Coaching practices for Paul Gilbert Cft

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Paul Gilbert Cft, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I’m either anxious or chasing the next thing, full stop
• My instinct is always to squeeze out the last possible rep until I physically can’t do another
• I’m trying to improve at five different moves at once and progress on every one of them is crawling
• Every time I train I push each set until my arms are shaking and I have to take three days off to recover
• I can barely carve out one workout block, but I’m home all day near a pull-up bar

Practices that may help

1. Compassion-Focused Therapy: Calming the Inner Critic
   Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT), developed by Paul Gilbert, targets shame and self-criticism by training a compassionate inner voice to replace the punitive self-critic. It draws on evolutionary psychology and affective neuroscience — specifically, the finding that different emotional systems (threat, drive, soothing) have distinct neurobiological profiles. A growing body of RCT evidence supports CFT for shame-based difficulties, self-criticism, and depression, though the evidence base is smaller than for CBT.
2. The Three-Circle Model: Mapping Your Emotional Systems
   Understand your threat, drive, and soothing systems — and learn which is overactive in your life.
   Compassion-Focused Therapy: Calming the Inner Critic
3. Never train to failure — ever, during GTG
   Muscular failure during a GTG session resets the nervous system to recovery mode and undoes the frequency advantage.
   Greasing the Groove, Made Practical
4. Cognitive Defusion (ACT), Made Practical
   Cognitive defusion is an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) technique for changing your relationship to thoughts rather than their content. Instead of challenging whether a thought is true or false, defusion creates distance between you and the thought — seeing it as a mental event rather than literal reality. ACT has strong meta-analytic support, and defusion is identified as one of its core mechanisms.
5. Target GTG at one specific goal movement
   GTG works through accumulated neurological specificity — spreading it across too many movements dilutes the signal.
   Greasing the Groove, Made Practical
6. Train at 40-60% of maximum — the sub-maximal effort rule
   Each GTG set should feel easy: you stop well before any form breakdown or perceived effort.
   Greasing the Groove, Made Practical
7. Greasing the Groove, Made Practical
   Greasing the groove (GTG) is a strength training method developed by Pavel Tsatsouline in which you perform a target movement frequently throughout the day at sub-maximal effort — typically 40-60% of maximum — without ever training to failure. The goal is neurological efficiency rather than hypertrophy: myelinating the motor pattern so the movement becomes more automatic and powerful. Evidence is mechanistically grounded in motor learning research; formal RCTs specifically testing GTG as a protocol are limited.
8. Prioritize frequency over volume in any single session
   GTG accumulates reps across the day — 5 sets of 5 spread over 8 hours outperforms 25 reps in one session.
   Greasing the Groove, Made Practical
9. Compassionate Imagery: The Compassionate Image and Safe Place
   Develop a vivid compassionate figure in imagination whose care you can access during distress.
   Compassion-Focused Therapy: Calming the Inner Critic
10. Simple Heuristics: Gerd Gigerenzer’s Case for Fast and Frugal Thinking
    Gerd Gigerenzer’s research program argues — with empirical support — that simple heuristics often outperform complex optimization strategies in real-world decisions under uncertainty. The key condition: when the environment is unpredictable and data is limited, ignoring most information and acting on a few reliable cues can produce better outcomes than exhaustive analysis. This is not anti-intellectual — it’s about matching the decision strategy to the structure of the problem.

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