Should I Train Everyday?
The first question is always about DESIRE. What do you really want and how far are you willing to go to get there. No desire, no need to do anything, any day. If this is you and you haven’t decided what YOU DO then you don’t have any reason to read on.
EXCUSES
I don’t have them
Time
Money
Health / Youth
Everyone can play these cards, or they can burn them to light a fire under the butt to redesign life around what they really want.
I’d recommend reading something like The Passion Test or The BreakThroughExperience and then come back to this.
If you do have a burning desire to achieve something related to movement. If you want to be an example to the world that changes your family and friends, a few hundred people, a few thousand people or maybe even to be remembered for the next thousand years.. then read on.
DEFINE TRAINING
Let me first say that the line between training and life has really blurred for me over the last 2 years. Including bodyweight training, hand balancing, mobility and endurance training into my regime as well as heavy barbell work means that I can train almost anywhere at almost any time.
What is training? It’s a stimulus that generates a response in the body.
When you look at it this way we all train everyday. If you don’t think someone getting out and doing what they need to do to go to work, shops, clean etc everyday is training, see what happens when they stop. Just a day of bed rest changes physiology. A week and you won’t even know yourself.
In this logic we need to do work on that stimulates the body, EVERYDAY. You may think this is ridiculous, why are you considering daily activities training? Well it’s a question of scale. Does walking contribute to your training? What about if you start walking 5 hours everyday for a month, would it affect your training and physique? I carried 20L of water home from the shop in Costa Rica. It’s about 400m. For some people this would be mission impossible, it would take the average 60 year old hours to accomplish this if they arrived at all. Fortunately for me it’s not really a stimulus, unless I decide to grip it 1 hand around the neck or in an inner range curl position to assist my 1-arm chin-ups.
Yes you need to train everyday. Yes you need to increase what “training” means to your body. See for a Bulgarian Weightlifter in their time of world domination 50kg snatches may not have been considered training. It’s simply not a stimulus, for them it would be like walking to the toilet in the morning and then reaching for the BCAA’s. I see a lot of this. People taking supplements on the back of something that would better be considered a warm-up or an abstract theatre piece delivered in a commercial gym.
HOW MUCH AND WHAT?
The Question now is not, “Should I Train Everyday” it’s “How Much and What Should I Train Everyday?” Here it comes back a lot to what you want to achieve.
If you’re a professional team sport athlete like a Rugby League player and you want to change the game, go beyond what people have ever seen. Then you would do something like what Kobe Bryant does. Train more and better than anybody and see where you can get to. I don’t believe this has really been done in League yet, Sonny Bill Williams certainly wanted to do more and did train more than most players I’ve seen. Andrew John’s is renowned for never not having a football in his hands as a youth and for going to the park doing extra training on his own at different times during his professional career. Johnny Wilkinson had the same ethic. I saw him doing extra training at Toulon in his late 30’s, staff reported that was the norm for every training session.
Sport Science as the biggest limiting factor on elite performance.
I’ve been in the pro environment. As staff you need to keep players healthy and performing. To do this there is always a tight-rope to walk between under training and being soft and over-training. From my experience most athletes could and should be doing a lot more skill work. It was always a frustration that many players didn’t have this mentality drilled into them in their junior sports days. It’s the mindset that separates champions from the guys that almost get there.
Now We’re Clear, you know that it’s going to take something exceptional to do something exceptional lets go into the details.
Skills should be practiced with high volume and frequency at high quality. There is a tonne of research on what it takes to be great in terms of skill around 4 hours a day seems to be the sweet spot of quality skill work.
Strength Is A Skill
Structurally you can produce massive amounts of force. Women have pulled cars of kids, athletes I’ve worked with have added 10-20% to their bests for $ or milkshakes. When motivation is high the body can do big things. So why doesn’t that same woman go and deadlift 200kg in the gym? Because it’s not in her comfort zone for lifting. Paul McIlroy and Pavel Tsatsouline are the guys that have helped me understand this theme. Lifting is about disinhibiting the body. Showing it what it can do without hurting itself, and then a little more. Minimal extra mass is added to increase a newbies lifts by 100%. It’s a neural process.
4 Hours per Day?
Now taking this on board you may want to think about it like the Violinist and race to 10,000 hours of lifting time to be among the best in the world. But hold up. We just spoke about increasing your comfort zone. This applies for load as well as volume. When you first go and lift, if you complete 10 tonnes of volume that session you may end up in hospital. 6 months later you can breeze through the same session and come back to train in the afternoon. How much time you can spend in the gym safely has to be earned.
The more skill based your training is the more volume you can do. Handstands and juggling can handle a lot more volume than 80%+ snatches and power cleans. The higher your intensity the less total work you can do.
CrossFit? Yeah you got it, a lot of moderate and low intensity volume, huge performances. A number of Australia’s top CrossFit Athletes would place highly in National Weightlifting Competitions despite moderate amounts of specialist weightlifting coaching and tonnes of other types of training that should be “competing” against fast twitch muscle fibres by Sport Science logic.
How many hours could you load garbage into the back of a truck in the old style manual way? How many hours could you work as a tree lopper with just an axe and a saw and a back? How many hours can a mechanic spend manually loosening and tightening bolts?
We can do a lot more.
I Tried XYZ program and I got hurt.
Yes you did. Because you went too far from what you’re used to. New stimulus is always a risk. By this same logic rest days also create risk. The longer you go between training stimulus the more new that stimulus will be when you get back to it. This was one of the key and most shocking points that John Broz hit me between the eyes with when I attended his workshop at Rhode Island a few years back.