The important thing during this experience is to learn from it. It’s perfectly natural to spiral down, but what separates the strong from the weak is the ability to pick yourself up, maybe with a push-up or situp, depending on how far you’ve fallen, getting back on your feet, and then picking up the weight of our burdens.
So if you find yourself in a training rut, change some things up, and like the meme says improvise, adapt, and overcome.
Trainers get too caught up in the actual movement and the perfect technique. What this does is take out the actual brain and muscle connection. There is a big difference between lifting the weight up from start to finish and letting your muscle actually drive the weight up by using the optimal bio-mechanical line and contracting it intentionally at the same time, thus, utilizing the mind-muscle connection.
If you do a bicep curl, the keyword here is ”bicep” not core curl, or knee slightly bent curl, or tight buttocks curl. If you have a hard time with any exercises, the problem lies in who showed you. If your trainer wasn’t able to show you in two sets or less than four cues, you might need a new trainer or the exercise might be too hard for you.
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Focus On What Works
Some programs work and some don’t—learn from both. When you get good and you don’t train like most gym goers, instinctively, you take notes and leave no chances for mediocrity. You know you should be doing bodybuilding training because it’s the best fit for your cortisol and stress profile, but you end up doing CrossFit because it’s the cool thing.
If you know that choice number one is best suited for your needs, why waste your time with the something else? It doesn’t mean that the other programs won’t work for you, but at least, you know that at some given time, you’ve got to do what you have to do, not what you want to do. Big difference.
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Switch Up Your Program
Your program is only as good as the effort and time you put into it. Time as in, the more advanced in training years you are, the faster you need to change a given program. Muscle maturity and experience has a lot to do with it. There are many ways to change your programs: You could keep the same exercise and change the actual tempo to dig into different energy systems or keep the same tempo but use different angles of recruitment.
With so many possible program permutations, there’s no excuse to fall into the boring regular gym “train what you can see” insanity.
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Give It a Rest
You still think you grow in the gym? Well, the earth isn’t flat, but your results might be. You tear and break down muscle in the gym. Yes, the more you go, the better your results, but you need time for rest and regeneration. Let’s be realistic here, most people have a hard time getting a decent four to five days training in their busy week. Plan rest days like you would training days.
If you plan your workouts on a four-week cycle, use the third week as a deload, meaning, cut down on volume, or less sets but still go at it as hard as you can. Depending on training age and the annual cycle, I would take a few active days off every two or three programs.
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Think Outside the Box
Many schools of thought and training methodologies get stuck in their closed-thinking box and always stay with the same ways of training.
Get out of your comfort zone and try something new. I see some very well known trainers bashing other school of thoughts without even setting foot in the so called event, courses, trainings or seminars. Change it up often and you’ll be able to understand what works for you, your clients, your friends and you’ll be even better at making your own programs by discarding what’s good and not.
