One of my favourite sayings is:
“You can do anything, but you can’t do everything”
I have lived this a lot in the last year with my own training and the need to be selective and purposeful with how I choose to spend my valuable time. It would be brilliant to do a little bit of everything but in reality that leads to being not particularly good at anything.
During a team meeting last week it was raised that we feel a number of our members maybe ‘overdoing it’ with their training recently. This is in relation specifically to the number of classes members are attending per week, sometimes up to 3 or 4 in one day and I feel I have a duty of care to raise this topic to the whole community (and anyone else who happens to be reading).
Many of my posts are about encouraging people to do more, so this a first in asking people to possibly be more selective and do less.
It is great that we have developed such a strong community and our members have formed genuine relationships together and I know part of the appeal of classes is social. However, I would warn against attending classes for classes sake.
The first question you have to ask is:
“What is my goal?”
Be specific. Even if you have a very general health, fitness and longevity goal (which many of our members do) you can still be specific about the areas of you physical self you want to improve eg flexibility, strength, endurance, speed, balance, coordination, reducing back pain, re-habing an injury etc
This can change month to month and is not set in stone.
To use me as a simple example, I’m currently following Dan John’s ‘Easy Strength’ programme which consists of:
2 x 5 Squats
2 x 5 Deadlifts
2 x 5 Bench Press
2 x 5 Chin-ups
1 set of Kettlebell swings
1 set of Ab Wheel roll-outs
I have followed this programme for my last 19 workouts (approx the last 6 weeks) that’s it. I’ve not been distracted, I’ve not been tempted to do lots of other random stuff and I’ve really enjoyed it.
From Monday 28th November I’ll be following the 10,000 Swing Challenge for 5 weeks, 4 days a week to build towards our New Years Day Swing Marathon of 2017 Swings.
In the new year I’ll start training towards my SMK2 Kettlebell Certification which will be in September 2017.
I train hard when I train (as hard as I want and need to) and 1 hour a day is enough. If I was going to train for 3 hours intensity and focus would need to reduce to allow for that duration.
So ask yourself a few questions:
What are you training for at the moment?
How many hours are you training per week?
Are all of those hours productive or beneficial?
Are you eating enough to power yourself through all of those hours?
This was another point raised during the team meeting, some of our members seem to feel they can train more and more and more and eat less and less and less.
This will lead to muscle damage and wastage, possible injury, increased fat storage and reduced performance levels. This seems to be applying more to some of our female members than male.
The desire to lose weight and get ‘smaller’ can lead some people to eat less (which maybe sometimes needed if you are over-eating and portion control is out of control) but reducing calories too far and then increasing energy expenditure through exercise excessively will lead to short term success and mid to long term frustration and possibly damage.
Please take this blog in the way it is intended, as a caring, honest and professional piece of advice.
Be selective with the way you train specific to your current goals (which will be transient over time) and remember to EAT!
Yours in health,
James St Pierre