North Coast Miller
Level 9 Valued Member
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.