By Pete Ryan
I believe that exercise has a good analogy with the person on
the treadmill. If you slowly walk forward, you stay about the same, if you
stop, you are going backwards. To move forward you have to run! It takes some
effort to actually stay still, let alone move forward.
I believe training is the same (once you reach adulthood).
As a trainee if you plod along, doing the same old pace, you will achieve the
same old results. You have seen the
people in the gym who look the same after months or years doing the same
things. They often have ridged, set
routines and do not focus on goals or plan their training. Let’s look at some
ways you can plan your yearly training cycles.
First off a lot will depend on what you do and your goals, some people
may need to lose weight, some may need to add muscle, others may use exercise
to improve a sporting or leisure activity? So, your first chore has to be to
decide why you want to exercise, what is the end goal?
After you have the final goal, the next is to break up your
training into mesa cycles throughout the year.
If you want to look buff, you might want to break the year into 3 or 4
mesa cycles. This will include a
strength cycle, a hypertrophy cycle, a conditioning cycle and a peaking cycle
(usually the peaking cycle will be just before summer, so you look your best
topless on the beach). If you are
someone into a sport, you split it into off-season exercise, pre-season
exercise and during the season exercise. These will probably be strength
focused off-season, adding in conditioning as the season approaches and then
minimal workouts to hold strength during the season (depending on the sport).
Strength athletes like powerlifters or weightlifters will focus on specificity,
so they will have more non-specific exercise during the off-season, then focus
on their actual sport more and more as the contest approaches, then a peaking
cycle leading into the contest. This
does not mean not doing the lifts off-season, but it does allow for doing
variations, conditioning and other exercises to be included.
Now we have an idea of what we want to do, we now need to
find ways to really push forward. A lot depends on your goals, but if you are
looking at 100 pound weight loss, set intermediate goals. Celebrate every pound
lost, buy yourself something nice when you lose 5 pounds. Learn to enjoy the process, the goal is
always anti-climatic, but enjoying the process continues as long as you are
doing it! If you want to lift 100 pounds, but you are only lifting 50 pounds,
lifting 51 pounds may not seem like much, but it is that step closer to the 100
pounds you want to get, so celebrate that. A PR (personal record) of 1 pound is
as valid as a 50 pound PR, enjoy the moment. To go back to the treadmill
analogy, every little PR, whether it is an extra rep, an extra pound or doing
something with a few seconds less rest is just upping that pace on the
treadmill a little, you started jogging instead of walking. The only sprinters in this analogy are people
new to training (or possibly people who begin taking anabolic steroids). Those are the 2 times a person would be
sprinting in this allegory, the rest of us will be walking, jogging or stopped.
Throughout life we will go through times of each, will have times we move
forward, times we ‘go through the motions’ and times of injury or distraction
where we regress. Our goal must be to maximise the times we move forward and
minimise the times we regress. You can do this by finding things you really
enjoy doing, that way you will be keen to actually do the work, secondly set
short term goals, so you will actually move forward slowly and not stagnate.
The final point to remember is that this is a process, so
there may be goals along the way, but there is never a finish line, every goal
is just a stepping stone to the next challenge, never be satisfied and never
stop striving!
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