Riding The Rollercoaster

One of the most common misconceptions about training is the idea of a steady climb or increase.  The reality is the most successful athletes and fit humans go through a rollercoaster like ride in their fitness journey.  

The people who try to maintain a steady “ride” tend to miss out on the highest of highs due to their pursuit of linear progression.  Not every day does an elite athlete train hard or go to ultimate exhaustion.  

There’s a structure and a plan to go through peaks and valleys of ranging intensity to reach the highest of highs.  

What is intensity and how do we define it?  Intensity in the simplest terms is the range of difficulty in a certain workout.  

The most elite athletes and people of fitness have many different levels of intensity throughout training and know how to tap into each separate level of intensity.   

Running your fastest mile, fairly intense.  Wind sprints, extremely intense.  Heavy leg or upper body day, very intense.  

Now how do we quantify each range of intensity?

Let’s continue with the rollercoaster analogy and use some of the previous examples.  The start to most rollercoasters has that slow climb to the top of an intense drop off, it’s a slow build, and it gets harder as you get closer to the top.  Although this is nowhere near high intensity, the heart isn’t racing quite yet.  This would be my mile comparison, the first start to the mile isn’t so bad, you’re trying to keep the same speed/pace the entire time, but eventually you start to get tired, and near the end of the mile you’re just about ready to be done. 

So, you’re at the top of the rollercoaster and you’re about to drop.  This would fall under the heavy leg/upper body lifting session.  The entire workout is incredibly intense, there’s no time for a slow build.  The foot is on the gas pedal the entire time.  It’s an exhilarating feeling, although not exhausting. 

Now the toughest part of almost all rollercoasters, the loopy loop.  Some people love it, some people hate it.  Regardless of how you feel about it, we all agree we should limit the amount of them on a rollercoaster.  It’s incredibly intense, heart races, and might be the most fatiguing out of every aspect of the rollercoaster.  This would fall under the wind sprints aspect of the analogy.  Probably can’t do a wind sprint longer than 20 seconds, you’ll most likely need a lot of time to recover after one, and this has your heart racing faster than any other type of exercise.  

So how do we maximize our own training to ride our own rollercoaster?  

First and foremost, we should figure out what our true goals are, and then work our way backwards.  The more specific the better.  

But to truly reach our full potential we must ride every aspect of the rollercoaster, because each aspect adds value to every one of our goals regardless of what that fitness goal is.  

A lot of people miss that part.  

Choosing one part of the rollercoaster is one dimensional and leaves a lot to be desired. That rollercoaster won’t be fun or worthwhile if you don’t have all aspects of the entire ride. 

It is our job to understand without the ups and downs and loopy loops of our own fitness journey, we will simply burnout and lose perspective on the much bigger picture.  

Let’s put this into gym terms so we can better understand what a one-dimensional ride can look like.   

Your goal is to increase your squat, every Tuesday and Thursday you try and hit a personal record.  When you first start off, you’ll have some success. As we do it more often, we simply gain strength and figure out how to move the weight more efficiently over time.  After a few weeks you’ve had success, added 30lbs to your squat.  

Everything is great.  You go back to try and hit another personal record; you fail.  That’s ok so you try again on Thursday, you fail yet again. Frustration starts to set in, so the next week you do it again, and again, and fail again and again.  

You’ve now hit a physical wall and you simply can’t keep pushing through.  Your body is saying I need a change. A one dimensional mindset would say keep pushing through the wall until it breaks. A multi dimensional mindset would say listen to your body and change it up.

The start of every rollercoaster is that gradual incline up into a drop.  You’ve now hit the top of that rollercoaster and it’s time to drop.  

         Instead of pursuing that gradual increase week after week, maybe we need to shift our focus on a much higher intensity lift, just not quite as often.  Maybe over time we will decide to increase our squat. We should try and hit a personal record once every two weeks.  Now that you’re not pushing your body to full exhaustion as often, we should realistically have more gas in the tank to pull from when we try and hit a heavy squat.  The reality is we can only gradually increase our workload over a long period of time.  It takes months to truly increase our work capacity.

So instead of waiting months, let’s shift gears and increase our intensity rather than our capacity.  This way we can still push ourselves but with more effort in less time.  

Now we’re back to adding weight to our squat and life is good.  But eventually the inevitable is to come, the wall. 

Stage two was a success; however, you’ve now hit your most recent wall.  The weight is staying the same, and your confidence is falling.  It’s time for the loopy loop.  Let me start by saying it takes a while to truly reach the loopy loop phase.  This is where those viral clips of high-level athletes come from.  The crazy balance exercises, the intense movements only few can even comprehend.  Unless you have elite level fitness goals, or want to max out your physical capabilities, this phase is not required.  However, once you start this phase, working out in general becomes a lot more creative and fun.  

This is where we now must start reaching for the smallest of gains and improvements in the gym.  As you get stronger it gets much tougher to increase your lifts over time.  Once upon a time a 20lb personal record was realistic, now a 5lb personal record might take months to achieve.  To achieve these new records, we must go to a type of training that we have yet to tap into.  Bands, Pistol squats, single arm and leg movements.  Incredibly difficult exercises that push our body to a level of intensity that only so much weight can achieve.  

These lifts are the peak of intensity and should be used lightly throughout a workout because the level of fatigue is at an all-time high.  However, this is the final phase of the rollercoaster.

Implementing each phase throughout your workouts are key to obtaining your goals with efficiency, and in a timely manner.  It’s very important not to skip each phase of the rollercoaster, build up, and then try other aspects of the ride.  

Know that this type of training is optimal to prevent consistent walls in your path to your goals.  Don’t be afraid to master one aspect of the rollercoaster before you go to the next phase. 

Also don’t be afraid to go back to the start of the rollercoaster and do it over again.  Enjoy the ride, change intensities, and watch your fitness journey transform right in front of your eyes.