People often assume that in order to get the best results you just have to knuckle down and train hard. Whilst this is certainly true to some extent; there are many other aspects that are just as important if not more so…
A brief run down of my training in recent months. I came back from a 3 month injury in January and began the process of building back up to where I was prior to this injury.
Everything was going well for the first month or so and I quickly got back to near enough where I was prior to my injury.
This is where the problems started, once I was back to 100% I demanded progress. I was expecting pb’s and improvements all the time which obviously isn’t going to happen… especially when I was in a calorie deficit… and it really began to stress me out.
I was spending ridiculous amounts of my free time stressing over my program, my nutrition and everything else that goes with it.
I was losing sleep over it and I began to hate training. I was completely crushing myself with my own expectations and I actually began to get weaker despite feeling like I was training harder than ever before.
In order to combat this I decided I was going to jump in with the lads on our strip and rip program a couple of days a week. By doing this I removed all of the stress of programming, setting my own weight even just changing plates.
I literally just had to turn up and lift. I did nothing complicated, I made no major changes apart from this and I’ve made excellent progress. I’ve just benched a weight I had only recently failed at 3 reps for a 9 rep amrap and this was after 4 sets of 5.
I’m also a lot happier in myself I’m sleeping better and thankfully I’m enjoying my training again.
That’s the most important bit!!!
If you’re not enjoying what your doing and you’re getting stressed about it, sometimes it’s better to wind down and find something you can enjoy and the progress will come naturally.
The most well thought out and meticulously planned program won’t help you progress if you’re so stressed you’re not sleeping or recovering correctly.
I may go back to doing my own thing in the future but at the minute I’m enjoying training with the Strip lads, I’m making progress and I’m feeling good.
Happy days.
Dan
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