by Andreas Scheicher, KSI CIP Coach, Austria
Since working in a commercial fitness club I have the chance to watch many people training. By doing this I noticed an interesting phenomenon: At a moment in training, a lot of people reach a certain point where the progress stops or even declines and injuries occur. Now, to reach a sticking point and to get injured is not a big surprise when watching them, because it is predictable when you know what to look at. But it's interesting that all this unwanted situations (stop in progress, injuries etc) seem always to occur SIMULTANEOUSLY!
I started working with some of them, analyzed their training and found a concept that I could explain to them in simple words as to what the problem might be. Here I share it with you too:
When building your body, compare it with building a house. The training you do are the bricks and the height of the house is your performance, level of hypertrophy, leanness... (whatever your goal is).
You have two ways of doing it: You either build a house that looks like a pyramid, with a broad base. This takes some time to do, since you put the first bricks side by side to each other and only when one floor is completed start building the next floor.
Or you build all your bricks on top of each other, like a thin, shaky tower. This is what I see most people doing, because it produces visible results faster.
Take as an example the loaded squat: the ‘tower’ would be to start with loaded squatting and instantly increase your load, even if form and squat depth decreases. It's the instant gratification way. Or you use your first bricks to build flexibility, technique and muscle recruitment. You see, there is not even a lot of squatting at this stage. But you build a foundation, and this foundation opens a potential to build a huge pyramid from!
Back to our phenomenon: My theory is that those people build towers. This wobbly building stands as long as everything is normal and as expected. As soon a there is an unforeseen challenging situation in the training career that breaks one brick somewhere, the whole tower comes down at once!
I suggest to build your house on a firm base, and if you already have a not optimal construction go back to rebuild the base NOW, because later might be either too late, or very hard on your ego since the higher you already are, the further you have to go down.
How long should you stay on each floor? I wouldn't orientate on time, but results. If you use the brick’ ’technique’ from the squatting example you work on that until you have it perfected. If you improve fast and/or have high quality coaching this might happen fast. But if you need more time then take your time. Staying healthy will still be less work than getting healthy!
Andreas will be travelling to the US in August 2008 to complete his KSI CIP coach education program.
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