Feb 17, 2019
The Basic Principles of Training
How are you spending your time in the gym? Are you coming in with a plan of attack and measuring your progress or are you winging it session to session? As previously touched on in The Difference Between Working Out and Training, attempting to achieve our fitness goals can often be overcomplicated and while training doesn’t need to sit in the same leagues of complexity as rocket science it needs to be viewed with some level of precision.
One goal may differ from the next but each should follow a similar skeleton of guidelines ensuring that your training is as efficient as possible. Detailed below are some of the principles of weight training and how we can adhere to them to keep us heading in the right direction towards achieving our fitness goals.
Specificity:
Ask yourself, how relevant are the exercises you are performing to your goals? For those looking to lose body fat and improve body composition; is spending half an hour doing core exercises really beneficial to getting you in a caloric deficit or is your time better spent hitting the weights? What about those looking to maximise strength; how necessary is it to be regularly hitting double dropsets and repetitively taking the body to failure? All training should be personalised to suit the fitness goals of the individual, not of your best friend.
Overload:
We now have the understanding that the exercises we need to be doing during training should be relevant to what we want to achieve, but how do we stop from plateauing? Homeostasis is “the ability or tendency to maintain internal stability in an organism to compensate for environmental changes” or put simply; the body always catches up eventually. In order to keep moving forward with our goals we need to keep producing enough stress on the body to force change.
Progression:
We need to constantly be challenging ourselves with training. Coming to the gym to train and doing the same thing day in, day out won’t provide the body with the proper stimulus to force change. Steadily increasing the intensity of training by making incremental changes to the exercises you are performing will force the body to adapt. Ways of doing this include increasing weight, adding sets, reps and altering rest periods. The combination of the two above principles is commonly combined and referred to as “progressive overload”
Reversibility:
After several months or years of consistent training we might meet a level of satisfaction towards how we look, feel or our strength levels, but this doesn’t mean that we suddenly give it up. Reversibility says that if we discontinue training then we lose the effects of the work we’ve put in. This may mean a loss in strength, decrease in muscle or fat gain! A simple way of combating reversibility is always maintaining some level of training
Recovery:
Muscle isn’t created in the gym. During weight training the muscles being used develop micro tears as a result of the stress induced by the exercises performed. These tears are then repaired during time spent away from the gym with nutrition and sleep playing major roles. Ensure you are eating adequate amounts of protein with every meal, staying hydrated throughout the day and getting enough sleep throughout the night to optimise recovery.
Applying the principles
After establishing the basic principles of what makes a good training program we now need to put knowledge into practice.
Firstly, identify the areas you are lacking. If your training is currently random and erratic, look at following something structured and tailor-made to what you’re trying to achieve.
If you feel like you’ve hit a plateau in the exercises you’re doing it will likely mean a shift outside your comfort zone. As humans we’re capable of so much more than we think we are and our body is no different.
What might truly feel like maximum effort may in reality be the body working at 60%. Going from 0 to 100 right away is irresponsible and counterproductive but taking baby steps towards making training more challenging will help break away from that limiting belief. It’s easy to fall into comfort so it’s important be constantly setting new goals and targets and striving to do better than last time.
As great as a sesh in the gym is, if your body is telling you that it’s time for a rest it most likely is. Decreasing your weekly training workload to better enhance recovery might be the action needed to keep pushing forward.
