Humans are an odd lot. There’s no denying it.Without wanting to get all touchy feely and start deeply analyzing the human mind (and also because I am not a therapist, nor do I play one on TV) it should be pretty obvious that as a species we really only have two driving forces in our lives.
Every single thing we do is either a desire to move toward pleasure, or away from pain.
That’s it, there are no other choices.
What makes humans especially odd is that you’d think if you had two such starkly contrasting choices that we’d make deliberate efforts to always move towards the former, instead of rushing headlong towards the latter. But it’s true – most of us seem more determined to find the edges of pain, to dive deep within it, before figuring out once more how to drag ourselves out of it. Wouldn’t it be easier just to remember the things that got us a hug instead?
Think back to a time in your life when physically everything just clicked. I will bet that no matter how successful your program, how well you performed, that you pretty much gave it up and went off to try some other new scheme instead of sticking with what proved successful. So, instead of choosing an option that moved you towards success, you instead opted to see how far you could push it, and the likely result was moving into pain.
Moving into pain doesn’t necessarily mean that something actually hurt you, just that the result was less than you’d hoped. Disappointment, injury, burn out – all types of pain.
So, because we seem so hell bent on having pain be an integral part of our training, let’s look for ways to manage it and make it beneficial.
Elite athletes are experts at dealing with pain. Lance Armstrong has famously said, “it’s not a good day unless I’ve suffered a little”. Because we all want to be like our elite heroes, this then filters down to the masses, like a game of Chinese whispers, and gets wildly misunderstood to mean that all our training time should be painful. That every session should be a lesson in facing misery.
Quite a lot of sports have seemingly popped up over the last few years. Each one more extreme than the last. As daily life becomes more and more sedate, safe and reclusive it seems we are looking for leisure activities that are as painful and shocking as possible. Deep down within us all is our primal need to move, to experience a range of raw emotions and conquer the fear of our surroundings. With no sabre tooth tigers left to attack, we are simply seeking new challenges.
But training can’t become all about how much can you endure, how much can you suffer or how tough you are mentally. If every day becomes a fight for your survival, well, I guarantee you’ll find pain quite quickly.Just like boxers shouldn’t spar daily, let alone actually train with the same intensity they use for fighting, we shouldn’t look to either. The results will be just like a fighter who fights daily – no matter how good they are sooner or later they’re just going to get really hurt.
In traditional periodisation plans there was often a long period of time, early in the year or preparation period, where the athlete was told to go and so aerobic base building. The purpose of this was to strengthen the system so that it could operate at higher intensities for longer periods once some polishing work was done later in the preparation. Only once this had been accomplished was any intensity added to the training. If you think about it, how many people do you know who began their running training with sprints, because that’s what an article in Men’s Health told them to do (and let’s not even get into that it was likely written by someone who had never even toed a start line, let alone finished a race in a respectable time)? Sprints, hills, intervals, any kind of added intensity is not for beginners. You wouldn’t have a beginner with zero lifting experience come into a gym and have them work up to a max single in the deadlift, would you? (Please say no). So why would you encourage them to do the same while running?
Let’s learn lessons from the pain we put ourselves through. In no particular order here are some of my all time lessons -
Stop when your hands hurt – As a kettlebell trainer I spend a lot of time with lumps of metal in my hands. There are some workouts that stress the hands more than others. For instance, combining weighted pull ups, farmers walks and snatches all in the same workout is a bad idea. If, at any point during a session your hands start to hurt, then just put the bells down for the day. There’s no shame in it. To fix this issue try either – changing the workout so that you don’t have all the exercises that annoy the hands all on the same day or fixing your technique. There’s no glory in making your hands bleed. If you’re into self-harm I can suggest better ways to achieve your end goal.
