Reclaim Your Motivation - Everyone Loves a Comeback

A close friend of mine reached out to me recently. He's someone who's struggled with his weight and body image for a large part of his adult life. In the last couple of years he managed to really turn himself around and completely reshape his entire body. He lost close to a hundred pounds and then packed on a solid fifteen to twenty pounds of muscle. As his friends, we were all blown away. A lot of my male friends even started to wonder if he was taking....something. Jealousy is a funny beast.

Anyway, my friend got in touch with me because though he had been really killing it at the gym for a long time he had somehow misplaced his motivation and felt like he couldn't find it again. No matter how he tried he just didn't feel like going to the gym or eating clean. It was too much work and not enough reward anymore.

Anymore. That's key. Remember that.

Now there's certainly a line of response that goes something like this: "SUCK IT UP FATTY! WORKING OUT IS CALLED WORKING OUT BECAUSE IT'S WORK! FITNESS ISN'T SUPPOSED TO BE FUN! NOTHING WORTH HAVING IS EASILY ATTAINED!" While I agree with the central sentiment of a lot of those, that kind of response is also pretty much the worst possible way of dealing with his issue.

On some level we all already know that stuff is true. That's part of why he's frustrated and why we all get frustrated. We know it's work and that it's hard but we'd found a way to get past that. We'd found a program or a diet that, though it was work,  it worked for us. To me, that is both the problem and the solution.

Fitness is easiest when it's a routine. It's a universal truth that if you have to completely alter everything about your life to include your workouts you're not going to keep up with them. Yea, yea fitness is a journey and it's about changing your life but that's not what I'm talking about. It's simply much more realistic to throw in a workout at a gym that's on your way home a few days a week than it is to sign up for some crazy bikram/ashtanga yoga fusion class at a studio that's at least half an hour from any of your stomping grounds.

When people work hard enough and successfully make the changes that my friend did it is typically because they found a routine that worked for them and they were able to stick to it. The really unfortunate problem with this is simple: boredom.

It's like when you first get a new job that you're really excited about. Maybe the pay's great or its a shift into a better industry or something more in line with your eventual goals. For whatever reason, you got a job you're really excited about and for the first year or two you work as hard as you can and you get consistent returns: raises, promotions, a bigger office, managerial duties; whatever it may be. You love your job which gets you to work hard and you get consistent returns which motivate you to work harder.

Then, like in many organizations, eventually you top out. You hit the ceiling of the upward mobility available to you in that position. Work simply becomes a grind. You're going in and putting in the same effort and getting less and less in return. Eventually you're just showing up to keep collecting a paycheck. When this happens you have three options: keep grinding, quit, or start looking for a new job.

This is almost exactly what happens with your body and a new workout routine. Your body becomes acclimated to any stress placed on it, this is what gives rise to the plateau effect: given the same exact program with the same parameters and loading schemes your gains will begin to decrease even when load and intensity increase. This is one of the main reasons athletes periodize their workouts: to avoid stagnation.

When your results stagnate your motivation follows soon after. Who wants to keep cranking away in the gym when you're not getting anything out of it? Unfortunately when this happens a lot of people's instinct is to do just that. They keep trying to do their old routine, keep trying to get BACK to the thing that USED to work.

Unfortunately that's the trap that too many of us fall into. We want to go back in time to when that routine worked for us but you can't and even beyond that you shouldn't want to. So what do you do instead? Try this:

Tips To Reclaim Your Motivation:

1. Stop kicking yourself. It happens to all of us at one time or another. Read this. 

2. Do what you did before, but in a different way. What worked initially? You CHANGED your habits. You started something NEW. Do something new, again. 

3. Acknowledge your progress. When you first started you were having trouble with the basics but now you're running and lifting with the best of them --> it's become boring. Try something different - take up kettlebells, powerlifting or oly lifting. 

4. Stay within your relative comfort zone --> If you initially had success with lifting you don't have to give it up and become a cross country runner. There's many different types of lifting. Maybe just try one you're not familiar with. Same thing with bootcamps and the like. If you're bored of your bootcamp find a different one you like or sign up for CrossFit (it's what most bootcamps wish they were anyway).

5. Conversely, don't be afraid to try something completely new --> Maybe you weren't in good enough shape to take an honest crack at kickboxing or hot yoga before. Maybe you didn't feel comfortable signing up for your first spartan race....but now you might. Just don't get too upset if you find it isn't for you. You'll never know until you try. 

6.Keep moving forward. Fitness is a journey and while some journeys involve retracing your steps, they are always moving decidedly in one direction. So your routine worked for 3 years but doesn't work anymore. So what? Don't get caught up wondering why it doesn't work because it's usually not just one thing. Keep your eyes out for the next thing. That's what matters. 

I've been doing this for a long time...coming up on about fifteen years. Thats fewer than many but still more than most. I've done martial arts, gymnastics, bodyweight fitness, SPARQ, CrossFit, P90x, Bootcamps, bodybuilding and all sorts of weight lifting. I've spent more time on a bosu than anyone should and attempted a couple of very cute exercises on very pink physio balls. My point is that to stay interested you have to keep it interesting. You guys know how I feel about bullsh*t "functional" training, but that's not what I mean. You don't have to wrap yourself in rubber bands and try to do walking handstands while doing leg extensions with a kettlebell hanging off your foot. There are literally hundreds of different entirely legitimate approaches to exercise. You found one that worked for you before. I'm willing to be you can do it again. Here's a few ideas to get you started.

Just remember you didn't fail and you're not done. You hit a speed bump. I've been there and you aren't alone. It's just one more obstacle to overcome and you overcame the f*ck out of it last time. You're going to do it again. 

