“The better we get, the fewer choices we have.”
This is something I heard a while ago but was reminded of while training recently.
My training sessions consisted of a maximum of half a dozen exercises (bike ride to/from gym, deadlifts, cable rows, the handstands I’m practising and the power cleans I’m re-learning). I like to think I was working hard, there is a definite skill componant to most of these moves and I was improving.
Training close by was a beginner using a couple of the light dumbbells and shifting them all over the place (up, dowm, side to side, swinging, twisting etc). They were doing dozens of random different exercises, most of which I’d never ever seen before!
But you know what…it didn’t really matter. It’s bloody great being a beginner! Virtually anything works! You got a choice of as many exercises as you can possibly ever imagine. You can do almost anything and it will have a good effect on your health/fitness/strength. Because doing any exercise is better than doing the no exercise you were doing previously. I bloody love it! And so should you!
I am a passionate believer that exercise should be fun. And beginners have a HUGE range of choices of things they can do. So go ahead and try them all. Find half a dozen activities you enjoy…you will get healthier/fitter/stronger for it. I promise.
But…as we get better, if we want to avoid plateaus and continue improving, our choices start to narrow. The easy things will become too easy. Quite simply, they will not be hard enough to force us to keep improving. We can’t keep choosing these exercises any more. So we will have gradually fewer exercise choices open to us.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you are a beginner, there is no excuse in the world why you can’t start or increase your exercise levels today. You have more exercise options than shoe options! But if you are one of the many people to have started to exercise, seen great improvements, only to see these gradually decrease and dissapear, it’s because you are no longer a beginner (congratulations!) and you may need to start looking at your training.
Oh, and did I mention I’m a trainer for hire?? Contact me to see if I can help you further…
As always, if you think anything I have written here has helped you in any way, please feel free to share it with others…it may help them too.