In my fifteen-ish years of training, there have been times where I have made little or no progress, despite hitting the gym week in, week out without fail.
Years, in some cases.
Why is this?
Easy.
I was going through the motions.
None of this is to say I was being lazy.
I was still training hard (very hard when my mind and body allowed), but there were sufficient occasions when I didn’t attack my sessions with discipline and intent to make everything grind to a halt.
It takes fewer less-than-stellar sessions than you might think to get you stuck in the mud, too.
For example:
I take a full week off “hard” training (that’s lifting and higher intensity cardio like long runs and sprints) roughly every eight weeks.
That’s six and a half weeks per year.
Now let’s say there are another six or so weeks when you half-arse your training for various reasons – some legitimate, like a touch of sickness, others less so, like being a lazy sod.
All told, that’s a shade over 12 weeks, or fully one quarter of the year, when you’re not really training properly or, indeed, at all.
In such a scenario, you’re not going to get to where you want to go.
Sure, you (probably) won’t go backwards, but, ultimately, this is why you see people at the gym shifting roughly the same weights and looking broadly the same year after year.
The fix?
Make every session count insofar as is reasonably possible.
(I still recommend taking regular rest weeks because they facilitate the above.)
Hardly an Earth-shattering revelation, but rarely are the solutions to your fitness woes particularly complicated or, often, stuff you didn’t already know.
The difficulty lies in the details and application, both of which are covered in my three-month programme “Silver Era Secrets” which you can learn more about below:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/programme/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman