Training weak points
17 May 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Whats the toughest lesson to learn in all of fitness-dom? I would nominate not continually playing to your strengths and being able to prioritize weaknesses. Every single time you feel the need for a fitness reality check, refer back to the three legs of the fitness triad: cardio, weight training and performance eating. Each leg of the tripod has a million subtle variations but always think big picture initially. When stagnation sets in check recent performance in each of the three legs. Be cold and clinical. Human nature seeks continual repetition of pleasurable experience.
We have five sense gates: we hear, see, smell, taste and feel (tactile sense.) A sixth is the sense of consciousness, cognition, thinking. In our fitness efforts were inclined to repeat that part of the transformation process we perceive as pleasurable. Perhaps we love a particular cardio mode; perhaps we love tennis and get up a five am year round and go to the local tennis club and play for a solid hour with other tennis fanatics all before the rest of the world is even awake. I know such a collection of fanatics exist because I used to see them flaying away at 5:30 am as I passed the windows overlooking the indoors courts at the posh club I used to train at. I would be on my way to train with like-minded weight training fanatics.
That which we perceive as pleasurable causes us to make great sacrifice in order to squeeze the pleasure activity into our hectic and harried life. Often we train in such a way that our physiques become disproportional and unbalanced. If a person loves to do curls and does them often, after a number of years, those biceps are going to become proportionally larger. Maybe you love a particular cardio activity and despise weight training and hurt you back picking up a forty pound child. Perhaps you can bench press 400 for reps but cannot walk up a flight of stairs without getting gassed. Maybe you are a diligent weight training and love cardio but have zero control over the knife and fork theoretically you could be one very strong, extremely fit in a cardiovascular sense and still be obese at the same time. The NFL is loaded with this type look at any 340-pound offensive tackle.
The point being; we all have our fitness preferences and dislikes. Likely the areas that need improvement are developed using modes, techniques or tactics we dont like. Working on weak points is the absolute fastest way to make physical improvement. The strong points are at a much high percentage of total development whereas a weak point might be at 50% (or less) of total potential. When you begin a serious effort on a weak point the room for improvement is vast. Factually, that hypothetical athlete who loves to curl would find that if suddenly he devoted as much time and effort to a bodily weak point as they have their over-developed arms (perhaps the thighs or back) huge physical improvement would be realized.
Logic dictates a continual shift of the training emphasis from one under-developed body part to the next, until every muscle and muscle group on the body would be uniform and proportional. But thats logic and humans are not robots.
If arithmetic, measuring and weighing
be taken away from any art,
that which remains will not be much
for measure and proportion
always pass into beauty and excellence.Plato, Philebus
If you want to make progress at neck-snapping, head spinning-rate, look at the Triad and with a cold hard eye, identify you weak points. Then draw up a four week battle plan that specializes on that particular aspect. If eating is your weak point than thats where to focus your energy. If you are doing way too much cardio and zero weight training, get down to some iron pumping. Likewise if youre strong as a gorilla but fat as a pig, that dictates a certain course of action. Habit-force is a bitch to overcome but fighting against our basic, preferential human nature is the way of the champion.
If we always and forever do that we love and ignore things we dont than you are wearing a deep, deep grove that might prove difficult to escape. People who do the same thing for too long a time become fossilized and incapable of change which is odd because progress and change are synonymous. Without change, without subjecting body to new and different tests and stresses, nothing of any consequence will occur. The human body does not favorably reconfigure itself in response to sameness.
Identify weak points, devise a plan of attack, pull the triggerbip, bang, boom!
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