Avoid A Threatening Training State
The way you train determines the physiological training state that you will achieve during a workout. When all is said and done, I believe that achieving the right training state is the biggest factor that determines training success. In order to gain strength, I don’t believe that effective training is based on annihilating yourself with brutal workouts, rather it’s about precision workouts. By this I mean that you don’t want to train to easy, and you don’t want to train too hard, you want to train precisely right. If you can nail it when it comes to achieving the right training state, you’re going to start gaining strength.
When Precision Training Becomes Important
Precision training is not as important when you have an abundant supply of recovery power that is greater than the demand of your workouts. However, precision training becomes very important when you become strong enough to challenge the supply of recovery power because heavier weights and greater workloads produce a greater demand on your supply of recovery power.
Some people have a fabulous supply of anabolic or adaptive recovery power. Such people will be able to blast away in their workouts with positive results long after others have reached a massive sticking point. But eventually, everyone will end up in the same boat where the supply of recovery power cannot overcome the stressful demand of workouts. When this happens, the body becomes threatened by a workout stress and progress stops.
When A Threatening Training State Will Backfire
Sooner or later, training in a physiological state that is threatening to your body will backfire. If you yourself were threatened by someone, you would respond according to how severe you think that threat is. For example, if you knew that every time you overcome a threat, it would keeps coming back stronger the next time, there would come a point where you no longer want to overcome that threat anymore. The threat would grow to be too severe, and even if you have the ability to overcome it, you know it would come back greater the next time, which is highly demotivating. This is what happens with your body when you keep training harder as you continue get stronger. Eventually the continuous increase of the workloads and weight will present a severe enough threat to your recovery power which will cause your body to say, “Enough!” This is when your body shuts down strength gains to avoid increasingly greater threats on your recovery power.
What Causes a Threatening Training Sate?
What are the main variables that cause your body to go into a physiological training state that is threatening to the body? I believe there are four main variables which include: 1) Training too far into a set; 2) Doing too many sets or too much work; 3) Lifting too heavy often; 4) Trying to increase the workload and the amount of weight too often. How is this problem solved? First, stop a set when rep speed and rep rhythm begin to slow down. Second, stop doing sets for a body part when that body part begins to decrease in strength. Third, don’t max out with the heaviest weight that you can lift for one rep more than once per week. Another way to keep from training too heavy is to be aware of when you reach a heavy weight for one rep where rep speed dramatically slows down, and stop adding weight just prior to that point. Fourth, consider using the same weighs, reps, and sets in each workout until the workouts feel easier and all reps can be done without ever slowing down rep speed or rep rhythm. In other words, let the same workout become easier over time as this is not threatening to the body. Once your workout has become easier and can be done without slowing down on your last rep, then you can add weight.
The Right Training State
The whole idea behind achieving the right training state is to train hard enough to stimulate strength gains without training so hard that the body is threatened by a workout stress. If you’ve been pushing yourself to train hard because it worked for you in the past, but you have found that your training is no longer working, your strength may have increased to the point where severe workouts have become threatening to your body. If this has happened to you, consider using the training advice in this article and using the training concepts outlined in the basics of PPT on this website. Best of training to you.