How Do You Know When to Stop Working Out?

Imagine you are driving home for Thanksgiving and you roll 50 miles past your hometown just because you want to look cool. Or what if you decide to drive to Lubbock twice in one day just because you have nothing better to do with your time.

Everyone would agree that unless you dread seeing your family this is an extremely ineffective use of your time and resources.

But, why is everyone completely OK with playing this extremely inefficient game when it comes to training. Well, training is more fun than driving to Lubbock, but unfortunately unrelenting fun never pays off.

First, you have to have a destination. If you don't have that then you are just driving around in circles and no one can help you. Sorry. After you have figured out where you want to go, then we need to start thinking about these two common training pitfalls.

Number 1 - We don’t know when we have arrived at our destination or the best way to get there - AKA we need to know when we have hit that the minimum effective dose for the training day.

Number 2 - We have little real idea how far or in what direction we need to travel.

Solving the first problem involves both the art of coaching and some science. Here are a few strategies we use on a daily basis– when you see an athlete’s lifts slow down or the quality diminish - don’t hesitate - cut it. When someone’s power or work output drops by 5-10% - cut it. When someone cannot get their heart rate back under 120 beats per minute in the allotted recovery time - cut it. In the end, these tactics are more caution signs, to be really good at this you have to know how much gas was in the tank, the speed limits on the trip, and the most efficient route to get to the destination, etc.

Solving the second problem takes a lot of art and a lot of science and is not for the faint of heart. It involves truly analyzing the athlete’s physiology, work capacity, strengths, and weaknesses and then creating a long-term imperfect plan of improvement that is flexible enough to be adapted to where they are in any given training session and block in their programming. For example, we may have speed and power work, hormonal circuits, cardiac output, and aerobic development all programmed (even multiple times) for a training week, however the order, days, and volume depend on a plethora of factors – cardiac readiness, central nervous system recovery, individual goals, where they are in their current block, and well...life.

Just because a white board says 5 rounds doesn’t mean you need 5 rounds – you may only need 2 or you may need 11 to move you toward your goals. How do you know? How does your coach know? Start asking those questions. You may piss some people off, but you may also find out who knows their shit.

Don't spin your wheels and put pointless miles on your vehicle. You can't trade this bad boy in.