Putting effort into improving your health and fitness but only seeing minimal results is frustrating.
Here are 3 principles that often get overlooked in workout programs that keep people stuck.
Understand these 3 principles to make better training decisions
When traveling and managing your fitness without a fixed routine they will help you:
- Time your next training session correctly
- Keep challenging yourself
- Picking the right training for your current goals
Find the best time for your efforts
After a training session, no matter if it’s strength or cardio based, your body will adapt and will prepare you to repeat that effort again in the future.
This process is called supercompensation and it has 3 phases.
First, your system recovers from the stress (the training), then it compensates by becoming a little bit better and lastly it reverts back to baseline.
This takes a few days, depending on the intensity and type of training you did.
Only when we train during the period where we have more ability can we get long-term results.
Instead when waiting too long we train around our baseline forever, making one step forward and one back.
For most strength training that means that each muscle group should be trained every 2-3 days.
High intensity training like sprints have a longer recovery time and doing them once a week is a good schedule.
When using a flexible workout plan that means looking at your past training week to decide what to do next and not leaving too big a gap between training sessions with the same goal.
Make it harder
Progressive overload
Life gets easier when you become stronger.
Bags get lighter, travel feels less taxing, difficult work situations become less distracting.
Things that were hard once are not challenging anymore.
This also is true for the training you do. That’s why you can’t just keep doing the same program over and over again. Once it is not challenging enough anymore, you need to find a way to make it interesting again.
This can mean using more weight, running faster, adding more repetitions to your workout or decreasing the rest time. One important detail here is that you can’t just overload one dimension indefinitely.
This most often happens with body weight exercises because increasing the reps is more intuitive than increasing the resistance. Instead of aiming for 100 push-ups, once you can do 20 look at harder variations like putting your feet up or shifting your weight to one side.
You don’t need to make every workout a battle for improvement but always aim for a little bit more than last time.
Train what you want to have – SAID
You get what you train for, so you need to train for what you want.
Don’t put all your effort into jogging if you want to look athletic.
Instead look into explosive exercises like jumping and sprinting.
Don’t focus on stretching if you want to improve your posture to reduce back issues.
Instead build stability with core exercises and practicing good posture.
Be aware of which exercise modality gives you what results and adjust your program so that you cover all of them.
Because being adventure-ready means you are ready for whatever.
Summary
When you time your workouts right, keep challenging yourself and train the things you want, results are just a question of time.
