The Sunday Scaries, Explained (And Three Ways to Shrink the Dread)
Your Sunday-night dread has a name: anticipatory anxiety. Scientists have studied it, and we break down three ways to quiet it.
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Today’s Health Upgrade
Arnold’s Corner: Monday motivation
Most people get electrolytes wrong
The fix for Sunday scaries
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Workout of the week
Arnold’s Corner
Monday Motivation
Since we’re letting you earn back every dollar you spend on the Pump Club app until the end of this week, I wanted to let you in on one of our best traditions: the weekend schmooze.
Every Saturday and Sunday, I bring everyone together in the app to celebrate the wins from the week. Not just the big ones. Mostly the small ones nobody outside of the app would think to clap for.
We think it’s a big part of why this works. When people learn to see their own progress, they quit quitting.
Here’s what I shared with our newest members this weekend:
Welcome to our new members. There are a lot of you. The most since the first day we opened to the public.
This is the weekend schmooze, and it’s probably going to feel pretty weird to you at first.
I ask everybody to show up here every Saturday and Sunday and share a win from the last week.
It can be big. If you hit a milestone, go for it.
Most of the time it will be small. Showing up even though you didn’t want to. Doing all of your workouts. Getting your protein or vegetable servings all week.
It’s the small stuff that no one outside of here celebrates.
And that’s a major mistake. You’ve heard we do things differently. It’s because of the old quote: insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The same thing isn’t working. You all know that.
So take a leap of faith and celebrate the little tiny wins you’d normally brush off.
Let me explain.
People are used to the huge transformation. It’s all they see on social media.
They don’t see that the huge transformation is built on a million bricks of tiny steps forward.
And then people quit. Because the big win seems so far away they’ll never get to it. All of us who run this app can tell you how many times someone has said “I only lost a pound a week.”
They never zoom out and think, if I did that for a year, I’d lose more than 50 pounds, and would I say someone “only” lost 50 pounds?
If you learn to see your progress, I believe you’re less likely to quit.
And it has a second benefit. I’m a wildly positive person in a world that’s getting more and more negative. If I can train more of you to find the positive like I do, that’s a win.
So just join us in celebrating something you did this week to move forward.
The first workout. The first day tracking your food. Joining a coaching call.
Learn to celebrate yourself so that you have the fuel to keep going when it gets really hard.
The last thing I want to leave you with is this: don’t expect perfection.
Throw it out the window right now. It was never real, anyway.
You will hear this from all of us, over and over.
You will miss workouts. You will eat delicious treats that aren’t on your plan.
Some of you think that the people who succeed don’t do any of that.
Bullshit!
They just come back every single time.
I eat treats. It’s my birthday week! I miss workouts. I’ve had to miss weeks and months after operations. I’ve had days where it just didn’t work in my schedule.
There is no secret.
There is no perfection.
The only thing that works is being relentless. Like a Terminator.
You just keep coming back.
Fall, get up. Miss, show up.
Too many people choose the mirage of perfection over the reality of progress. And 5 years later, they are still standing in exactly the same place, still researching the next move.
Just move. Relentlessly.
If you just joined here, promise me this.
Today, you quit quitting.
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Remember, if you want to join the app, for this week only, you can get a yearly membership for free — if you do the work.
You’ll get $50 off to celebrate my birthday, $50 back when you complete your first program, and another $50 back when you finish your fourth program. Add it up, and the app is free. And you get in better shape and improve your health.
You can check out the app, start seeing the small wins, and get a free 7-day trial by clicking here.
Together With LMNT
Do You Need That Electrolyte Packet?
Ten years ago, you would only see electrolyte packets in a marathoner's gym bag. Now they're on the desk, poured into the bottle before a 40-minute lift, sold as the thing that will help you have a more energized afternoon.
But the electrolytes story has lost the plot and ignored the science. There is a real time and place for electrolytes, but most people use them incorrectly or take them unnecessarily.
Most people believe that electrolytes prevent cramping, but that’s one use where the benefit isn’t as significant. Cramps can affect people with completely normal sodium levels. When researchers tracked runners across races, those who cramped and those who didn't had the same blood sodium and hydration levels. If low salt were the trigger, that wouldn't happen. That’s not to say it has no impact — dehydration can influence it — but it’s not a primary cause.
The real issue is fatigue. Cramps show up in the muscles working hardest when you're going harder than you trained for. The muscle tires, the signals telling it to fire and relax fall out of balance, and it locks. That's why the common fix for a cramp is a stretch, not a sip. That’s because stretching can help reset the signal. And it's why prevention is about building your motor and endurance. You can't salt your way out of a conditioning gap.
