morning. You're 12 years old, in your dad's basement gym, and you tell him you're just not feeling it today. He doesn't let you off the hook. Instead, he says: "Sometimes you have an off day, and then you hit a personal record anyway. So don't give me that bad attitude. Do your warm-up sets and let's get going."
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Thomas describes the moment his dad loaded the mystery bar and sent him out of the room — the setup for his first 135-pound bench press
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That's exactly what happened to Thomas Frank as a kid. He had been trying — and failing — to bench press 135 pounds for months. He had a mental block around that milestone. But on that particular morning, the day he declared an off day, his dad had him leave the room, loaded the bar with a confusing mix of random plates, and told him not to look. Thomas got under the bar, pressed it, and racked it. His dad said: "Congratulations. You just hit 135 pounds."
The lesson wasn't just motivational fluff. It was a practical insight: what feels like an off day is often just a day where you haven't warmed up yet. Once you do, your body and mind shift into a completely different gear.
How Does Your Perception of Energy Affect What You Do?
Most people treat their energy and motivation like a one-way road. They wake up, assess how they feel, and let that assessment dictate what they do — or don't do — that day. Low energy in the morning becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that kills their afternoon output too.
But that road is actually two-way. How you feel influences your actions, yes — but the actions you take also influence how you feel. When you start moving, writing, lifting, or creating — even badly at first — you begin to change your emotional and physical state. It's not just a mental trick. You genuinely start to feel more capable and energized as a result of the action itself.
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Thomas explains the two-way road between perception and action — how what you do changes how you feel, not just the other way around
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This is the core insight: don't let a perceived off day stop you from starting. Start anyway, and let the warm-up do its job.
How to Get Into Flow State When You're Not Feeling It
Flow state — that feeling of being completely locked in and performing at your best — doesn't usually arrive the moment you sit down to work. It builds. And the bridge between feeling sluggish and feeling locked in is the warm-up.
Whether you're a writer, an athlete, a programmer, or a student, the pattern is the same:
- Writers: Open a blank document and write whatever comes to mind — even if it's terrible. Don't try to craft anything good. Just write. The act of writing, even badly, gets your brain into writing mode.
- Lifters: Do your warm-up sets properly. Not as a formality, but as a deliberate process of getting your nervous system and muscles ready for the real work ahead.
- Knowledge workers: Start with a lower-stakes version of your main task — reviewing notes, sketching ideas, or re-reading your previous work — before diving into the hardest problem of the day.
The key is to lower the stakes during the warm-up so you can build momentum without performance pressure slowing you down.
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Thomas breaks down the effective reps concept and why warm-up sets should never be treated as performance opportunities
Watch at 4:45 →
How to Warm Up the Right Way (Gym and Creative Work)
There are two core principles that make warm-ups actually work — whether you're in the gym or sitting down to do creative work.
Principle 1: Stop Trying to Perform During Your Warm-Up
This one is harder than it sounds. When you load 135 pounds on a bar as a warm-up set before working up to 275, there's a temptation to crank out 20 reps and feel productive. Resist that urge. The point of a warm-up isn't to accumulate extra work. It's to prepare.
In exercise science, there's a concept called effective reps — the idea that in any given set, only the last few reps near failure are actually stimulating muscle growth. The earlier reps just get you there. Warm-up sets should never be taken close to failure. They exist to prime your joints, elevate your heart rate, and get your nervous system firing correctly.
The same principle applies to creative work. If you're a writer warming up by journaling or freewriting, do not try to edit that material. Don't evaluate it. Don't second-guess it. The editing brain and the creative brain are opposites, and trying to run both at once during a warm-up will kill your momentum before it even starts. Let the warm-up be low-stakes. Let it be messy. That's the whole point.
Principle 2: Give Yourself Enough Time to Actually Warm Up
A warm-up that gets cut short is barely better than no warm-up at all. One of the biggest reasons people have more off days than necessary is that they've packed their schedule so tight there's no room to transition properly between tasks.
If you have to sprint from one meeting to a creative session, from a workout to a work call, from commuting to deep focus — you're not giving yourself the ramp-up time your brain and body need. That anxiety about the next thing bleeds into your current performance and makes everything feel harder than it should.
The fix is straightforward, even if it's uncomfortable: schedule less. Give each important task a generous time block that includes warm-up time at the front end. Not just the time you need to perform, but the time you need to get ready to perform.
Why Do You Feel Like You're Always Having Off Days?
If off days feel like a chronic problem for you, there's a good chance the issue isn't your energy, your sleep, or your motivation. It's your schedule and your expectations. When every task in your day is jammed right up against the next one, you never get the chance to fully ramp into any of them. Everything feels hard. Everything feels like an off day.
Here's a useful reframe: more than 50% of the time you think you're having an off day, you're actually just having a day where you haven't warmed up yet. That's a big deal, because it means most of your perceived off days are recoverable. They're not a fixed state — they're a starting point.
Real off days exist. Sometimes you're sick. Sometimes you're burned out. Sometimes rest is genuinely the right call. But before you write off a day, ask yourself honestly: Have I actually warmed up? Have I given myself the time and space to get into it? If the answer is no, you haven't yet earned the right to call it an off day.
Should You Turn Off Your Editing Brain While Writing?
Yes — especially during a warm-up. The editing brain is a critic. It measures output against a standard and flags everything that falls short. That faculty is essential during revision, but it's poison during the early stages of creative work when you're trying to generate ideas and build momentum.
If you sit down to write and immediately start judging every sentence, you'll stay stuck at the starting line. Give yourself explicit permission to write badly during the warm-up phase. Set a timer for 5-10 minutes and write without stopping, without deleting, without reading back. When the timer ends, you'll often find you've written your way into something worth keeping — or at the very least, you're now warmed up and ready to do the real work.
The Bottom Line: Warm Up Before You Write Off the Day
The next time you wake up feeling slow, unmotivated, or convinced it's going to be an off day — don't trust that feeling yet. Your perception of how capable you are right now is not fixed data. It's a starting point. Take action first. Do your warm-up sets. Write your garbage paragraphs. Give your body and mind the ramp-up time they need.
You might be surprised to find that what looked like an off day turns into a personal record.
