Get better at something.
It has always been my position that training should make you a more useful human. It should make you better than you were at something.When you try to get better at something, there’s going to be ups and downs. You will encounter roadblocks. It then becomes necessary to get past those roadblocks. But then you do, and you feel wonderful! Such is the joy of accomplishing a goal.
Too often what we see is, rather than getting better at something, people attempting to accomplish the goal of burning calories. “That was such a good workout! I worked really hard!” .This approach, to me, seems inside out. Let me try to explain why.
Exercise is a tricky thing: it creates deficits or debt that must be paid back. The harder you exercise, the more to pay back.
With exercise, there are hormone exchanges that take place.
Exercise makes you hungrier; and done wrong it can reduce the integrity of muscle and connective tissue. Too much exercise can leave you in a depleted state in which you are more prone to injury.
This is the problem with looking at exercise itself as a sport.
When your goal is simply to burn calories (and there are limitless ways of doing it), You are trying to make yourself tired. In such a state, one is just creating caloric(oxygen) deficit at the expense of structural integrity, energy systems, and hormone balance. Indeed as the intensity of your exercise goes up, the integrity of the systems come down.
When you run, you’re trying to run faster. When you lift, you’re trying to lift heavier. Too much running or lifting respectively, is counterproductive. It will actually make you slower, weaker. You’d be silly to proceed because you are just burning yourself out to no good outcome. Such are the built in safeguards of trying to get better at something.
Does it not make sense that one should do the minimum required to get where you need to be?
This to me is the difference between training and exercise. Get stronger or faster by training; get tired with exercise.
Now, I’m not saying all of this because it’s bad to get tired. It’s not. Being tired may well be the outcome of your training. Making “tired” your destination is really what I really want to challenge.
Thank you for reading this it really means a lot to me. 🙂 I’d love for you to come in for a free assessment and we can get you training! http://goo.gl/IH9RRb
The Trainer.
