Training

Exercise is deliberate movement that improves your health. Training is exercise directed towards a goal.

Exercise if you are sedentary or need accommodation. Train for a better future if you are able.

Fundamentals

There are no shortcuts.

Anyone who claims to have a perfect plan, a one-size-fits-all solution, or a quick fix for body composition and/or athletic performance is trying to sell you something. The best thing you can do is arm yourself with knowledge. Here are the basics:

• Training pushes your body. In response, your physiology adapts.
  • Training stimulus is the stress you put on your body during exercise.
    • You must increase the amount of training stress over time to continue improving.
    • Ratcheting up difficulty in training is called Progressive Overload.
  • Adaptations are the changes in your body that result from applying training stimuli over time.
  • Training adaptations showcase the wonders of the human body. Understanding specific training adaptations requires familiarity with kinesiology, cell biology, epigenetics, and biochemistry.
• Training outcomes are strength, endurance, stability, and speed. Good training outcomes improve your quality of life, lifespan, and health span. You can think of training outcomes as overarching goals.
• Training status is a qualitative assessment of your experience. You can be a beginner, intermediate, advanced, or elite.
  • Training status independently varies by training outcome.
  • You don’t need to be of advanced or elite training status for good health outcomes.
  • Progressing beyond intermediate training status requires the discipline and commitment of an athlete. It isn’t for everyone.
• All training follows a plan or a program. The act of creating a training plan is called programming.
  • Programming balances enough training stimulus to drive adaptations and enough recovery time to avoid injury.
  • Volume is the amount of training stimulus in a program or a specific exercise.
  • Adherence is how consistently you follow a training plan over time. A training plan must be easy for you to adhere to be successful.
    • It must be interesting enough to keep you engaged.
    • It must be effective enough to let you see results.
    • It must modulate training stimulus enough for you to avoid injury.
  • Getting your programming “dialed in” is increasingly difficult as your training status improves. You may plateau without expert help.

Set Achievable Goals

The amount of time and attention you commit to training will limit your performance more than any other factor. Improving your training status in each outcome requires a logarithmic amount of effort. You must decide how much time you can devote to training and invest it strategically.

As a beginner, you won’t know what is realistic to achieve in a given period of time. Don’t worry about this. Your primary goals should be:

• Staying consistent (stop making motivation a factor)
• Avoiding injury (listen to your body, rest and recover instead of pushing through fatigue)

Personalize Your Training

Human physiology is complicated and varies widely from person to person. What works well for you may not be what works well for:

• The average of the subjects in a scientific study
• Your friend who slams mass gainer shakes all the time
• Any given fitness influencer
• The biggest person at the gym
• Anyone anywhere saying something in a comments section

You are responsible for figuring out what works for you. A simple template is:

1. Follow a training program for long enough to see results, 8–12 weeks should be enough
2. Track your progress and how you’re feeling
3. Make adjustments based on educated guesses
4. Repeat

Training by Outcome

Each dimension of fitness has different training modalities.

• Strength
• Endurance