Any old way V's a well thought out training philosophy
Not a day goes by that I don’t see ads for so called Fat Burning Workouts or people extolling the virtues of their HIIT workouts. New clients ask me shouldn’t I be doing HIIT as it’s really popular right now – sure it must be good if people are talking about it?
With all the training options that are available to you it can be hard to pick what’s right for you and your goals. In this article I will break down why it’s more important to question the WHY of any training method rather than the WHAT.
A yoga mat, kettlebell, barbell, dumbbells, an exercise bike, exercise bands, running shoes are all great training tools that can be used in a range of ways to elicit a response from the body. However, these same tools can lead to negative effects like injury, fatigue and burnout. A coach has responsibility to develop or follow a training method that delivers an exercise class which they believe to be the best use of the tools they have at hand. Yet it’s the coaches’ methods and training structure that reveals how their practice stands up to evaluation. Is this a coach worthy of learning and developing from or are they providing a myopic version of fitness that overly focuses on tools and methods not a thought out system to work with clients?
If you take the average bootcamp where weights (dumbbells, medicine balls, kettlebells) or other training tools may be used in a class and then the workouts are structured in a way where the coach believes that high intensity is the key to training. This tells us that an attitude of “go hard or go home” or “no pain, no gain” may prevail. How easy is it for a client to motivate themselves to give it all in each and every training session when they’ve had a hard day at work, food wasn’t ideal that day and they are very stressed out and really need a week or even a few months of lower intensity sessions rather than adding more fuel to the fire? There’s nothing wrong with training people in a single session where intensity is high, but is this sustainable? More important is it the right way to train people ALL OF THE TIME?
Coaches make the best use of the tools they have available, but sometimes without thinking too deeply on why they’re training their clients in a certain way. Professional athletes are NOT working at max effort in each session, they adjust the intensity of their sessions because they know and are coached to have variance in training loading, intensity and duration so why does Joe and Jill public get trained so that every session leaves them feeling crushed and soaking in sweat.
John Kiely is the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for the IRFU and here are his thoughts on training and stress.
“If you are unduly stressed — about the session or some other aspect of life — you are essentially overlaying the chemical consequences of the imposed mechanical training stressors on a suboptimal chemical backdrop. As a consequence, adaptations are inevitably compromised and risks, of injury or illness, escalate”.
The past 10 years have given us more gyms, classes and training options than we’ve ever had before yet too few coaches think in terms of an overall training philosophy and too many think methods only.
We see the same issues in the softer forms of exercise, such as, yoga, where clients are not firstly taken through an assessment to help them understand how the body moves optimally and what joints need to be flexible and what ones need to remain stable. I’ve worked with lots of clients that have come to me with years of yoga or pilates practice yet are fundamentally weak and have never properly addressed faulty movement patterns that no amount of random poses would resolve.
We coach our clients with a philosophy of firstly meeting them as they are in each session. This means that there are days where we focus mainly on less stressful work like mobility, core exercise and using bands because that’s what they needed that day and other days where we deadlift, run, jump and generally work at a higher intensity because in the warm up and through chatting to them they showed signs that they were firing on all cylinders. A client who shows up tired after a poor night sleep and a bad day at work or home means that cortisol levels will already be high - this is not the time to kill them in a workout. We consider having good mobility central to overall fitness, building basic functional strength as vital to daily life and so we bring a client in that condition through a lighter workout to help matters not adversely impact them.
When it comes to the conditioning part of training, the degree to which you elevate your heart rate or push yourself on any given day should depend on how you feel that day. We then wrap all this up into a polarized view of training which means that even if clients were feeling 100% all of the time (they won’t) we would still program only one session in every four or five to be done at a very high intensity.
The goal of any training session regardless of training method is for the client to experience a certain amount of stimulus which they can optimally recover from quickly, yet what’s often presented to clients is to use the hardest variation of the tools they have at hand to create a class to elicit the most damage and muscle soreness. The goal isn’t soreness, though some stiffness form sessions is ok, it’s PROGRESS and consistent progress is impossible if the training stimulus is always turned up to 11 in each and every session.
Training methods without being forged in the fires of practical training philosophy creates a system that can produce short term gains yet at what cost? Consistency and sustainability is key to all training. If you can’t see yourself training in the same way you’re currently training 5-10 years from now, if you have to push yourself to go to the session and the training is not hitting all aspects of fitness – improved mobility, strength and conditioning then maybe you don’t need another “celeb fat burning workout” but instead a more unified well thought approach to fitness.