Getting the Most Out of Training – Part 2

LONG-TERM MINDSET & INJURIES

by Thomas Richards

Last week we talked about moving well and how that will help you express your best fitness levels and create long-term growth rather than injury. This week, we’re going to talk about long-term mindset with fitness and how your movement, weight choices, and injury prevention are your greatest tools for health.

Getting healthy, losing weight, creating strength, and improving your fitness are all lifelong, long-term projects. Sometimes it’s hard to view them that way when we are feeling motivated and want results right now! Fast results can be achieved with a disciplined nutrition plan, but fitness and health-related goals require a long-term mindset.

Injuries

Every person that wants to engage in physical activity has to understand that injuries are a part of being active. Pushing your body to its limits, getting stronger, running faster: these wonderful things will all cause wear and tear on your body. How you deal with these pains is vital to your long-term success, but many of them are preventable early on by moving well. 

Weight Choices

Why don’t we max out our lifts every single week? It’s only 1 rep?! Maxing out a lift is putting your body under the maximal strain it can sustain. It’s not just your muscles working as hard as possible; your joints, tendons, ligaments and bones are all strained. Good training dictates you only test yourself a few times per year in order to prevent injuries from maximally exerting yourself. * Long example provided at the end.

If you couple the maximal strain when lifting as heavy as possible with using poor technique, you’re putting your body in a compromised position which will increase your likelihood of injury. This is why we want you to move well: we want your body to work as efficiently and safely as possible. 

Long-Term Mindset

The programming at SISU (and any good programming) is meant to guide you into good decisions, and build your capacity over time. If you follow the program, you’ll be set up for success and properly prepared to push hard when it’s time to push hard. Our philosophy is to keep our community training for a lifetime, not trying to maximal results and fizzle out in a 90 day period. 

Our goal is to push ourselves hard without getting injured frequently, and when we do get some injury, we find a way to keep working out or working around the injury. It’s when people stop completely that you lose your hard work and motivation and feel like you have to start completely over. 

*Long example:

Consider the following continuum with squatting:

20 Air Squats ———— 3×8 @60% ———– 1RM Back Squat

If we were to complete this rep scheme every single day, there’s a close to zero percent chance we’ll get injured doing 20 air squats each day. Compare that to completing a 1RM back squat every single day where we are pushing our body to its absolute limit, at some point your body will not tolerate what you’re asking it to do.