The Work: ACE Your Training

Through inexperience we have the opportunity to make choices with little to no knowledge of the outcome — these choices can result in mistakes, but they also leave room for sparks of genius. As we continue to practice a skill or craft, we refine our approach. We miscalculate less often. We continue to do what works and we discard what doesn’t.

Overtime, we develop rules that dictate our behavior and actions. If A, then B. These rules allow us to feel confident, knowing what to do even when the situation we’re encountering is new.

Even more significant than learning what someone knows, is to learn how and why they came to that conclusion. Here within “the work” we’ll discover the rules that experts in the fitness and wellness space have developed as they share how they arrived.

RULES TO ACE YOUR TRAINING

1. ADHERENCE

It doesn't matter how good the training plan is if you don't stick to it. Find a form of training that you enjoy and suits your style, nothing kills progress like dreading your workout. Go out there and try different classes, training programs, & outdoor activities. It will be more fun and motivating to find an activity that you can do in addition to your training, it's how you are going to see your training in the gym pay off. For example, if you go hiking on the weekends and notice after training a few weeks that you are able to recover better and climb more aggressive trails, you will FEEL the benefits of your training and be motivated to train!

2. CONSISTENCY

Physiologically we need constant physical stressors in order to signal a need for change in our body. Life happens and you don't need to have the perfect training schedule as long as you are consistent. Once you have your training plan set stick to it for AT LEAST 4 weeks. Most people don't get much out of their training because they switch things up too frequently. I'm going to break down what usually happens in the first 4 weeks of training:

Week 1 (Foundation) is where you will set the foundation for future progress, you are getting familiar with the movements and understanding how to do them correctly, this is called motor learning.
During week 2 (Accumulation) you now know what is going on and have likely increased your work capacity, I would usually keep the weights the same and try to do an extra set on most movements, it will allow you to further increase work capacity along with help build muscle that will be needed in the future to get stronger.
Week 3 (Intensification) is where you can make a push, you understand what needs to be done, have built some tolerance, this is where you challenge yourself. Slightly increase weights across exercises to challenge yourself while maintaining movement quality.
Week 4 (Deload & Transition) is meant to allow you to recover and prepare for the next training block. I would typically back off of the weights being used (Intensity) OR the amount of total reps (Volume) done by no more than 10-20%, which variation you choose depends on how you feel. If you are feeling run down and tired all the time I would adjust the load, If you feel extremely sore and beat up adjust the volume.

As you can see it takes some time for all of this to happen, this is why "going hard" for one week then taking the next week off doesn't work. You don't have to train every day but you need to train frequently! As a general rule try not to have more than 3 days off of training unless you need it.

3. EFFORT

Effort is a tricky one. You need to challenge yourself if you want to make a change. Everyone has a different scale of effort This is why having a coach is recommended at least until you understand how hard you need to be working. Hard effort will look different depending on what you are doing so trainers tend to use what's called and RPE (Rating of Perceived Exertion) scale which typically goes from 1-10. A 10 on the scale is a maximal effort and you would not be able to perform another rep of the exercise. For most strength-based movements I would like to see you at a 7 or 8, this should feel like you left no more than 2 more reps in the tank.

Another thing to note is proper rest time. There needs to be enough rest between sets to sustain that level of intensity otherwise it will just feel hard but won't register enough stress for the adaptation you want. As a general rule the more intense the exercise it the longer you will need to recover. I recommend 60 seconds for normal exercises (6-8 RPE), 90-120 seconds for very heavy (9 RPE), anything at a 10 RPE probably shouldn't be repeated but rest up to 4 minutes before moving on.

If you follow these 3 rules I'm confident you will see results no matter what your choice of training is, it's going to be hard if any one of these is missing from your training. Good luck!