Injuries teach us lessons – If you got hurt running 10km the lesson is clear – you’re not ready to run 10km at that pace. If you hurt yourself performing a movement like the Get Up the message is clear – you’re not yet ready to perform the Get Up with that weight. The choice is drop the weight or speed, improve your form, or both. Building strength for any movement requires repetition. This is seen quite a lot with females in pressing. Often in a hurry to jump to the next size bell they start cheating, trying to force the bell up. The simple solution to not pressing well is to keep pressing with a lighter bell. Over time, the reps will accumulate enough, and add enough strength in the process, that magically one day that next bell will just float up. But, if you’ve hurt yourself training the lesson is alwasy clear – it’s your fault. To quote the RKC manual you simply pushed too hard, too soon and paid the price. Learn from it, that you need more time at a lower intensity to bullet proof your body.
A little intensity goes a long way – Often once people have finally acclimated to training, and the time is right to slowly start turning up the heat, they find big results quickly from a little bit of intensity. For my running, the best sessions I have ever done were a set of intervals – 3 x 3min hard/ 1min easy with a 20 minute warm up and cool down. Very simple, very hard, but massive pay offs. But do you know what happened when I tried two of those sessions per week? Plantar Fasciitis. Took about a month for it to clear up. In that month I could only run easy, swim easy (couldn’t even push hard off the wall on my injured foot) and ride seated as even being standing gave me problems. All I had to do was stick to my one hard session for the week and I would have made an extra month of progress. But no… The same goes for lifting weights. Sets of 1-3 reps do wonders to peak your strength. However, they also fry your CNS making performing them longer term difficult. While they are essential for building greater strength care needs to be taken not to over use them. In Easy Strength Dan John recommends only one workout of singles every two weeks, or approximately every ten workouts. A genuine hard session may leave you wiped out for days, losing valuable training time.
Listen to your body – If you struggle to face the alarm in the morning. If your body is tight, tired, stiff, sore or feels weak, today is not your day to push. Recognise it, lower your effort, no matter how frustrating it seems and let your body recover. This is particularly hard if you’re in the middle of a build up for something and I;m no different to you. Yesterday I rode about 100kms in trying conditions. What was my response to those conditions? I tried to beat my record for that particular ride. To the point where I was cursing at red lights on the last uphill stretch of road to home for the time I was wasting. When I arrived home I came inside and sat, mindlessly staring at the wall, shelled out of my mind and too fatigued to do anything. While not a 100% effort it was up there. Today is largely going to be wasted as I am simply too tired for much other than an Easy Strength session late in the day, more than 24 hours after I returned home from my ride. This is extremely difficult. The sun is shining outside, it’s a beautiful windless day and my brain is screaming at me to kit up and go smash my pedals. But that one extra session could honestly be the end of my entire week of training if I feel so bad now. But a day of next to nothing will do me a world of good and I will return to train better tomorrow and the rest of the week.
Volume is the answer, but it’s the problem too – There’s only three things you can change in a program to increase it’s effectiveness. You can add intensity, do it faster or do more. Intensity is often the first choice for change, but the reality is that if you look at classical periodisation schemes it is volume that should be adjusted first. Maintaining easy training loads, but doing more sessions will bring good results. But, you have to save these changes for when you need them. I liken it to having a ton of ammunition, sitting in your foxhole and waiting for the enemy to appear. You could fire it all off now, hoping to scare the enemy and never see them or have to face them. More likely, a better response would be to wait until they show themselves, having conserved your precious ammunition and then unload with a red hot torrent of lead. If you add volume before you need it, you’ll still wind up hurt! You must wait until you no longer see increases from low volume before adding even a single session! Most of our clients train only three days per week yet see better results than they ever have at any time in their lives. If their goals were high performance, at some point we’d need to add more sessions. With such a small number of sessions per week it’s easy to add volume. But what if they were already doing five or more sessions per week? What then? Does their lifestyle allow for multiple daily sessions? The chances are most likely not, and then we’re just back at the same point – injury or burn out.
Pain is life’s way of teaching us lessons. If you’re smart, despite the self-harming nature of choosing to move towards pain, you can actually benefit from these lessons and prosper. Just don’t keep hitting your head against the wall and expect a different result.
Tags: coaching, conditioning, GPP, Kettlebells, movement
