Post 28: Why Your Training Is Busted

          I have been a victim of this in the past, and basically died by my own hands when unsuccessfully coordinating my training efforts. Too often do people end up working their ass off while taking no appreciable strides towards their training goals. This happens for a myriad of reasons but in my opinion there seem to be a few popular roadblocks associated with common training goals. Typically, people workout to do one or more of the following things: a) gain muscle/strength b) lose fat c) improve "fitness."

          The first goal, gaining muscle or strength is more often than not going to be a lack of proper programming and progression. If you're not documenting your training efforts, chances are you aren't progressing, and you most certainly are not programming. One principle that I will bet on every day of the week is: Your body will adapt to the demands imposed upon it. If you understand what "adapt" and "impose" mean, you'll be fine. Hopefully you can deduce from this that if you don't change some component of your training (exercise selection/variations, rep ranges/loading, core/assistance work) you're going to go stale. The human body is always in flux, and therefore is unbelievably effective at adapting. Takeaway: if you allow your body too long to adapt to the same training routine, it's going to become increasingly efficient at accommodating it and eventually stop responding. To avoid this problem, pay attention to your weights and rep ranges, not only on core lifts, but assistance work as well. If you're not willing to change the exercise, (you are still seeing some progress) up the volume or the intensity. If you're not seeing progress, change the exercise altogether. This applies to both core and assistance work. More specifically, if you're not seeing progress on core lifts over a reasonable period, change your assistance work, and rotate core lift variations once every couple weeks.

From www.twoscoopsgethuge.com

          Whatever the case, the typical shortcoming with fat loss is nutritionally related. What most people fail to realize is that unless they are more than a recreational athlete, the amount of exercise you're getting is NOT going to be sufficient to promote fat loss alone. I'm talking about people who are less than (at least) a high caliber high school athlete. I would say that conservatively, 80% of your progress is going to be a result of effective dieting. More often than not you could count on seeing better gains by just dieting correctly than by going to the gym and crushing a baconator afterward. I really don't care if the treadmill says you burned 1000 calories, because it's more likely that's not the case. In all reality it's more likely that you burned between 200-500. Furthermore, even if you do that as a corollary to sound resistance training, that wasn't even 500 calories of pure fat that you burned. So why bother? I'll address that in the last paragraph.

          With respect to the last goal, your hindrances will be contingent entirely on what you decide constitutes better fitness. Is that going to be an increased aerobic capacity? maintaining a "healthy" weight? making it through your day with less difficulty? In any scenario, increasing 'fitness' in one way or another is going to make your body more effective at maintaining internal balances and thwarting physiological disruptions. Of particular interest to you may be that a trained subject is going to possess a body that is better equipped to burn calories at a higher rate during bouts of exercise. Say a typical untrained person may burn about 5cal/minute, and a trained individual may effectively burn 10cal/minute. This lends at least a bit more hope to those of you who were upset after reading the last paragraph.

-Alex