Less is More

You can train hard & you can train long … just not both.

One thing we understand clearly is that the body adapts to what it needs. If it’s put under stress it learns to handle that stress but better. The saying “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger” is perhaps the best way to describe what goes on inside your body when faced with a threat or stress.

While the word “kill’ may seem a little drastic I’m sure you get my point – which leads me to the second thing we know about our bodies. The work we do needs to be HARD … VERY HARD. For the body to produce any adaptive response it needs to be threatened with a challenge so intense it feels like something is trying to harm it. After all, if it doesn’t challenge you, then it doesn’t change you … right?

The next time this perceived threat of harm comes it will be prepared but stronger than before.

Working hard is not a long event. When working to your absolute maximum intensity the body only has a limited engine for 100% which leads us to our third evident truth about exercise – If it’s going to be hard then it has to be BRIEF.

Yes that’s right ‘brief’. Short in duration. This is probably the hardest of the beliefs to comprehend because we’ve been led to believe that we must exercise long periods of time many times per week. Your body does not recognise time as such. It recognises intensity.

I believe most people know they need to train hard but what concerns me is that they feel they need to train long otherwise they won’t get the benefits. Not true. The other thing that concerns me is how people are going about ‘Hard’ exercise. Erratic movements with weights (throwing, jolting, jerking, swinging, heaving, etc) at excessive speeds is doing more harm than good but as with most things in society everything seems to be in a frantic mad rush. This does not apply to exercise. Please be kind to your body, listen to it and maintain posture and form always.

Tess