It is called "programming." It is the element missing from your friends' workouts. It is too bad. They could be saving a lot of time, energy, money and frustration if they'd consider it.
Let me take a minute to brag on ya'll. Today we saw impressive improvement in strength across the board. All class times reported significant improvement. Personal records were set all over the place on heavy deads. Both the over-all male (455 - Brother of Beastmode) and female (255 - Buff) dead lift records fell today. Many many other PRs were reported. Some by 50 lbs! Others by more!
OUTSTANDING work all!
The thing is, we have hardly done ANY heavy deads this year. A couple of times we have done heavy sets of 5. Once, we did heavy 4's. Even then, I can only find (less than) a half dozen times we have done heavy deads at all. The question then becomes, HOW is this possible? How is it that so many of you saw such improvement on so little specific training on this movement? Wouldn't you think that to improve your dead lift by over 50 lbs. and set a new PR you'd have to put some specific, constant and focused effort on dead lifting?
It is called "programming." And your trainers at GPP have learned how to put these improvements onto you without subjecting you to the potential dangers and rigors of frequent dead lifting.
The popular notion among fitness trainers in the world (the bad ones) is that delivering a daily "hell beatin" is all that is needed to show improvement in fitness, strength and health to your client. So, instead of learning anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, biomechanics and the like, inexperienced (and bad) trainers are putting all of their effort into thinking up creative ways to "WOD" up their clients and mop them off the floor after a workout. And while many clients will see some improvement from this type of training, the improvement they see is not without downside and risk.
Downside - Slow change, incomplete fitness, imbalances in physique, injury and expense.
Risk - Permanent injury, poorly developed health & fitness, de-motivation, lack of confidence, illness and imbalances.
The problem with this randomized stuff is that your body just doesn't respond well to random. Case in point, can you imagine how successful your doctor would be at helping you if he prescribed random drugs, to be taken at random times, in a randomized dose? Or how about your orthodontist? What if she randomly tightened your braces using randomized forces and tension? You might see some improvement, right? Then again, it could really mess you up bad too.
It isn't much different with exercise. The thing is we all know it. Can you imagine training for a marathon using randomized protocol? Just start running however many miles, however many times per week/day?
To see progressive change that is healthy and can serve you in every way, you'll need some well thought-out programming to see the fastest, most complete improvement. Anything less than this will yield poor results. We've always said, "Randomized training yields random results."
If you'd like to learn the specifics of how we program and train at GPP, please send us a letter to "Contact Us." We are organizing a class to teach our specific methodology and training techniques to others.