Yesterday I talked a little about montages. They’re awesome, right? But in real life, how do we see our progress?
In small steps. Most of them go forward, but not all of them.
With our cardio workouts, we don’t want to increase our time by more than about 10 percent per week. If that’s too mathy, we can just add a minute a week until we get to our target time. When we want to increase our intensity, our best choice is to add in a minute of high intensity here and there, either by going faster or adding incline or resistance.
With weights, we want to choose a weight that barely allows us to complete a set of reps. When completing the set isn’t hard anymore, we increase the weight and see how many reps we can do with good form, even if that is fewer than we were doing before. For example, let’s say we start doing funglepresses (yes, I made that up so no one has any judgy opinions about the exercise) with 5 pound weights. After a couple workouts, it's easy to complete ten reps. We trade our 5s in for 8s, but now we can only do six good-looking reps. Over the next weeks, we work up to ten reps with the 8s. When we switch to 10s, we have to drop back to four reps. And so on until we are eventually, 25 years later, doing our funglepresses with 3 tons.
In either scenario, cardio or weights, we will have days when we need to back off. Maybe the baby kept us up all night and all we can manage is five minutes of random stumbling on the treadmill. Or we foolishly offered to help our friend move and all her furniture is solid oak, so we’re lucky to complete a single funglepress with 3 pound weights. This is all part of the process. Stuff happens. We listen to our bodies and we do the right amount of work for this day.
Go play.
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