Besides, everyone loves a good comeback.

Good luck and good lifting.

Cheers. 

Training to Failure - Why it's exactly what it sounds like

I remember reading an article back in school. There was some up and coming fitness guru who ran a facility that was half strength training and half research. Granted, the types of research they did usually involved slapping electrodes to people and shocking the f*ck out of them while they were working out to elicit increased motor recruitment or something along those lines. In hindsight, I can tell you several things that are wrong with this picture but at the time when I was 19 it seemed edgy, new and scientific. I totally fell into the trap.

One of the things this guy was advocating at the time was training to muscular failure; working out until your body is quite literally not capable of going any more. His argument was that it's the easiest predictor of the proper intensity. You should be able to do x number of sets and x number of reps, and if you don't reach failure, you didn't use enough weight. Basically what he's saying is that if you can complete every rep of every set with perfect form, you need to increase your intensity in some way which I don't totally disagree with. The problem was that his theory was not, in his mind, open to any kind of interpretation. If you were lifting, you should be training to failure.

So I did. I trained to failure on every exercise and initially I saw some great improvements. I tried to tell all my workout buddies about it, tried to push them into my mode of thinking but they mostly shrugged it off. I told myself it was because they weren't hardcore enough to train to failure. Maybe they were just smarter than I was at the time. The reality, as usual, probably falls somewhere in between.

Training to failure is just like any other modality, it's a tool for your tool belt but you can't use a hammer for every task. Training to failure on every set, every time you go into the gym is a great way to get overuse injuries by overtaxing your body and not giving it a proper rest interval. It's also a great way to short circuit your progress. Now, don't get me wrong, I think I've made it pretty clear that when it comes to fitness intensity really matters. I'm not saying otherwise. What I'm saying is that you can keep your metabolic engine at a really high rpm without redlining the damn thing for an hour straight. Would you do that to your car?  No, you wouldn't, so why would you do it to something you can't replace every couple of years?

It's list time ladies and gents.

Why Training to Failure is BAD:
1)CNS fatigue - If your goal is to become as strong as possible, you need your nervous system in tip top shape in addition to your muscles and joints. Maximal lifts or max effort exercises fatigue the nervous system in a way that takes several days to recover. Most strength gurus do not advocate going for a max on any big lift more than once a week. That doesn't mean if you maxed your deadlift monday you can max your bench on wednesday. It means you get one max per week, and a lot of these guys would say even doing one per week might be too much.
I understand that if your main goal is strength this may seem discouraging or frustrating but you can increase your 1RM by doing sub maximal lifts. In fact, in a lot of ways it's more effective in addition to being less dangerous. Going for a max lift when your body doesn't have the energy is a great way to shred your joints and put yourself out of the gym for months, not just a few days.

2) Reinforcing improper motor patterns - I addressed this a little bit with my article on form. Every exercise has an ideal movement pattern. Now, these movement patterns are somewhat different person to person because all of our bodies are unique, but I am a firm believer that there is an optimal, if not ideal movement pattern for every exercise for every body. If you are constantly lifting to failure, you are constantly in a state of fatigue. In addition to the primary movers being fatigued, the secondary stabilizers required for any of the big lifts are going to be fatigued as well. I don't really care if you can get all the way down on a squat and then re rack the bar with 300lbs. If you can't maintain good posture, your lower back is rounded and your chest is pointing at the ground the whole time you are using too much weight. No, I don't care that your legs are strong enough to lift it and that going down in weight won't "stress" them adequately. Don't be a meathead. You can only make up for poor form with raw strength for so long before you either stop making progress, hurt yourself or both.

3) Overtraining - Overtraining is one of those things that, to be completely honest, I'm not really sure the scientific community has pinned down. There are several different modes of thought on the subject and a lot of them are pretty different. On top of this there's also people who just seem to disprove all the scientific "knowledge" we have about it by training more than should be humanly possible and still making gains.
All I would say is that you need to listen to your body to know if you are overtrained or not. If you are always waking up sore and your joints never seem to stop hurting, stop working out or lower your intensity. If you aren't making the progress you used to but you're still doing two a days and sprinting until you vomit every time you go in, seriously, chill the f*ck out. It's easy to get carried away with all the fitness crazies out there yelling at you to go harder and faster but take my word for it, that's not always better. If you are training to failure on every set of every exercise of every workout, you are probably over training. Stop. Stop it right now. You are working too hard to be short circuiting your own progress. A little rest goes a long way.

So I've gotten to this point and realized that a lot of this seems like a re-hash of my entry on proper technique. In a way it is, but it's coming from a different angle. Muscular failure compromises technique, compromising technique compromises your progress and can ultimately compromise your health. The reality is that a lot of this fitness stuff really isn't that complex and it's all extremely interrelated.

So what's the take home? Killing yourself in the gym is good from time to time, but don't do it every workout. Strength and power are only two of the facets of what defines fitness. Mobility, flexibility, coordination and agility are all just as important and if you're training as hard as you possibly can sprinting and jumping and lifting weights, you're probably missing out on some of the finer points. Take it down a notch. Go stretch or maybe even swap out a workout for a sport. Your joints will thank you, and so will your gains.

As always, good luck and good lifting.

Cheers.

Today's Workout:

Dynamic Warm-up/Jump Rope - 15 min

Clean and Jerk 5x3
Front Squat 5x5
Parallel Grip Chin Up 5x5
Dips 5xAMRAP

Metcon:
FRISBEE. Frisbeefrisbeefrisbee. Today my metcon is pretending to be a dog and playing fetch until i fall over. Fetching to failure....wait...wait a minute...what was I just saying?