"Doing something trumps thinking about a perfect program"
- Dan John
A while back in the gym I saw a great example of this. I had to show a guy through a routine someone else had written. Luckily I could subvert it a bit, the other trainer had written "BB squats" and I knew he meant "smith machine BB", but I took the guy five feet the other way to the power rack and he did his first ever below parallel squat.
Anyway, he had his old programs, and he'd just ticked each exercise each workout. That is, when he was shown the exercise, he found a weight he could do without trouble, and then did that for every workout, 12-24 of them over the next couple of months.
He was in his 60s, 5 years past having had a heart attack and triple bypass surgery, and could without trouble do barbell squats, solid planks for a couple of minutes, and so on. To be honest he had more strength and bodily awareness than most healthy 20 year olds I meet in the gym.
Simply doing the movement a few times a week with a load that wasn't terribly challenging, and doing this consistently over months and years - it'd done a lot for him. He was by no means an athlete, but he was stronger, fitter, with better joint mobility than the sedentary 20 year olds coming into the gym with some pages pulled out of a fitness magazine.
Strength is a skill, and practice is practice.
I once trained a young woman called Swati. She came to me in November 2010 for a routine. She had poor strength overall, only able to do a few knee pushups, and not great bodily awareness, she could get a squat but not a hip hinge.
One of the exercises I gave her was goblet squats with and without a dumbbell. Over the next several months I saw her come in and work out pretty regularly.
Then in August 2011 she asked me for some personal training. I got her under the barbell. In her second session she said, "this 25kg is easy, I could do much more."
"Yes, you could. But there's the weight you can lift, and then there's the weight you can lift with good form and still walk tomorrow."
She insisted on trying out her max strength, so I added 5kg to the bar and she did a rep, and so on. She got up to 50kg and it was a bit rough but she did it. She could have lifted a bit more, maybe even 60kg, but I stopped her there.
Obviously, all those goblet squats had prepared her for barbell squatting 50kg, at a bodyweight of 63kg. But here's the thing: she never used more than 12.5kg in the goblet squat.
In PT school we were taught a lot of stuff about training at such-and-such a percentage of your 1RM to improve your 1RM. However you want to translate goblet squats to back squats, it's plain she was training at under half her 1RM for quite a while. According to all the official tables, this will not build strength significantly.
Yet she got stronger. She practiced the movement at a low load, and got stronger. Just like the recovering heart attack guy who never really challenged himself with his load and had less than ideal exercises (his previous routine had swiss ball wall squats and his new one had cable flyes).
Strength is a skill, and practice is practice.
I once trained a young woman called Swati. She came to me in November 2010 for a routine. She had poor strength overall, only able to do a few knee pushups, and not great bodily awareness, she could get a squat but not a hip hinge.
One of the exercises I gave her was goblet squats with and without a dumbbell. Over the next several months I saw her come in and work out pretty regularly.
Then in August 2011 she asked me for some personal training. I got her under the barbell. In her second session she said, "this 25kg is easy, I could do much more."
"Yes, you could. But there's the weight you can lift, and then there's the weight you can lift with good form and still walk tomorrow."
She insisted on trying out her max strength, so I added 5kg to the bar and she did a rep, and so on. She got up to 50kg and it was a bit rough but she did it. She could have lifted a bit more, maybe even 60kg, but I stopped her there.
Obviously, all those goblet squats had prepared her for barbell squatting 50kg, at a bodyweight of 63kg. But here's the thing: she never used more than 12.5kg in the goblet squat.
In PT school we were taught a lot of stuff about training at such-and-such a percentage of your 1RM to improve your 1RM. However you want to translate goblet squats to back squats, it's plain she was training at under half her 1RM for quite a while. According to all the official tables, this will not build strength significantly.
Yet she got stronger. She practiced the movement at a low load, and got stronger. Just like the recovering heart attack guy who never really challenged himself with his load and had less than ideal exercises (his previous routine had swiss ball wall squats and his new one had cable flyes).
I'm always in favour of slapping another plate on where you can, but... Consistent effort over time gets results. As I said about Rosemary, what I've learned is that consistent is more important than effort. This does not mean that no effort is needed, the little pink dumbbells, walking at 4km/hr on the treadmill, the quarter-squats, half-bench presses and the cheat curls aren't going to do a thing for you. It does mean that you don't have to go all-out in every workout. Show up. Do something. Keep doing something.
That's fantastic. I agree completely - showing up consistently trumps most everything else when it comes to physical training. Or maybe learning anything, really.
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