One of the biggest problems I’ve come to notice in the fitness world is the perception of a quality trainer or gym is determined mostly by intensity and physical exertion.
Not only do most people rate the quality of their workout by how much it ruined them, they expect it to be this way every session too.
Now don’t get me wrong at some point exercise needs to be hard in some way, shape or form but it’s a very limited view of training.
Last time I checked, the best athletes in the world regardless of sport spend a disproportionate time of their own training working at lower intensities or simply resting for long breaks between their higher intensity work. They have harder sessions often followed by easier sessions and likewise harder and easier weeks of training.
Why as people with real jobs, families, stress and often subpar nutritional and sleep habits do we think that we need to train flat out every day?
Sure high intensity workouts are effective for a variety of reasons, the most common one people look towards is for fat loss. But when we look at all of the reasons why high intensity cardiovascular workouts are beneficial there’s an equally or more effective means of achieving the same result with a less stressful means.
Doing Bootcamp style interval workouts everyday to lose fat? The guys and girls that get the leanest in the world are physique competitors very rarely do them at all. They lift weights with relatively short rest breaks and do low intensity cardio.
Want to get a huge aerobic engine? World class endurance athletes have traditionally followed a 80/20 approach of 80% of their training volume at lower intensities and 20% of high intensity interval work.
What about 15-20 minute metcons? Once you’ve been training hard for a while the intensity you need to work at to improve your fitness becomes higher and for longer. Often it becomes nearly impossible to hold that intensity high enough during those sessions to get the response you’re after.
Particularly for women we find that they’re not strong enough to actually challenge their energy systems to continue to see results after they’ve been training for a few months. They get stuck trying to do more cardio or trying to add lifting to their training but treat it like cardio anyway and never get the results they’re after.
Appropriate rest is actually one of the most important factors in getting results in your training.
Because someone doesn’t feel as physically exhausted at the end of a training session says absolutely nothing to the quality of the session.
The only case where that may apply is if there is no longer term approach to training past the day of the workout and if that’s the case you won’t get the results you want. Sadly for an industry where we are trying to push to be more ‘professional’ it’s still few and far between to see coaches look at any more than the workout at hand.
If there’s one thing I’ll stand for as long as I’m in the training space is that training plans should always have intent and progression.