A Potential Key to Athletic Progression:
Breaking habits:
It’s common practice as a human to develop a habit and maintain it all throughout life, it makes things a lot more simple and it doesn’t require a lot of brain power to carry out these habitual functions or actions, a good example is brushing your teeth.
If every time you wanted to brush your teeth you had to actively think about each action involved very quickly this would become quite a mentally demanding task, take for example a kid learning to do so, its quite a slow process and messy but gradually it becomes a learned process and a habit (hopefully..). So in terms of evolution and human development this is quite a useful skill, movements and tasks need to become habitual or else life would be incredibly difficult and demanding on your nervous system.
However, when it comes to your training, strength work, conditioning, cardio and any other forms of training you’re partaking in, habitual training can become detrimental to your progression.
Specific Adaption to Imposed Demands:
As humans we’re predisposed to adapt to demands that are placed upon our bodies, so long as these aren’t massively incremented of course, you can gradually increase the amount of weight you can lift, the amount of force you can apply, tendon and ligament strength, bone structural integrity and cardiovascular endurance, oxygen uptake/use efficiency and so on. These adaptions come from both neural and structural improvement’s, your body becomes more efficient at sending signals down a path way on a reoccurring basis as well as structural adaption to handle the demands.
( A good display of this adaption to a movement is shown by throwing, if you try to throw with each hand, unless you’re ambidextrous, one arm will throw a lot better, while the other will feel awkward and uncoordinated. )
However, because of these adaptions, more physical stress and demands need to be placed on the body to improve otherwise the body will reach a point of balance where there is no need for further adaption as the demands are no longer increasing.
For example, if you go to the gym and follow the same program for two months, whether it’s strength or hypertrophy or endurance. By the end of the month, compared to the start, you should be marginally better at those exercise, have increased your strength, endurance or increased muscle size, so long as the implement program contained progressions at least.
Although if you follow the same program for another two months, you most likely won’t benefit from the program again or if at all, especially if you aren’t increasing or modifying the weight/reps/sets or changing something within the workout due to the adaptions you’ve previously made.
It’s common practice for people to stick to the same program for an overly extended period and that actually has a negative effect on your progression as an athlete usually due to a mix of habitual training, lack of knowledge and personal tracking.
Self Monitoring and Progression:
Monitoring your progressions is going to benefit you and hopefully keep you away from habitually training in general, whether it’s muscle size or weight lifted, distance ran, set/reps, body weight, max reps, there are lots of various aspects that need to be monitored and tested and if these aren’t increasing then the program you’re following has to be modified in some way to allow for future progressions.
Conclusion:
This might seem like basic information but a lot of people fall into the habit of repeating workouts, failing to monitor workouts, or even themselves.
Using something as simple as an Excel sheet, you can add any information you want to monitor from muscle size to distance you’ve covered and it will change how you train, rather than being stuck on repeat and wasting months and potentially years making no progressions.
Showing up needs to be the habit, not the training.
Thanks for reading,
Chris.
Movement, Performance And Conditioning 