The everyday "hydration upgrade" doesn’t hold up much better. On a normal day, your kidneys clear excess minerals you don't need, and plain water with regular meals gives your body what it needs.
But electrolytes are valuable. And if you do need them, they are a priority. The key is knowing when you’re losing enough that electrolytes should become a priority.
There are four ways to determine if you need to take electrolytes: workout intensity, workout duration, the climate (think hot days or humid gyms), and how much you sweat.
When you’re pushing near your cardio or strength limit, go past 1.5 hours in your workout, train in real heat, or sweat heavily, electrolytes become not just a benefit but possibly a necessity.
Sodium is what lets your body hold onto the water you drink instead of flushing it straight through. During a long, hot session as you sweat, your blood volume drops, and thinner blood means your heart works harder to push it to your muscles and your skin to cool you.
Sodium helps you keep more fluid in circulation, so the whole system functions as you want when you’re training.
Lose enough water through sweat, heat, and exertion — roughly 2% of your body weight in sweat — and endurance starts to slide, and you break down quickly, and that influences both performance and recovery.
And it pays off after, too: drink plain water alone, and your body senses the dilution and pees a good chunk of it back out. Add sodium, and you actually keep it, which is the difference between feeling wrung out an hour later and bouncing back.
So it's not always, and it's not never. For a normal 45-minute session, water and a meal with a little salt get the job done. When it's longer, hotter, saltier, or you want to bounce back fast, that's when the packet stops being a habit and starts being worth it.
There’s no shortage of electrolyte options, and we tried most of them. We recommend LMNT because it was designed to replace the vitamins and minerals you lose through sweat during exercise.
It doesn’t try to be something for everybody. It solves the problem of when your body needs electrolytes.
With the right balance of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, LMNT helps replace the electrolytes your muscles and brain need to keep going strong.
As a member of the village, you’ll get a free sample pack (8 packets) of all LMNT flavors when you make any purchase.
If you don’t love the product, LMNT offers a no-questions-asked refund policy, which means if you’re not satisfied, you get your money back. That’s the type of guarantee we can appreciate.
Start Your Week Right
The Antidote To Sunday Scaries
Every weekend, we get emails from people telling us they want to be better, more optimistic, and inspired. And yet, each Sunday night, they already feel it: the dread of Monday. If last night you were answering emails in your head that nobody had sent yet, understanding what’s happening might help you break the pattern.
Psychologists call it anticipatory anxiety, and it’s your brain reacting to a stressor before it arrives, not after, and there’s research suggesting you can rewire how you deal with these thoughts.
The anxiety is not a glitch unique to you or to Sunday nights, and it doesn't mean you're bad at your job or bad at unwinding. It means your brain is doing what brains do: rehearsing what's ahead so you're not caught off guard.
You can't out-think that dread, and you can't order yourself to stop feeling it. Unfortunately, worry doesn't take commands. But you can give it somewhere to go. Here are three moves researchers have actually put to the test.
Rename the feeling: That knot in your stomach and a jolt of excitement are almost the same thing in your body: high alertness, faster heartbeat. In studies of people facing exams and public speaking, those who treated the buzz as fuel (rather than fighting to feel calm) felt more capable and did better. You don't have to fake calm. You just have to let the feeling mean, “I’m ready” instead of “I’m doomed.”
Get it out of your head: You likely run the same loop on repeat. In a sleep-lab study, people who spent five minutes writing a specific to-do list before bed fell asleep about nine minutes faster than people who wrote about their day. And the more specific the list, the faster they dropped off. So when the loop spins hardest at night, that's your move: one short, specific list, then lights out.
Give worry an appointment: Your worry expands to fill whatever space you give it. In a review of randomized trials, people who worked to consolidate their worrying into a fixed 15-minute window each day spent less time worrying overall, and naming a specific "if this comes up, I'll deal with it then" plan further reduced it. When a worry shows up off-schedule, you're not ignoring it. You're just telling it “not now.”
Fitness
Workout Of The Week: The 10-Minute Deadlift
This one might seem easy, but it’s a great way to train strength and endurance, especially on days when you’re short on time or training at a busy gym.
How to do it:
You’ll be doing deadlifts and only deadlifts. It can be traditional, Romanian, or whatever variation you prefer. Any type of equipment works, but we recommend a barbell (like the official Pump Club barbell) because you’ll be using heavier loads.
Perform 2-3 work-up sets to help prime your body. Don’t go above 60% of your 1-rep max on the work-up sets.
Select a weight that’s about 70% of your 1-rep max. So if you can deadlift 300 pounds, you would load 210 pounds.
