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Other/Mixed How good should you feel?

Other strength modalities (e.g., Clubs), mixed strength modalities (e.g., combined kettlebell and barbell), other goals (flexibility)
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I read the article just now and wanted to do a shout-out :/

The whole point of the article (how i understand it) is to make you aware that you need to be able to handle life on top of training. Training shouldnt beat you up. Leave gas in the tank to deal with life.

This is similar to how old strongmen trained. Avoiding breaking a sweat, making it look easy, not light just easy. And "dont overexert yourself"

The bulk of the people go to the gym and beat themselves up. Believing the more the better. And fitness should be hard and beat you up etc. This is how i trained for roughly 8 years and hardly progressed in anything.

Imho Brett through the article warns us we should leave gas in the tank when training and always focus on enhancing health through training rather than focussing of doing more in less time.

A good read !


Yes, you have to account for the rest of your life, and hopefully train to enhance it in the context of physical expression.

I'd add there's no point in training like you need big daily reserves if you don't - you could afford to train harder at the gym in that case depending on your goals. If your nutrition is good, you can go pretty hard and still recover fine.

Most folks don't have jobs that really beat them up, and folks that do, generally don't need to be told to take it easy. By the time they take their steel toes off they're only going to spend so much time on exercise, and since they're fired up from their work, they'll get a lot out of a shorter, more intense session.

Personally when I train to leave a lot in the tank or leave the gym feeling like I could do another total session with the same loads, I haven't tapped into my survival surplus and I'm not going to make gains. I need to have a bit of intensity just to hold my interest. When I was training the hardest I saw by far the biggest gains in the least amount of time. The only negatives were that I actually gave myself some stretch marks.

Even when my jobs were very physical I trained hard, just not in ways that would impair my ability to work.

Of course we are all quite a bit different in the details of our goals, daily demands, and recovery capacity - listen to your body and be honest with yourself.
 
I probably live in a slightly over trained state, but that's what I've done since day one. Your body and mind have ways of tempering training. I listen to my body and feel good most of the time, but the 'live sore' philosophy has merit as long as you know your limitations. Some cues for me to back away are..

- Sleepy eyes
- Joints feel stiff
- Muscles look/feel flat
- General feeling of malaise

@Kettlebelephant had a great point on warmups, that's also a cue for whether or not I need a backoff day. Listening to my body and instincts has never let me down. Through 41 yrs of weight training and 31 yrs MA training I can honestly say I've never had two lousy training sessions in a row. So if I have one that's not so good I don't worry about it.
 
I find if I push myself and get to feel uncomfortable, and keep doing it, I don't get uncomfortable anymore with the same effort later on. I progress and adapt. Or was it really that uncomfortable to begin with?

I think this is an important point that is sometimes overlooked. If we train intelligently and progressively, our capacity for training increases. Therefore we can do a lot more work in our training time. Or we can train for more total time, if we so desire. Either way, if we "ride the wave" forward, always providing a stress that is recoverable and not overwhelming, the amount of stress our bodies can handle and productively recover from becomes greater as we become more trained. As we improve and train, more becomes possible. More strength, more skill, more endurance, etc... or whatever combination of these we want to develop. Then it's there for whatever we want to spend it on -- competion, special events, recreation, saving little kids dangling from building railings, etc. ;)
 
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