Your Brain Knows When to Stop (And It's Lying to You)

If you were an attentive student in secondary school, you'd remember the scientific method: observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and conclusion. My science teacher used to say there was a 5th step — the "Fact" step. The idea being that a strong enough conclusion, tested enough times, eventually graduates into fact.

I'm not there yet. But today, I'm walking you through how I arrived at a conclusion about why we set goals the way we do, and what might actually be a healthier alternative. Yes, you're getting scientific AB today. You're welcome 😇

My Observation

As you know, I started this year trying to build muscle after undergoing a DEXA scan two months ago. I could barely do one correct push-up. Such things were never my thing. Why would I voluntarily put myself through pain? You can probably relate 🫣

As often as I could, I practised. I remember our excitement at home when I managed 5 pushups. In fact, my neighbours would have thought I just landed an admission into my dream university — the screams were deafening. My son kept saying “I told you you could do it”.

That excitement quickly faded and I just went all in. But I noticed something: whenever I counted as I pushed up and down, I knew exactly when I was approaching my previous limit. It was like my mind and body automatically became ready to give up; like they received a signal from my brain screaming “Now, you can stop”.

With knee push-ups (the easier variation), I'd naturally expect to go slightly beyond my full push-up limit. If I could do 10 full push-ups, I'd expect maybe 15 to 20 knee push-ups. And the moment I approached that number, my whole body would begin to wind down, and pushing past it required extra mental effort, not just physical.

My Hypothesis

This observation quickly led me into forming a hypothesis 👇🏾

The tracking of current progress in comparison to past limits actively influences the mind and body’s perception of maximum thresholds.

Who knows? I might be getting quoted worldwide soon, so we need to give this a name. The AB Maximum Threshold Theory? I’m genuinely dying to hear your suggestions — please add them in the comments.

The Experiment

I asked my son to count silently while I did push-ups. I didn't want to know the number. To stop myself from counting in my head, I'd hum at the start, just enough to lose track.

Every single time, I did better than before. Because I did not know where I was at in the count, I approached each set just giving my best and continuing until I physically couldn’t. I think the gym crowd calls this "training to point of failure."

Yesterday, for example, I did 43 knee push-ups, took a 60-second rest, then 25 full push-ups. If anyone had told me last week I'd do that, I'd have asked: "How? Via sorcery?"

My Analysis

As an organisational leader, I couldn't help but map this onto how companies set goals.

The obvious extension of my theory is: what if teams didn't track targets in real time, and everyone just gave their best until they couldn't anymore? Replacing "we need 10 client calls this week" with “Just reach out to as many people as you can until you're exhausted”. Would they beat 10?

Probably. But probably unevenly. You'd have people who'd run through walls and people who'd coast. So no, blind execution doesn't scale to teams the way it does to a solo push-up session.

Nevertheless, I do think that the best companies have already internalised this principle but disguised it as ambition. When a company says "we made £1M last year, we're going for £10M this year," they're not being naïve. They're deliberately setting a target beyond what anyone can mentally anchor to. Because if the number is so far from precedent that your brain can't find its usual stopping signal, you're forced to push past where you'd naturally quit. The threshold gets dissolved by design.

That's literally my theory in organisational clothing. And I think it holds 🤷🏽‍♀️

My Conclusion

The AB Maximum Threshold Theory (while awaiting a better name from you lot), holds water. The experiment showed at least one clear circumstance where removing knowledge of your current count removes the ceiling your mind has quietly constructed.

I suspect that this shows up in more places than push-ups and revenue targets. Anywhere you track yourself against a past version, you're quietly giving yourself permission to stop — either just at the limit, or just past it. Either way, the old number set the ceiling.

We now have a comments section, please test it out. Have you felt this before? Share it. And if you haven't, go apply the theory somewhere in your life and come back to tell me what happened. You'll officially be contributing to the data set. Who knows, maybe this is already a named theory somewhere. If so, we'll just add my 43 knee push-ups as a data point.

Thanks for reading amigo. See you in the comments section 😉