Like my first two articles outlining the first three steps to fitness for men and women, this article will not be a step-by-step plan on what to eat and how to exercise to look and feel your best. It will help put you on the path where you can achieve such things. I think I need to justify why a 48 year old man who co-owns an office supply store is giving out fitness advice in the first place. Besides the fact that I look good, I’ve spent over thirty years and many dollars on videos, books, and trainers to achieve goals that range from gaining weight and strength for college football to losing fat for natural bodybuilding competitions. I haven’t spent the money on certifications that test my knowledge and allow me to add letters after my name, but that doesn’t seem to stop people from asking me for help and advice.
The fourth step to fitness for men and women is to plan for continued progress in your weight training. Your body is programmed to die. Beyond that certainty, some habits, exposures, and conditions will speed up the process and make aging more onerous than necessary. But your body is also programmed to adapt as evidenced by such a simple and visible golden tan. The depth of this second certainty has been lost to those of us who believe that weight training and exercise are options while living in today’s society.
The fact that we don’t need to exercise to physically exist in our world doesn’t make it any less important. When you properly plan for and apply increasing levels of stress on your body through weight training, your entire body, including everything in it, will adapt and become stronger and more resilient. But doing the same exercises without some progression plan will not be enough to continue this benefit. You couldn’t sunbathe for 15 minutes every day for a month and expect to get as dark as someone who exposes their skin to continually longer doses of radiation every day for the same month. Your skin will adjust and darken enough for the daily 15 minutes of radiation sometime early in the month and then you won’t need to adjust.
The key to stimulating adaptation is to apply a new stress or a more intense dose of an existing stress. The same principles hold true in your fitness pursuits. The adaptation necessary to increase strength will lead to better and more visible fitness results and will help postpone the effects of old age and death that are inevitable and hastened by those habits, exposures, and conditions that we sometimes enjoy but sometimes dislike. we are forced to endure. .
The most effective training plan is to simply increase the weight each time you are scheduled to perform a lift. This is called Linear Progression and should be everyone’s first plan. Mark Rippetoe explains linear progression and much more in his book initial force. The inherent problem with the training program is that it cannot last forever.
But, progress need not be continuously linear. The body can have increasing stress applied and adaptation results in cycles. The key to adapting and progressing throughout the training cycle is to be consistent with the training plan. The initial and final strengths of the plan are mostly irrelevant. Stay true to the training plan you are following and avoid being seduced by other people’s goals. Book by Mark Rippetoe Practical Programming is an excellent resource for learning about adaptation, training cycles and training plans