Set ten different 1-minute timers. Start the first 1-minute interval and perform 3 reps. Once you complete the second rep, rest for the remainder of the minute. So if the 3 reps take 10 seconds, then you would rest for 50 seconds.
Then, perform another 3 reps. Once again, rest for the remainder of the minute.
You’ll repeat this process for a total of 10 sets, for a total of 30 reps. And that’s it.
The approach allows for heavier weights to build strength, enough volume for muscle, and short enough rest to jack up your heart rate.
Give it a try, and start your week strong!
Is The Pump Club App For Me?
We hear a lot from people who wonder, ‘Is the Pump Club app for me?’ So we pulled feedback from the different types of people who experience success.
“I will be 72 in a few weeks, and I am stronger than at any time in my life. I signed up for the free trial and canceled it within the first 7 days because I did not think I could do it, but soon after I decided to give it a shot. The ‘do the work and get your money back’ is a great program, but I don’t want any money back because I am getting more than my money’s worth.”
“Two years in. 105 weeks in a row. Missing a workout occasionally, but never two. I’m a dad with three youngish daughters. I’m stronger than I was 20 years ago and can carry around my 7-year-old whenever she wants, by taking it one workout and really one rep at a time.”
“As a mom of 6, my health was falling apart. I’ve lost nearly 75 pounds, but more importantly, I rebuilt my habits and my mindset. The Pump Club taught me how to create healthy routines, celebrate wins, and stop quitting when things weren’t perfect. Without it I’d still be on the sofa, ordering takeout, showing my kids none of the habits I want them to have. Now we train, we move, we cook, we grow.”
“My biggest success is far greater than what I can lift. It is changing that voice in my head. When life gets cuckoo bananas and consistency slips, I know how to get back. The old critical voice is slowly being replaced by celebrate the small wins, keep showing up, progress is progress.”
“Small win: signing up, logging first workout, and I’m blown away by the ‘first set mindset.’ I’ve lifted weights for 30 years, but this feels different: less focus on the rep number, more focus on the quality of each rep. Excited to complete the foundations.”
Better Today
Take any of these tips from today’s email and put them into action:
1. Arnold's Case for Celebrating the Small Wins
You stop quitting by learning to see and celebrate small weekly progress instead of measuring yourself against an all-or-nothing transformation — losing a pound a week feels like failure until you realize it compounds to 50+ pounds in a year.
Why it matters: The people who succeed aren't perfect. They just keep coming back. A pound a week feels tiny, but that's 50+ pounds in a year.
Try this: Pick one small win from this week and celebrate it.
2. Four Things Decide Whether An Electrolyte Packet Is Worth It
Most people don't need electrolyte packets for everyday training — plain water and normal meals suffice. But they become worth it when a session is long, hot, sweaty, or near-maximal, roughly once you lose about 2% of your body weight in sweat.
Why it matters: For a 45-minute workout, water and a meal are enough. Electrolytes don't stop cramps, and you don't need them every day.
Try this: Save the packet for long, hot, sweaty, or all-out sessions. It will help with performance and recovery when it’s necessary.
3. Give Your Worry An Appointment, And It Shrinks
You can't order the dread to stop, but you can redirect it with three tested moves — relabel the anxious buzz as readiness, offload the loop into one specific bedtime to-do list, and consolidate worry into a single short daily window.
Why it matters: That Monday dread is normal, and you can quiet it. Fighting the feeling doesn't work. Redirecting it does.
Try this: Before bed, write one short, specific to-do list. Then lights out.
The Positive Corner of The Internet
About Arnold’s Pump Club Editorial Standards
We do things a bit differently here, starting with transparency.
The Content: All APC emails are researched, written, and fact-checked by the APC editors (see bottom of the email), with written contributions from Arnold (noted with “Arnold’s Corner”). Links take you to original studies (not second-hand sources).
Does AI play a role? Not for the primary content, but it is used in two ways. The main items are original content written by the APC team. The summaries at the end are AI-generated based on the human-written content above. We also use an AI tool to review our interpretations of the research and ensure scientific accuracy. We don’t assume AI is right, but we use technology to hold ourselves accountable.
Yes, we have partners (all clearly noted by “Together With”). Why? Because it allows us to keep the APC emails free. We first test products, and then reach out to potential partners who offer ways to help you improve every day. The bar is set high, and to date, we have turned down millions in ad deals. (Example: we will not partner with any non-certified supplements or those without evidence in human trials). If we won’t buy the product, we won’t recommend it to you. And if there’s no evidence it works, then there’s no place for it here.
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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell
