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I was taking the 6am session the other Monday.
It’s a session where you do as much as you can in the given time.
Go at your own pace.
No competition with others.
But, you try and increase your score week on week.
As you get fitter, stronger and faster.
After the the first round, everyone put their scores on the board.
Jamie (who you may remember from the Jamie’s Giant Pen blog) had made a huge increase on his first round compared to the previous week,
I commented on that.
“I’ve peaked early” he replied.
“Best way. Just keep peaking now” I responded.
Which, when I said it, was, I thought, a great way to describe effective exercise.
Effective Exercise
People often, understandably, feel the need to “hold some back”.
To stop when they could do some more so that can do a similar amount later.
Maybe it’s 5 sets of 8 reps on a machine when only the last few reps of the last set are particularly hard.
Or something like we were doing in these sessions – “Don’t go too nuts to start so you can still do good numbers on the later rounds”.
I get that.
Seems to make sense.
The thing is though, that approach isn’t what makes the body change.
Challenge Your Body
The body responds to a challenge.
It doesn’t have to be so much you don’t enjoy it and feel awful after.
But it does need to push you a bit.
If you were on said weights machine the body would respond to 5 sets of as many reps as you could that ended up being an 11, 9, 7, 6 and 5 more so than it would to five lots of eight.
In a session like we did last Monday it would respond to something like 110, 100, 90 and 80 more than it would four lots of 95.
Effective exercise can generally be described as “Go until you can’t, carry on when you can”.
A simplification, sure.
But a pretty good simplification to go by compared to some others.
Again, it doesn’t have to be so much you don’t enjoy it.
But it’s always worth remembering that if there’s no challenge, there’s no change.
Much love,
Jon ‘Ing Duck’ Hall and Matt ‘Flow Meter’ Nicholson
P.S. For those that couldn’t make the find out more meeting at RISE in Macclesfield on Tuesday, the details of the next one are up at the Briefing Meeting page.
RISE Macclesfield – myrise.co.uk
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Enter your details at myrise.co.uk for more information about what we do.
Or check out our monthly find-out-more meeting if you want to learn more about our free ’20lbs weight loss in 8 weeks’ and ‘Beach Body’ challenges –> myrise.co.uk/briefing-meeting
