Enjoyment Is a Training Variable

Enjoyment isn't just a soft add-on to a good program, or a nice-to-have. It's a major factor in long-term success, arguably as important as your programming itself.

Many lifters underrate the soft skills. It's easy to prioritise the technical work (advanced programming, detailed feedback, precise periodization) over actually enjoying the process. But training enjoyment is a real, measurable factor in adherence, longevity, and athletic success.

The Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale (PACES) is the most established way to measure training enjoyment. It's a short questionnaire (18 items in its original form, though validated shorter versions exist, down to just 4 items) that quantifies how much someone enjoyed a given bout of activity. You'd expect someone who genuinely enjoyed a session to answer most of its questions in a similar direction; that consistency across items is called internal consistency, and it's measured with a statistic called Cronbach's alpha. An alpha above 0.9 is considered excellent: PACES scores as high as 0.96 in its original validation, which is a big part of why it's become the standard tool for the job.

Like with most sports, the way to get good at powerlifting is to keep doing it, for years. So how do you set up your training to actually keep you going, and what makes some lifters stick with it while others burn out?

A 2026 study by Conti et al. tracked nearly 400,000 users of a training-log app across all experience levels, looking for what actually predicts staying in the game. The picture for beginners was bleak: only about 1 in 10 were still training regularly a year in. Demographic differences barely mattered. The biggest split was behavioural. Lifters who trained consistently and frequently from the start were far more likely to still be lifting a year later than those who never built that pattern early on. The study didn't measure enjoyment directly, but the takeaway lines up with what you'd expect: whatever gets you training consistently in month one is doing most of the work for month twelve.

Self-determination theory (SDT) explains exercise behaviour, including adherence, by looking at the quality of your motivation, not just how much of it you have. Teixeira et al. (2012), reviewing the evidence across the field, found that extrinsic motivation (training for a specific look, say) predicts short-term adoption reasonably well. It's just bad at predicting whether you're still doing it a year later. Only autonomous, intrinsic motivation, actually enjoying the process, reliably predicts long-term adherence.

Vallerand et al. (2008) compared how two different kinds of passion for a sport relate to performance and well-being: obsessive passion (a rigid, identity-fuelled drive to lift) versus harmonious passion, which comes from genuinely enjoying the process. Both types predicted more deliberate, high-quality practice, and in turn, better performance. But only harmonious passion predicted subjective well-being (SWB): the combination of life satisfaction and more frequent positive, rather than negative, emotion. Obsessive passion didn't move the needle on well-being either way.

That distinction matters because low SWB is a documented predictor of burnout. A 2025 study of adolescent athletes found life satisfaction, one of SWB's core components, negatively correlated with burnout risk. SDT treats SWB as downstream of getting your basic psychological needs met (autonomy, competence, and relatedness), so protecting it isn't a soft concern, it's foundational to staying in the sport at all.

In powerlifting, enjoyment often gets tangled up with progress: you look back on a block, and instead of remembering how it actually felt, you judge the whole experience by how well it served your numbers. That's a form of obsessive, performance-approach motivation, exactly the kind Vallerand found predicts practice but not well-being. Auriga is built to help you separate the two. Log your enjoyment alongside your lifting on Strength, our training log, and The Hierophant, our analysis tool, tracks it over time and surfaces whether particular program structures correlate with higher or lower enjoyment for you specifically. Having an accurate, in-the-moment record, rather than a reconstructed memory coloured by how the block went, makes it much easier to manage your motivation and enjoyment deliberately, rather than by accident.

The secret to a long and happy career in powerlifting is to make sure it's happy. The long part takes care of itself. Don't let enjoyment fall to the wayside; start tracking it with Auriga's purpose-built tools.