Limitless living flows from limitless mindset. The mind is our tool to tune our efforts to the tremendous energies within and around us. This ability to do this well is perhaps the most powerful skill we train in life. To move beyond limitations we learn and practice patterns of progression and expansion. Developing ourselves involves learning and getting in sync with nature’s rhythms and patterns for growth. Improving performance in any single capacity involves tuning in to fairly straight-forward wavelike training rhythms. Eventually, however, these simple rhythms and singular outcomes start to limit us. We find ourselves caught in cycles and ruts that result from focusing too narrowly on specific metrics, and we must learn and start tuning into more expansive patterns of development. Luckily nature teaches expansive patterns as well. The first step that many of us must take is simply deciding to train progressively and to continually and gradually challenge limits. We all roughly know how this works and we’ve done it with plenty of things in our lives already: we start small with what we can do and we gradually work our way up to harder things. We also know that this is more than just a learning process; the human body will physically adapt to stresses that are above and beyond what it has previously experienced. Exercise scientists and trainers refer to this as the principle of progressive overload and it’s one of the pillars of training science and practice. For some reason, however, when it comes to exercise and outdoor sports surprisingly few of us actually train in a very progressive manner at all. For those of us who are a little stuck in randomness or unchanging routine, the simple mindset switch of deciding to always look for ways to go a little further or do a little more will probably do more for our training than any other training change we can make. If we are goal oriented, we can complement this by breaking goals down into various approach steps to guide our overall progression. Simply maintaining a progressive mindset is actually quite a challenge in a world that doesn’t really care about our athletic dreams and reinforces a lot of beliefs about limitation. It’s easy to fall into comfortable repetitive ruts so we may have to figure out how to give ourselves little reminders. In addition and somewhat ironically, most of the noise from the fitness industry and fitness social media doesn’t really help. The industry likes to focus on workouts and specific new exercises rather than on progressions and it can all be a bit distracting. Single workouts or gimmicky new exercises are simple to teach and photograph/videotape and share via media outlets but the true art of long term training is not. Everyone also progresses in somewhat different ways which makes selling services to a mass market complicated and challenging. Sadly, in our culture, this is a deal-breaker for most businesses. If the commercial fitness world actually taught us how unlimited we can be and taught us something about finding our own progressions we would probably evolve beyond their limited offerings faster than you can say “recurring revenue.” The pattern for developing almost any single strength metric looks roughly like an upward sloping wave with alternating work and recovery and gradually increasing capabilities and workloads:
The crests of the wave represent our efforts and workouts and the troughs represent our rest and recovery as our bodies rebuild and adapt. Nobody’s actual strength increases will be linear, will follow a preset formula, or will be the same as anyone else’s. No training program will work well for everyone and there is no “best” way to train, but there are some general patterns that seem to match the developmental rhythm of the human body that we have learned from decades of experience with athletes.
To tune in to a training pattern we use a process like this:
(1) We start with a general pattern that collective athletic experience has demonstrated to be effective. For example, in a previous post I’ve described the general pattern that has been proven for many decades to be most effective for developing aerobic endurance. As a hypothetical, let’s say we use that basic pattern to shape our aerobic work and we complement it with a full body muscle strength routine using five functional movement patterns that we will perform twice per week.
(2) We keep looking for opportunities to do a few more repetitions or add some weight while keeping good form in our muscle strength workouts. We gradually add a little more challenge to our endurance workouts (we extend our longest ride a little, we make our high intensity day a little harder, etc.). Over time we experiment a little and to see how we can improve the overall mix of training for own needs, training response, and motivation levels. We especially pay attention to the optimized balance for ourselves between work and recovery, because this is quite different for everyone and can really make or break our training (in the illustration above this is basically the distance between the peaks of the waves). If we’re getting really tired a lot we back off a little or add a recovery day, if we’re always filled with energy we try to add a little more training, etc. If our progress reverses, this is usually a big red flag that we are overdoing it and that we need more rest.
This is when the pattern starts to look like this:
After we’ve given ourselves enough rest and we’re feeling fresh again we can try to stretch the distance between the waves or we can take smaller jumps as we increase loads (3) We learn to become more responsive in our training to our changing energy levels, moods, and life disruptions. Training taxes our fight or flight system as does all other stress, so if we are weighed down with a lot of other stresses and demands, we usually need to back off our training a little. Training hard on days that we are beat down usually does more harm than good. Conversely, when we’re feeling especially strong and fresh it might be a good day to gun it and make a big breakthrough. Really well planned 16 week spreadsheets can be helpful tools for focusing action towards goals, accountability, and giving ourselves sufficient illusion of control to actually have the confidence to go after something big and audacious. However, we’re not cyborgs and if we rigidly stick to a plan we put together a few months ago we’ll often end up out of tune. There’s also an art to making a training plan fit the reality of a developing animal. (4) We make a few changes at least every couple months to avoid stagnation and stimulate new adaptation. If our progress stagnates for a few weeks, we might take a step back and consider training adjustments. The starting patterns that I would suggest working from for various physical capabilities are beyond the scope of today’s blog and they tend to be goal and intent specific. I’m putting together some training resources about patterns to start from with a view towards developing overall general capability for a nature based athlete. The key right now is being able to frame progression well in our minds so that we can set the stage for a series of small decisions to keep going just a little further and to keep learning and fine-tuning our practices. Progression is critical if we want to challenge limits; training needs somewhere to go or it will really do nothing more than burn calories and release some brain chemicals that put us at ease. If we keep our progressive orientation and work steadily we can go extremely far in developing any single strength metric. However, the further we challenge ourselves and explore nature,we increasingly find that these single metric strength progressions are limiting. To be unlimited explorers and athletes, we need to develop and balance many strengths and abilities simultaneously. Even when we start performing highly in nature, we will inevitably find ourselves in ruts. We might need to add new skills entirely or start new progressions into far deeper dimensions of challenge and fear. It becomes difficult to juggle all of the different skills we are working on and things may start to feel chaotic. When we reach this point, is there a pattern we can look to in order to help us frame our development and focus our action effectively? Yes, actually there is. Next week we’ll discuss nature’s pattern of expansive growth and how we can use it to maintain confidence in the face of apparent chaos and frame our action more effectively.
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