Listen to the author reading this blog post:
If you’ve resolved to achieve something that requires a lot of effort in 2024, then this post is for you! Today I’m looking at idioms and phrases that we use to talk about making an effort. If you didn’t already know this, ‘make an effort‘ (= try hard) is a phrase itself, for example:
Can we all, please, make an effort to keep the kitchen a bit cleaner?
Staying with the ‘effort’ theme, if someone spares no effort to do something, they do everything possible to achieve that thing:
We will spare no effort to secure their release from prison.
Let’s look now at two ‘back’ idioms in this area. If you break your back, you make a great effort, working extremely hard to achieve something and if you put your back into something, you use a lot of effort (especially physical effort) to try to do something:
There I was, breaking my back to get the project finished while he was skiing with his girlfriend!
You could clear this whole area in an hour if you put your back into it.
Someone who goes the extra mile makes more effort than is necessary in order to do something as well as they can:
She really went the extra mile to ensure the event was a success.
Two informal and emphatic phrases meaning ‘try extremely hard to achieve something’ are bust a gut and sweat blood:
If you can finish the report by Friday, that would be great, but don’t bust a gut.
We sweated blood to get that award.
In UK English, a way of saying that someone is putting a lot of effort into a task is to say they are hard at it:
We’ve been hard at it all morning and I think we’re starting to see results.
Finally for verb phrases, if you greatly increase your effort in order to do something, you might say you redouble your efforts:
The government has said it will redouble its efforts to prevent such a thing happening again.
Moving on to noun phrases, if a task requires hard, physical effort, for example when cleaning or polishing something, we say that it needs elbow grease. More emphatically, if you put the greatest possible effort into achieving something, you might say it has involved blood, sweat and tears:
You can do the job by hand, but it does take a bit of elbow grease.
He put blood, sweat and tears into that restaurant.
That concludes my post on idioms for making an effort. If there’s something that you will ‘go the extra mile’ to achieve this year, why don’t you tell us about it in the comments section?