Say you and your training partner come into the gym, ready to smash the weights, and you see two other people you want to train with. You now have a community of people to train with. Having a community of people who want to get swole creates even more support.

Your training partner or community can also give you a good technical eye. Your training partner can be like, “Your squat sucks and this is why.” Your training partner can also point out where you have technical breakdowns in your snatch or clean to help you improve your overall movement pattern.

No spotter also sucks while training alone. Not having a spotter standing over top of you while benching makes it easier to quit. You will get to a point where you’re like, “Eh, I’m just going to rack it; I don’t need to push anymore.” When that starts to happen, your training can start to plummet.

When you quit early in training, it becomes easier for you to stop showing up. Not having that community or training partner leaves you without a sense of external accountability. 

Next thing you know, you’re at the gym and getting lost in your cell phone. Your scroll brain sets in and the sad boy feels come on. You let the sad boy feels impact your intensity in training. You blame everyone else. That is not the way you want to go.

That said, training alone will make you tougher.

Training alone forces you to focus on what you want, how much you want it, and what type of effort you will put into your training.

Training alone can dramatically improve your body awareness. You will find your overall perception of what is going on around you improves dramatically. 

Training alone also does wonders for your perspective. When training by yourself, things stay REAL. All that matters is your thoughts and the positive efforts you put into training.

Being alone and under the barbell, doing plyometrics, or perfecting sports skills in training will ignite an “I WILL SHOW THE WORLD!!!” attitude within you. You will find yourself having a special motivation to prove how cool your accomplishments are.

Training alone also makes it that much more fun when you have the opportunity to train with other people.

You will also develop hacks and internalized methods to be used to help with motivation. You will find that on days where motivation is lacking, you know the tricks to put the work in.

People like you who train by themselves, compete supremely well. You are internally motivated, know what drives you, and you're used to not having anyone around except for your brain and your crazy thoughts.

You will also find that you have to focus on hypertrophy work because you lack spotters. It is tough to push super intense loads without spotters so you have to do some more standard bodybuilding work. 

You need to create a clear routine every single day by journaling. If you struggle with accountability, create a posting schedule on social media. 

Use social media as a community-building tool. Cell phones are great for posting, seeing what others are doing, and talking to other athletes and individuals who are like you, in the gym, going at it alone.

When you get into the gym, take out your planner and look at your programming goals for the day. Write out what your cues and goals for the day will be. You should also use your cellphone to film any lifts over 85%. However, the key to using the phone is having it in AIRPLANE MODE. It is a tool that you use for filming and playing music.

You also probably want to blast music until your ears want to bleed when working out alone three days out of the week. You also want to take two days where you don’t play any music at all and you are just listening to your thoughts. 

Focus on specific rituals before every single gym session you have. You want to make this a consistent theme. The way you put your shoes on and the routine you use to prepare for your training session being consistent will make things habitual when training alone.

You also will want to, at least once a month, try to find a gym within an hour or an hour and a half from where you live so you can go train there and get motivated in a group session.

A major key is that you should 100% find a professional coach that can help you with your periodization, and technique, and make progress through your training. A lot of individuals think they know it all. That isn’t you. You’re a learn it all, not a know it all. You need a coach.