How to Progress or Regress Your Training
Life is fluid.
We rarely feel the same on a day to day basis.
Sometimes we’re tired. Sometimes we’re sore. Sometimes we are anxious and stressed and sometimes we have no motivation to do anything.
On the other hand, sometimes we are bouncing off the walls with energy, feel stronger than ever and feel ready to take on the world.
So when it comes to exercise, it is important to take these factors into account and adjust our training sessions to suit what’s going on for us.
We also need to take our skill and performance progressions in to account. Sometimes we want to do the big movements or progress our weights to the next level. Or maybe we want to go a little further or faster in our run.
How do we know when it is suitable to do this without higher risk of injury?
Sometimes you need to take a step back and have a good listen to what your body is telling you so read on to discover my top considerations for managing your progress, so you know when it’s a good time to push and when you are better off holding back.
Energy Levels - Sickness and Recovery
The way you feel on a given day can greatly determine your ability to push hard in training. Whether you are getting run down, have been going hard at it for too many days in a row, or your recovery between sessions has not been optimal, this is a time to listen to your body and take a day (or more).
This is one of the difficult things to manage, particularly when you are hell-bent on achieving your goals. You may be on a roll with hitting big numbers in the gym. Maybe your body composition changes are tracking well. The last thing you want to do is take a break.
But believe me, taking 1, 2 or 3 days off will not prevent you from improving in the long run. When you are on the verge of illness, or in an extremely fatigued state, there is minimal benefit gained by training. Exercise is a stress on your body and when it is already stressed out, depleting it further is only going to delay your recovery and progress.
Focus on general recovery practices: Sleep, hydration and nutrition.
Up your hours of sleep and include more restorative practices including stretching (if you’re not too ill) and meditation. Drink more hydrating fluids and remove any alcohol, caffeine and sugary drinks from your diet. Finally, eat nourishing foods to ensure your micro nutrition is supporting your immune system for recovery. Broths are a great place to start.
Finally, another option when you just aren’t feeling it is to turn up and just focus on movement without intensity. Getting your blood flowing, mobility work and low intensity skill practice can help keep your mind in the game without overloading your body. If you aren’t getting sick and it’s simply a little more recovery time that you need, this may actually help.
Skill Progression
Knowing when it is time to progress your skills can be a little more challenging. Just because you can perform something doesn’t mean it’s time to throw it into a workout with high repetitions or loads.
Take a plyometric box jump into consideration. If you can do a plyometric box jump (rebounding from the floor rather than jumping) you may need to consider whether it is suitable to do them in a workout that has 100 box jumps in it. If you have not been performing jumping and landing movements (skipping, running etc) along with regular lower body strength work consistently for at least 12 months, you are at a higher risk of calf muscle or achilles tendon injury. If you are overweight, you are also adding further risk.
It takes time for joint connective tissue (tendons, ligaments etc) to build strength and progressing such dynamic skills too quickly will almost always result in some form of injury. This generally applies to progressing all skills.
Another example is a kipping chin-up. If you don’t have good shoulder mobility, or your shoulder stability isn’t up to par, something is going to give. We use specific benchmarks before allowing clients to progress. For example, if you can’t do at least 5 strict chin-ups, you shouldn’t be exposing your shoulders to the impact that kipping chin-ups create on the shoulders and elbows.
Intensifying Your Workouts
There are different ways we can increase or decrease the intensity of a movement. Some examples would be:
Increasing the number of reps or time under tension
Increasing the load
Performing more work in a given time frame (I.e. going faster)
Each of these factors can increase the metabolic demands on your body. This is why High Intensity Training is all the rage. Get more work done in a given timeframe for maximum efficiency.
When you are ready to progress intensity or ramp it up on a given day, you will know it. Are your energy levels feeling at least an 8/10? Is your muscle soreness only mild? Are you feeling motivated? All these are signs that you are ready for an intense workout.
On the other hand, if the thought of having to jog around the gym for warm-up is already making you feel out of breath, perhaps intensity is not what you need.
The other thing to consider when upping your intensity is your competency. If you have to perform 100 squats in a workout, but you struggle to maintain form and range of motion for 5 squats, you are not ready to do that kind of workout. You are not strong and/or mobile enough. Adding more repetitions or load in this situation is only going to cause injury.
Do your hips and lumbar spine a favour and work with your coach to improve your movement quality and strength before doing 100 shitty squats in a workout.
Increasing the Volume and Frequency of Your Workouts
So you have been training for a few months or years and you feel you want to get more out of training. What do you do? You do more!
Is more necessarily better? Well, sometimes….
Doing more can be achieved by increasing the number of sessions you do, increasing the duration of your sessions, or squeezing more work into your sessions. All 3 things have their advantages and disadvantages.
Increasing training volume can be particularly good for specific sports that require longer duration efforts, or multiple efforts in a single day. Aside from that, in most cases, training more than 5 times a week is unnecessary.
N.B. While training more may increase your energy output, it doesn’t necessarily mean it makes weight management easier. If it leads to missing days as you need more recovery, then the overall output will not be affected by much. You will also require/crave more food to support the increased output so get some guidance if you want to increase training volume for this reason.
When looking at any change to a training program, we need to discuss whether it is appropriate for your goals and your current performance in relation to these goals and this is something we do with our clients in progress sessions.
Applying an increase in training volume is going to require increased or optimised recovery time. Now if you are doing 2x1-Hour sessions a week and you want to up it to 3 or 4, this may not be a big deal. But if you are training 5 times a week and want to increase this to include some “double days”, then you want your recovery to be optimal. Not just optimal from day to day, but between training sessions on the same day. Nutrition and meal timing need to be on point, as does the structure of your training program.
This kind of progression requires further knowledge and dedication to learning about your body and seeking professional help on all aspects. It is generally not necessary unless you are a competitive athlete. If you feel you need to get more out of your training sessions, chat with your coach to see what the best options are.
Adjusting For Life Circumstance
We are not robots and life is certainly not without it’s ups and downs.
Some weeks, everything goes to plan and you feel amazing. You get to every training session you can, smash them all out of the park, prepare your food, stick to the plan and get to 8-9 hours sleep per night.
This is a 10 out of 10.
Then the next week, you have to stay back at work every night to meet a deadline. You missed preparing your meals as you were at a wedding and had too many drinks. On top of this, your 3 year old child has been sick and has only allowed you to get 4 hours sleep a night. You missed every training session and had take out 3 nights in a row as there was no time to cook.
This is a 1 out of 10.
When you are having a 10/10 week, it’s time for you to take advantage of it. We call this turning the dial up. You can aim for more sessions, more intensity and try new progressions. If you are having a 1/10 however, we need to dial things back, focus on tending to our priorities and go easy on ourselves.
As mentioned at the start, missing a few days is not the end of the world when it comes to hitting your goals. Look at what has happened, learn something from it and aim to make a change so you can get back on track the following week.
We call this process turning the dial up and down. It is important to regress when you’re down. If you aren’t feeling it, drop a few sets, back down your weights and aim to just move. You may just turn the dial down to a 3 or a 4 rather than completely switching off.
Your coaches are here to help you get the most out of training by optimising your lifestyle habits and 9 times out of 10, there are obvious things that can be adjusted to help. We just get caught up in our own lives and don’t see the forest through the trees.
I hope this helps you understand a little more about how we can progress and regress your training. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.
Ryan Mountford - Co Founder - Fitness Boxx