The other day, I saw an ad for a 6-week challenge that promised to transform people into “athletes”? ‘Cause athletes are made in 6-weeks of generic WODs. Excuse the sarcasm, but athletes are not made—especially out of sedentary adults.
For the most part, athletes are born with genetic potential and refined through hard work and specific training—a lot of specific training. Serious athletes train very hard. In fact, most athletes beat the heck out of their bodies.
Training like an athlete is not for mature adults. For some reason, though, this is the trend in fitness—at least to believe that one is training like an athlete. Certainly, we can adapt the principles applied to training athletes. I, for one, am a proponent of training nonathletes for ‘motor skill-related physical fitness’—i.e., speed, power, agility, balance, coordination, and reaction time. Training nonathletes like athletes is overkill and likely to injure the person. Talk to any athlete at the end of his or her season (and, certainly, career) and ask how they are feeling. I doubt any will say they are feeling “great”—“in the best shape of my life”. Most are going to be nursing injuries and be pretty beat up.
Indeed, what is marketed as training like an athlete is often a random selection of sports training-like exercises that are of questionable effectiveness. Training like an athlete is not flipping tires and swinging ropes. Training like a real athlete is a planned, intensive, periodization—cycles of training for sport-specific, hypertrophy, strength, and power. It is training for sport-specific motor skill-related fitness and aerobic/anaerobic power, etc.
And 6 weeks? Barely enough to see a significant neural adaption to the exercise. Most of the “gains” one will see in a short-term “challenge” are going to be the result of learning.
One does not train to become and athlete. One trains to become a better athlete. Don’t be lured by fitness marketing and hype. The principles of physical fitness are pretty simple and straight-forward. Stick to the basics. Have specific goals. Train to your goals. Most importantly, be patient. Do not expect significant results in a month or six weeks. Think years. (Yeah, sorry. Progress takes time!)
The work out may be hard, but that doesn’t make it effective. Train smart, not just hard.
Be your best today; be better tomorrow.
Carpe momento!