Chap I’m working with at the moment (anon ‘cuz I don’t know if he wants me naming him) casually dropped how he is now able to reliably complete 50 total reps of full pushups in one workout.
Quite the achievement considering how when we started working together nine weeks ago, he couldn’t do them at all.
I would like to tell you that I have given him some “secret sauce” to produce this result, but, alas, there is nothing particularly special about his training regime. It’s literally just the most fundamental basics in sensible quantities repeated over and over and over and over again.
Boring, in other words.
Yet it’s always the boring routines that deliver sustainable results, in my experience.
Not that more “exciting” stuff doesn’t produce fruit. It does. The only problem is, it’s fragile fruit – the training equivalent of a punnet of strawberries that turn to slurry within a day of you buying them.
Much better, in my humbly correct opinion, to grab some hardy apples (which can apparently last for months when stored properly), so your gains will stick around long enough for you to cement them, enabling you to use them as a springboard to ever greater things.
Anyway.
Sticking to the boring basics is never more important than when your ability to follow your usual schedule is disrupted by holidays, heavy workloads, family crises, and so on.
Why?
Veer away, and you start dropping workouts and getting run down then before you know it you’ve fallen off the wagon.
Maybe you’ll dust yourself off and hop back on right away, or maybe you won’t and it’ll be months before you get back into the swing of things.
Given the risk of losing the progress you’ve busted a gut to make over the last however long, seems like a dumb thing to leave to chance, I reckon.
Especially when there are resources such as my “Training Survival Guide” out there that will show you how to adapt your training so you can keep things ticking over for a few weeks to a couple of months until everything gets back to normal.
On that note, “The Training Survival Guide” is available for sale as a standalone purchase until 23:59 on Friday the 13th (that’s tomorrow as of this sending).
A copy will cost you £20 and you can learn all about what’s inside here:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/survival/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman