Your workouts are too hard and not hard enough
When you start out as an athlete, you rapidly see results. After just a few weeks of workouts, you see obvious gains in fitness. You get faster. But eventually your gains slow down. Your body adapts. The natural response for most people is to work harder. Every workout becomes a suffer-fest. “No pain, no gain” is your new motto. After another couple of weeks you’re just not having fun any more or get injured. You take some time off to heal and have to try even harder to get back to where you were. A lot of people then quit thinking they’ve gotten as good as they will ever get or they’re completely burned out. This endless cycle is the most common mistake of the amatuer athlete and the weekend warrior.
There’s a common misperception that each workout needs to feel hard to get results. After all, that’s what worked so well in the beginning. The problem with this approach is that your body actually improves after the workout, when you’re resting, not while you continue to push harder. By always working hard you’re always tired and your body never catches up. Now you don’t have the energy to push your limits so your efforts become “medium hard” every day. A better approach is to schedule easier days and harder days into your schedule. Rather than always working out at a “medium hard” effort, your easy days should feel really easy and your hard days can be hard enough to get the results you’re looking for.
But what’s the right ratio between hard and easy? Recent research has shown that about a 20% hard to 80% easy ratio seems to be about right. The design of the hard workouts will depend on your specific sport and your specific goals. And that’s where working with a good coach is so important. A coach can design a specific program that stimulates the response you’re looking for, whether that’s setting a new PR in a 5k, running a marathon, or another event.
If there’s one piece of advice I can give to athletes, it’s this: “Keep your easy days easy and your hard days hard”.
