Maybe You Have to Do Less

These days I get approached by people who have done long bouts of grueling training with a personal trainer, fit magazine or the popular fitness videos. I get asked if I heard of this guru or that fitness expert. Usually I have no clue who they are speaking of. Many times I agree with the ideas they express to me. Sometimes I shake my head and disagree with principles. Doesn't really matter. If it works for you, I can't argue with it (much). One painful thing I am noticing is the amount of exercises and TUT (time under tension) people are putting themselves through to get to their goal. There is an astonishing amount of stress (both physical and mental) and minimal amount of recovery many will attempt to go with. I have had people tell me about the amazing plyometric style workout they had followed by a 30 minute "core" (place lame ab title here) workout. This person is not an athlete or pursuing competitive driven goals. Instead he is a hard working individual with a job that demands long hours and little ability to eat. Sleeping is more of a burden for this guy as he needs to meet deadlines and keep his family financially secure while the rest of us sleep. Yet he still wants to train like a person who can get nine hours of sleep nightly and throw down 3000k/cal plus per day. This trend seems to be growing to me. Average Hard Working Joes and Janes wanting to train like competitive athletes.

 Now before I go on, I am all for "over reaching" phases of training for those who have a few years of consecutive training under their belt, but definitely not for the Administrative Assistant for a Engineering company ran by Insomniacs. It is absolute suicide! I heard a great quote from Coach Dave Tate "train hard and recover even harder". The problem with most people I talk with, without the ability to recover properly from usually excessively high volume workouts, is they hit some major obstacles. The obstacles can come in the form of injuries, stress, and ill effects from training (the real bad one). This just brings the goal drive to a dead stop for most. Very demotivating and it takes a lot to get back up and strive forward. Not a good thing to be plagued by "bad knees", "bad shoulders", or "bad lower back" for years because you just had to attempt to destroy yourself every training session without the ability to rebuild and recover from it. Added bonus is to find body fat still close to the same level before the carnage begin. Why is this? The human body simply does not differentiate our daily lifestyle stress from the workout stress. Too much stress regardless of cause is likely to hinder a person from progressing in training and enhancing overall health. The body does need certain amount of stress to stimulate body compositional changes and behavior changes, but there is no need to go over board. Lowering the daily intake of stress and increasing the ability to recover will reap greater benefits for both short term goals (be realistic though) and long term health. Paul Chek calls this "enforcing the balance". It is easy to see this when we watch elite athletes. They may train hard but they eat like there is no tomorrow and sleep like hibernating bears. So recovery is very high for them (generally speaking) as a result they can give their all at competition time.

So maybe less is better for us mere mortals. At least until a lifetyle is obtained that recovery and training and living are balanced. To know if it is a good time to embark on a vicious training session, you should be able to answer hell yes to the following:

• Do you get sleep 7+  hours a night?
• Do you eat at enough food so the caloric input is above your RMR (resting metabolic rate) and get most of your calories from lean proteins, healthy fats and cruciferous vegetables (seriously you should be well above this)?
• Are you able to use at least one form of active recovery daily (foam roll, massage, ice therapy, stretching etc.)?

 If you can't do these simple things than you need to think about balancing your stress (lifestyle and workout) so that you are able to handle it. Since I doubt if quitting your job is an option, an easy way is to drop the total TUT time each training session. This holds true for those having more than three training sessions weekly. Don't simply try to lower intensity (think-weight). It is true higher the intensity the more demand is placed on the nervous system. In comparison, the higher and longer the sheer volume (think-total reps) of the training, the more the body goes into "flight" mode. This is where stress hormonal response raises, fat storage increases, and a sense of depression begins to show.

 One more note, don't be afraid to drop the sessions when lifestyle stress becomes overbearing. One or two sessions a week with exercises that really count (squats, deads, lunges, cleans, pushups chinups and hybrids of these) will be fine until you can handle more. Trust me you may be surprised as you begin progressing in fat loss and strength gains while lowering the training stress.