Train Hard not Smart
I have been doing various sports as a part time hobby for a long time. At some moments it was сross-country skiing. Other times — road cycling or long distance running. Or various team-involved sports like football or volleyball.
To be honest I should say that on many occasions I was not the wisest man when it comes to training. Both physically and mentaly. Sometimes I overtrained without any reason to. Sometimes my plan for training was chaotic and not scheduled. Usually I didn’t pay attention to what I was eating as well.
In other words forced my younger more healthy self in bad situations without having a side thought about it.
Recently I’ve rethought my approach and view on physical culture. This is an attempt to summarize the topic.
Points to discuss:
- What to aim for. Goal
- Intensity in training
- Indirect ways to become better
- Technique. Coaches and Self-Analysis
- On gyms
What to aim for. Goal
Why do I train?
People who do sports professionally have a solid reason to put every bit of their energy to the training process. This is how they get sponsors and earn money.
On the other hand people with part time sport-hobbies like me mostly do sports for no money or even spend some on the equipment. In rare cases you see such people actually get prices. This group of people should not care a lot about compitition-component of the sport and focus more on gradual and calm advancement of their skills. And get satisfaction from this development and general health benefits. Such motivation could give high results in the long run.
Although it’s hard especially for a competitive-type person to accept this point and to leave the goal of being the best at every field there is.
I faced this issue too. Having sports on the very front lines of my interests, I hated to leave the idea that I should train like a professional.
Very intensive, 6–7 days a week and 2 times a day. Resting all the time between training. Although I could manage the schedule like that, I see very little reason to do so.
You should not spend all your time on training as professional athletes do. There are a lot of other interests in life. With me, there was probably some mental component to it too. You see, I grew up not that social and did not have a lot of other staff to spend my energy on.
Anyway, the summary to this part is to leave the idea of trying to compete on the professional level and enjoy calm and gradual development on your skills. And everything else come with time.
Intensity in training
What if after an hour of training you do not have any tired feeling. Was this session unproductive? Should you be exhausted after the session that could be called a successful one?
For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that during training your body could work in 2 intensity modes. First one in ease mode. This is when you can comfortably talk during training and do not need to breathe rapidly. Second one is the opposite — the hard mode. You can not talk at all because all you do with your mouse is constantly breathing, supplying muscles that work hard with oxygen.
Basic rule is to have more long training sessions in ease mode and occasionally short sessions in the hard mode.
Train this way and speed & strength that you achieve in easy mode will grow. And you will be amazed that you are not totally exhausted still do such results.
If you are in the hard mode all the time, it means that you just put yourself into a situation that you are not yet ready for. Slow down and find a tempo where you are still in easy mode. With time you will be able to return to the intensity you did before being in hard mode but this time being in ease mode.
If you are in easy mode you could find yourself very slow compared to you previous self or to others around you. Ignore these facts. We could say that “who wins who” is kind of important during compitition events, but it definitely has the lowest priority during the training process. Even if you are in the ease mode and some 9-years old kid passes through, just ignore it. You have compeletly different goals. You need to stay in the easy mode. And It’s not a problem because gradually you will raise your limits in easy mode, and this is when you feel really amazing. Actually if 9-years passes through, it means that you do a good job because you do not lose control over yourself in this provocative situation. You just should remember that if you want you could switch to hard mode and kill everyone around you, although do not do it during training session.
Indirect ways to become better
Let’s say you’re training 1k running and have some excess weight on your belly. You do training regularly and have a time of 10 minutes per 1 kilometer(1 mile). Will you be able to improve the time and make it 8 minutes with several kilos excess weight? Sure you will. But it will become harder and harder for your body to improve results as you move toward better results. Why not just spend some time before you start training when you still have 10minutes per 1k and think what could be done about excess weight. Without excess weight you will improve time much faster. Maybe you won’t even need to do anything. After losing some kilos your time will be improved automatically because your body starts working in more harmony.
I should notice that just doing sport to lose weight is not the wisest approach unless you first become concern about the diet(good way would be to take in less that you use) and other side things like stress and sleeping. Let high result in your training be a motivation for you to lose weight and not the way around.
You might say that progressing in sport is like the peak of the pyramid. And general health is the basis. There is no way to build it high without a good base.
Even though In the past I prefered sport itself over general health, Now I would better do yoga session cold water swim other than hard training, because sports is much more specific and narrow type of motions for muscles and is it’s not possible to progress long without good base health condition.
What side/indirect ways there are?
- fill your everyday life with low intensity activities. Be in motion as much as possible
- work on flexibility, do yoga. It will allow you to use greater range of motions
- have several sports of your interest like cycling, swimming, running
- be concerned about what you eat
As a summary, one could greatly benefit at any sport without even touching it and only working on side components.
Technique. Coaches and Self-Analysis
The second most important component after general health is the technical part of a sport.
Advancing in technique is more important than having extra strength. With great strength and poor technique you won’t see advancement in the long run.
Coaches are good at teaching technique, but it is useful to understand why you do various motions and why this is the most efficient way to do them.
I mostly do training along. I find it helpful to film myself from time to time either its swimming, skiing or anything else and then during some meal or tea session self-analyze it with no rush searching for weak points. This way I could better understand what is going on.
There are a lot of resources on the internet to use as a reference point while you analyze your tape.
At first I tried to use a phone to film, but it’s much more comfortable to use a cheap action camera because of great view angles.
If you have a coach, the question should not be how I do some specific motion in sport, rather why and what for I do it. There is a little meaning in just repeating after a coach. Try to understand why you do exactly these actions and not others.
On gyms
This is only my personal opinion.
The reason to visit a gym is to improve the functional abilities of your muscles to show better results in your main sport. It’s common around more advanced athletes. People already have a great technique and there is nothing else except gaining muscle mass to improve on results. I myself are not yet in this group because I have a potential to improve results working on side-components described earlier and technique. For me, going to gym is like a last resort. It’s greatly benefitial if done correctly.
I am not a great fan of visiting a gym just to visit a gym as a main physical activity. Living with extra muscle mass makes little scenes to me. And losing weight in a gym looks much harder than a healthy diet.
