Unless you have some morbid attraction to fatigue and strenuous activity, the real reason one exercises is for the adaptation that results from it. The training, then, is not the key necessarily as it’s the changes your body makes after the training that really matters.
Rack City.
For example, if you want to get stronger, lifting weights doesn’t in and of itself make you stronger, the recovery needed as a result of your lifting session and the repairs your body make in response to the weightlifting is the actual strength building.
Think about that for a moment.
Your progress is only as good as your ability to recover. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean you can nap your way to a fifty second 400m run or a triple bodyweight deadlift, but you sure do need to recover from your training to get there.
When people ask me how much training they should do, my answer is always that, “It depends.” Some athletes are super motivated… so much so that they put their bodies through more than they can make positive change from. The problem is training two-a-days, for example, wont make you better if you aren’t able to recover. Other athletes can train 3 times a day and rake in the benefits.
Here lies the huge flaw with bootcamp style training or any training protocol, for that matter, that isn’t sustainable. Take a bunch of people that are undertrained and you turn up the burners on them for 5 straight grueling days… Sure, they are sore and tired but they can’t recover from this massive amount of volume. Now you’ve got folks that are worse off than when they started.
Want to know the best way to waste a hard day of training? Don’t eat well and don’t sleep well (i.e. don’t recover). In many ways, we should prescribe recovery as much as we do workouts. So, that said… Welcome to the School of Elite Recovery.
Train hard. Recover harder.
Logan Gelbrich
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Tuesday’s Workout:
Complete the following for time:
10, 9, 8, 7…1
Deadlift (275/155)
100M Sprint
