At TWPT we adapt our sessions to suit our clients needs, often making adjustments on the day!
Whilst it can be important to have a long term training plan. Which includes short term markers of performance based success, weekly goals that include an increase in weights, reps, sets or miles covered.
It is also important to not get too focussed on short term performance as this fluctuates much the same as scale weight.
Your performance increases follow a trend when improving. Just like a stock market graph there will be peaks and troughs in the short term but the long term increase will invariably be up…..
That’s to be said as long as there is element of consistency in training.
What can throw a lot of people off - myself included - is focussing too much on beating previous sessions training numbers or general performance in live sporting practice.
This can lead to a feeling of pressure to perform at an arbitrary level that is just not achievable every session, which in turn can lead to not turning up to training, PT session, match or practice. Hindering development even more.
Here are a few examples:
- Last session a trainee hits 40kg on a squat felt absolutely great went home really buzzing about the new achievement. The following sessions a few days later can do 37.5kg with difficulty and 40kg now seems out of reach.
- A runner hits 10km for the first time. Tries to hit 11km a week later but can’t even manage the 10km!
- A goalie plays a game of 5 a side, stops all the attacks from going in and is man of the match! Next game let’s three in.
In all of the above examples there’s a peak and an immediate trough thereafter in terms of performance.
Sometimes experiencing these troughs after the buzz of hitting a new best can be very hard to deal with psychologically, especially if a PT, coach or team is involved. This pressure to match the previous performance can make it much harder to turn up to training in some cases.
Regulating intensity
Often at TWPT we ease off in a PT session and regulate the intensity to match the clients needs on the day. If we expect a client to hit a new personal best and they come in tired and burnt out, we will modify our expectations and session plan to accommodate. This may include lifting slightly lighter weights, doing less reps on an exercise, moderating our cardio element or adding more time for mobility, stretching etc. but importantly we will still be working towards overall results and their goal.
We know you that you cannot progress in a perfectly linear fashion. Often this is down to external factors such as sleep, stress, being busy, dieting, too much caffeine, injury, rushing to training and not having any time to decompress, sometimes even overtraining, and finally not training.
The best way to progress - as long as you have a good programme - is just to show up to training and accept that some days you just won’t be able to perform your best, but overall the act of showing up will allow performance to increase over weeks and months.
My rule is if you can train at an intensity of 8 out 10. Whatever you achieve on that day is a great achievement as you will be putting in the required effort to progress.
Using the weight lifting example from above.
Hitting 40kg on a squat one week is as good as hitting 37.5kg the next week if both are 8 out of 10 on your effort scale.
You will still be getting stronger and you will still be able to lift 40kg again on one of your following workouts.
After time 40kg will become the new 37.5kg!! If you remain consistent.
Another example using running:
You want to run a 10km run with a friend which is usually an 8 out of 10 in effort. That day you feel particularly tired, rather than putting the pressure on oneself to run the entire distance non stop you decided to walk and run the distance, which felt like the right level of exertion for the day! This will still go a long way to hitting your goals and will burn the same amount of calories, next time you try the 10km it felt easy!
Finally
The most important time to train is when you don’t feel like it. As this is the most crucial part in training success. The bad days when training allow you to have good days!
If you skip the bad days you won’t have the good days!
If you’d like more information on training please click here to get in touch with one of one of our team.