Adapting Fitness Overtime
The 7 Year Failure Scheme
Part 1 of 5 — Understanding The
“5 Keys to unlocking the gates of wisdom for sustainable health and fitness”
“Wait, I thought this was supposed to be a positive post?”
Well, it is! You have to actually read what i’m going to share to understand how every 7 years your fitness program may be a failing schematic when it ought to be a life long party down, can’t wait to get hit it, hulk smashing, progress building and down right fun time!
Trouble is, how do you keep up? There are different types of exercises being released almost monthly from people who either have been:
Bored from 30 years of doing the same thing
Believe that they have developed the new Cardio Blaster, Belly Blaster, Butt Sizer, Chest Pumper workout
Ungrounded athletes who aren’t coaches
Now before you get all frazzled, I have nothing against the fitness or health industry (i’m in it!) but I do have an issue with people who are attempting to sell “Results” to people with a One Size Fits All modality. THAT my friends is a complete lie, what works for one person may not work for a different person. That’s fine because at the end of the day person Y who didn’t see the results had the opportunity to give it a shot, hopefully more than a month, and now has wisdom which he/she can use for their future health and fitness goals.
“You sound pretty contradictory right now…”
Oh i’m sure of it, however there is always a bit of myst you need to traverse through before the encompassing truth is revealed. What I mean by that is if you bought into the idea that program X is going to provide you with the net results of losing 20 pounds, reducing your body fat by 5% and increase your LBM (Lean Body Mass) by 7% and you were able to achieve it then you won!
Oh but how many years has it been again? Is it now 5, 7, 10 years after and somehow you can’t fit into the same jeans, shirt or belts any longer? Hmm…
The problem is you were sold a quick fix program, not a scalable one that you can utilize over time. The program got you where you wanted to be, but you were personally identified with who you were and NOT who you were becoming. It takes many years of consistent effort as well as understanding that your body will age and with that comes shifts in metabolism, hormone fluctuations, decreased recovery times and more stress.
/Plateaus and Self Awareness
When you hit a plateau it’s usually come at a point in your life that was meant to be. Those events allow you to be more reflective on,
- What you have been doing
- Are you still passionate about it
- What’s the next goal
Taking this into the context of exercise programs, how long have you stuck to any program more than 3 years? If you haven’t been able to stay consistent with one for 3 years and have recklessly banged your head against the wall each time you have to workout, then perhaps it’s time you re-evaluated your goals. The easy thing is to have a goal of “lose x amount of pounds and get a bigger @$$”. Cool, what’s next?
You’re in for a sore hurting friend, if you don’t have another goal you will slowly start to despise exercising or try something else right? Yes, you have convinced yourself that a new workout regiment is necessary. A quick google search provides you with the following:
“Holy $*$@ Ummm”
So what do you do? Perhaps you actually pick one that works for another 2–3 years, or you simply give up and tell yourself you’ll get around to it in another 2–3 years yeah?
For the next 36 months you will spend (most of it at least) your extra time smashing weights, running up stadium stairs, running 10 miles each day, cycle until your spandex snaps or HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) until you MISS (Mild Indication Something Snapped).
Wow where has the time gone? You started reading this at the age of 18 and now you’re well into your mid 40’s! Another day another ride up the escalator of monotony and dread…
/The Truth Is Hard
No one likes the truth, it’s too hard to handle. Emotionally you felt you won in the past and the taste of victory was so good you won’t allow yourself to accept anything less than that. My friend, life will always and I mean always move in a cyclical fashion. It is the Eb and Flow of nature, just like we have tornados, floods, earthquakes and hot flashes so will you in the course of your life time.
Exercise is no different, if you spend too much time doing the same thing without,
A.) Intrinsic value
B.) Adaptable Mindsets
You will continue to wonder what you did wrong and be frustrated at what you look like and more importantly..
How you feel
It’s the love of training and with it comes grounded motivation (not external) that is not dependent on anyone else but you. You feel a deep calling within to start making a change because you’ve felt the effects of disparity and loss. You tell yourself, “Enough is enough”.
/Solution
Where you are now pales in comparison to the net results of where you have been and where you will be. The present moment is all we truly have, yet it’s the Captain Planet type power that builds from your past, present and future selves to create harmony with-in you. Once you’ve established harmony and balance you begin to see training, nutrition and your health from a holistic perspective.
You can have the best fitness program in the world and eat junk all day and never see a single lasting result. Perhaps you were given the ultimate guide on macronutrients and say to yourself, “Yes i’ll never have to worry about my weight again!” but then fail to exercise more than once a week and ponder why you haven’t lost any weight?
The solution to the madness is an Adaptable Fitness Program, one that can scale beyond the conventional means of programs today. There are so many systems and disciplines of training, you can utilize many of them over the course of your life to enhance and move through plateaus you hit. I’m not here to sell a program, what I am here to do is share with you 4 Pillars of Growth and Sustainable Exercise that will bring light to a darkened exercise attitude you may have developed. No fault of yours, there’s too much “Fluff” around the interwebz that it becomes difficult to navigate through the muck.
Here are the 4 Pillars in a nut shell:
1.) Flexibility
Incorporate a stretching program to build self-awareness around tonic (short) and phasic (long & weak) muscles through your body. When muscles become too short or too long over time, you develop what’s known as “Muscular Imbalances”. It’s your neuromuscular system’s own way of adapting to the path of least resistance which it will prioritize over any motor function. Now you don’t need to be a new found Yogi in order to perform adequate stretching, but if you’re someone that sits down 5–6 hours a day you may need to basic guidelines on how to open your hips, hamstrings, lower/mid/upper back. Feel free to browse {here} for 6 Easy Stretches you can do at home or in the office.
