It is an interesting game- this training or generally striving for something -and doing it smartly as well.
As I am on the journey to train for the iron maiden challenge which basically just means getting stronger – a lot stronger- I am again being challenged by my own head and perception of what I think I can do.
Obviously I am not the only one that encounters this dilemma; otherwise I would not hear the same story from other people.
Once we start training (whether this is training for a longer event like a ‘kokoda’ challenge or a short 15 minute event-endurance or strength) we seem to make massive progress- especially when there has been no or not much training, but then we hit the wall. Obviously the initial stage of this training is always good because the body has to change so much. Probably there wasn’t enough foundation – either strength or general conditioning, so progress is very noticeable.
How do we deal with this ‘wall’?
The thing I found so far that helped me most is to change my ‘training curve’. This means that if I was to continuously work on getting better each day I trained, I would find the proverbial wall much sooner than if I would take a different approach.
Believe me I have tried the first approach and it turned out to be the dumb way of training.
I have found that it is much smarter to press forward a little and then back off a little only to press on again and back off again. Each time I progress I stop short of what I could do, and go back to half way of where I was. So if I had to draw this on a curve it would look like a saw tooth pattern instead of a straight line in the upward direction.
The same thing happens during weight loss– we go hard at it and make great progress, but then there is the plateau. We forgot that it takes cycling to move forward. It is always push a little, ease up a little, push a little, ease up a little…. This way the body never gets to a point of being used to one amount of stress, as it has to constantly adapt.
Another place where I have encountered this is in the journey of recovery from injury. We tend to think it has to go uphill in one straight line, getting out of pain as well as rehabilitating to full function. The truth is that these cycles still apply. Especially when we feel just a bit better and we think that it is ok to push harder in hope to get better faster. What usually happens though is that by pushing harder we make the injury worse and set ourselves back. Again, push a little; ease up a little… and so on.
The other part in this equation is what goes on in the head… because the ego will often not permit us to take a step back. It is like ‘I have been going great, why stop now’. But what we fail to see is that the whole of life runs in cycles, so what is different about our training. If we can just learn trust the process of cycling we can get ahead a lot better and a lot less frustrated.