If you have been reading my articles or watching my channels you will have heard me talk about building layers of fitness. But, what do I actually mean by that?
In a way, it explains itself. But beyond the obvious, there are many things that are far more important than simply making you fitter.
Let’s simplify: each time you come into the gym you get slightly fitter and therefore are better adapted for your session the following week. This is one of the reasons that I focus on the importance of creating progressions over the weeks and months of training, as your body is very good at adapting to a stimulus. So for every session, every week, month and year that you train consistently, the more and more robust you become.
This leads me directly to my next point. One of the things I am trying to do with my clients is to help them to build their stamina, making them more robust, as well as fitter. The fitter and stronger you become, the easier it is to motivate yourself to visit the gym or do whatever style of workout you prefer, as you can see and feel the progressions and start to enjoy the process until it becomes a habit. I talk a lot about steady progression so you can build those layers incrementally. At the beginning, this may be a little boring because people are usually highly motivated at the start of a programme and so may feel like this approach is a little restrictive. But if you don’t build the layers of strength and fitness steadily, something is going to give—and usually, it’s your body.
For example: if you have a goal of increasing the strength of your squat, doing multiple workouts in a week that include squats, increasing the weight/reps and sets every week etc, your squat will get stronger and your muscles will likely get stronger too. But because you will have built the layers in your muscles too quickly, your connective tissue (ligaments and tendons) won’t have kept up—this is one of the main reasons for niggles and injuries related to lifting weights. Usually people ignore the early signs waiting until they are so severe that the individual stops training, before starting again once recovered, and then repeating the process. Or the person consults a physiotherapist who advises them to build up more gradually with some specific exercises, but they still have to work around the pain of an injury on top of that.
Basically, my point is that you need to progress your workouts and build the layers of fitness steadily or your body will force you to slow down and concentrate on the areas that have been neglected. Worse still, you may be put off training for a long time if not forever. For those reasons it is so important to progress your sessions steadily over time.
So, don’t see working out as a short-term thing, and remember to build those layers properly.
See you next time.
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