What having adequate flexibility will gift you with is the long term muscular and skeletal rooting of movement. This keeps you from getting injured during ANY exercise whether that be resistance training, HIIT, Spartans, Crossfit, Impact Sports and even picking up a water jug to replace in your kitchen (people still use those right?)
2.) Mobility
Being mobile isn’t just about grabbing a red resistance band and making circular motions. Mobility is the act of moving, it’s dynamic in fashion to help improve circulation of oxygen and enhance blood flow through to your joints and throughout your muscles. If you aren’t mobile you’re stiff, if you’re stiff as a log it’s only a matter of time before that log begins to rot out in the open woods. Ensure that you work on mobility through your ankles, hips, knees, wrists, elbows, shoulders and neck throughout the week.
By incorporating mobility you bring awareness to faulty recruitment patterns your CNS (Central Nervous System) will develop unconsciously through repetitive actions. What does a faulty recruitment pattern look like? Simple example is bending down to pick up a child but you “Use Your Legs” to do it. Using your legs what does that mean? It means that you ought to be using your hamstrings and glutes to move back up to a standing position. If you’ve developed more of a low back ligament movement then I hope you have some good insurance =)
3.) Strength
Ahh good old strength training, one of my favorite inner-heart driving passions. I’ll keep this one as concise as I can, basically there are two ranges of strength to develop. You have relative strength (bodyweight) and absolute strength (more than bodyweight). To scale your strength gains and lean muscle mass over time, develop a good habit of training both.
Relative strength will give you the foundation of movement patterns so you’ll be more confident when adding resistance to the mix (dumb bells, barbells etc). You can build a nice physique as well as “functional” strength (I use that term loosely here) when it comes to Jackie Chan type movements as well as realistic events such as carrying a couch, moving tables, loading your truck and other day to day activities.
Absolute strength will create denser and harder muscles (Type II muscle fibers) which you see common in gymnasts, sprinters and olympic weight lifters. By training periodically for maximal lifting you’ll also increase the efficiency of rate coding and the motor neurons used when your CNS (Central Nervous System) is given demand for high intensity kinetic energy.
4.) Power
Where gods and heroes live. Power is the final Pillar where flexibility, mobility and strength must be understood and trained to break through the barriers and plateaus you have experienced with your fitness programs. Reason being is because it takes so much from your CNS, muscular system, stabilizer systems and most of all mental fortitude to be able to perform any activity that is power related.
Ask a 200m sprinter, wide receiver, competitors in powerlifting/strongman/olympic lifting how long they have been training and why they still do it and I guarantee you they will respond with,
“I LOVE IT”
Power training pushes you to the limits — physically, psychologically and spiritually which is why it’s at the end. You don’t train power one day because you felt like it, you’ve ran the gamut of all other types of exercise and movement but never in your life have you experienced the uncanny and visceral experience of power training.
/Dogma, Deload, Discovery
Much like every ending, we are now left with a choice. To believe in what we’ve seen over the course of the film or continue to allow our minds and what social norms standardize as “The only fitness programs that work” to shackle us into the chains of dogma.
When you’ve accepted that there are only certain ways of training and exercising you soon find yourself in the continuous pitfall of health and exercise. You may get out after a while but with blind ignorance you fall into the next one, and the next one and the next one until your heart and spirit can no longer cope with the failures and rebounds.
That is Dogma at it’s best, the rules are simple and as long as you follow them then comfort and security are yours. Yet neither comfort nor security are the breeding grounds for self-evolution; you’re chained down to someone else’s preconceived notions of what fitness should look like.
The Counter-Punch To Dogma
Is understanding the principle of Deloading. In the strength training world the Deload period is necessary in order for your CNS to recover as well as to provide a brief rest period away from the mental energy that is required to stay consistent with pushing your physical body day in and day out.
When you understand and accept that rest periods are necessary in the context of physical training, you won’t need to energetically throw yourself away to another fitness trend. Give yourself a small break every 4–6 weeks to let your mind reset and come back with renewed energy and re-established faith with your body.
Discovery of Self
Gifts you with the practical and powerful ability to know what works for you, what doesn’t and then to use all of your failures and victories as guiding principles. This is how an adaptable fitness program shines above all other training modalities.
You are not fixed in position, dogmatic rules do not run your life and you have developed flexibility both in body and mind. Isolating the way you think transfers in all areas of your life — financial, relational, educational and personal growth. Let go of old $h*t so that a new and more powerful version of you is free to grow and evolve.
If you can do this, if you can view your life from the perspective of holistic health and not just immediate ROI then you will never be left a victim again. That is my wish and hope for you, you have one opportunity at life — your health comes first and if you take care of it your body, mind and heart will thank you each and everyday.
With Love and Strength,
David Lee — The P.O.W.E.R Coach
I hope you enjoyed reading this rant, philosophical expression, psycho-something or other post!
If you have 1 second (just one!) please comment or ❤ the post if you liked it! I believe in communication and community which is why i’m here.
Thanks a bunch and follow me around on my journey as a Powerlifter, Yoga Teacher, Holistic Lifestyle Coach and Techie.
Namaste!
