Yeah, "no pain no gain" is probably the worst advice I've ever received. It encourages sedentary people to go hard for a week and then quit, which is the exact opposite of what works: starting with consistent easy sessions and adding progressive overload.

Dynomight has a good blog post about this[0], but applied to running rather than resistance training.

[0] https://dynomight.net/2021/01/25/how-to-run-without-all-the-...