By Paul Dexter, Copyright 2014
This tip of the month is for all of those who want to maximize every minute that they put into their fitness endeavors. For most of us, there are not enough hours in the day for us to get everything we need done. So, when it comes to exercise, we want to be sure that we are getting our “return on investment” with the amount of time we spend in the gym. In other words – RESULTS!. No one wants to just be spinning their wheels and staying the same, or worse, actually regressing.
As a Personal Trainer, I have witnessed most people putting in many hours of hard work with little or nothing to show for their efforts. The reasons for this could be two-fold…..
- Lack of knowledge of proper program design.
- Human nature to avoid consistently challenging ourselves.
Physical changes must be forced, and only outside of “the norm” of everyday activities is going to provide the changes that you seek. No matter what level of fitness you are at, you must strive to go farther, faster, stronger or harder or you shall remain indefinitely at your current level.
Do you remember the old fable about “Milo of Kroton” an Olympic wrestler born over 2,000 years ago? He supposedly got his strength from a calf his father had given him as a child. Every day, his father would ask him, “how big is your bull today?”. Milo would run inside and threw the calf over his shoulders, and carry him into the house to show his father. Each day his father would ask, and each day Milo would throw him over his shoulders and show his father. This went on for a number of years. As the bull grew, so did Milo’s strength.
Moral of the story, you build strength by increasing the load slow increments that the body hardly notices the effort required to lift it, and consequently gets stronger
