One Piece of Training to Remember
Coach Dean posted this blog awhile ago. It is such an important piece to training I want you to read it again.
“Anybody that walks into a gym to train for the first time, or the first time in a long time, deserves a lot of credit.
Unfamiliar place, all these weird looking instruments of torture, people standing around gawking at the “newbie”. And dumbbells? That’s how you are left feeling sometimes. Who needs that mess? (In reality nobody, which is why Cr8 Fitness is the real “anti-gym”)
All that weirdness, and you did it anyway – really cool. As for results? In the beginning just about any workout will start to get you at least some results. But regardless of how long you have been training, you need to pay attention if you want to make the most progress, the quickest.
Good training design incorporates progression. “Progressive Strength Training” isn’t some political thing, it simply means that you need to be continually increasing key training variables, usually volume and/or intensity, to continue making progress.
And that’s why you need to settle down and pay attention when you are training. For instance the most common “progressive” variable our training cycles here at Cr8 Fitness uses is volume. The work periods increase over the 4-6 week cycle; from 30 seconds to 60 seconds, or even more at times. That’s the easy part for you, at least from a “paying attention” standpoint. Load selection, or how much you are lifting, is where we miss the boat at times. If you are not paying attention and tracking, at least mentally, how much you are lifting on a weekly basis you will not progress as fast.
Here’s an example why it matters:
Let’s say we are working on single arm overhead presses. In week one we do 30 second sets, and you use a 30 pound dumbbell. Our speed of movement is 3-1-x, so you are getting about 6 reps per side. The next week you come in, notice we are doing 45 second sets, so you drop the weight to 20 pounds, because the work period is longer (not an ideal strategy, but I’ll get to that). Or you simply don’t remember what you used last week. In the 40 second set you get about 8 reps. That’s more reps than last week, so that’ good, right? Well if you add up the total work you are doing, in week one you lifted 180 pounds total (6×30), and in week two you lifted 160 pounds (8×20). You see where I am going with that? Even though the set took longer, you did less work. Dropping back only to 25 pounds would have been better, and in reality staying at 30 would have been the best strategy.
The take home on this? You have to know week to week what load you have been using, so you can track how much work you are actually doing. This is the key to progress. Smartphone, moleskin notebook, permanent marker on your forearm. Any of those will work. 🙂
I was talking to another “athlete of aging” this weekend and we were commenting that the older you get, the faster you have to peddle just to stay in place. It may not be “fair”, but it is pretty accurate. And you need to keep track of how fast you are peddling somehow. Speedometers on a car, thermostats on an oven, numbers on the scale. They all give us crucial information, and let us know how we are tracking and if and when we need to make adjustments. Keeping track of how much you are lifting does the same thing.
And to put it bluntly, that’s about the only thing you are responsible for when you train here, besides showing up. Our training design and coaching takes care of the rest; proper exercise selection, coaching your form, number and length of sets, rest periods, macro and micro-recovery strategies, the whole gamut. This one piece is where we have “co-responsibility”, which is why we are consistently encouraging you to increase load, where appropriate. (Coach Nancy is SO mean, right?) 🙂
We have a recovery week coming up next week (June 26 – July 4th). This too is by design as part of your overall plan. You can check out why here: You Are Not A Unicorn. Recovery Matters.
So now that you know, how are you going to keep track? It might just be the piece you have been missing to making even better progress.” – Coach Dean
Need some help? That’s what I am here for!
See you soon,
Coach Nancy
