As aging athletes, it’s hard to determine what type of intensity is optimal for your workouts. After all, harder is better right? Not so fast! In my experience working with thousands of individuals in my career, the clients that were most successful in reaching their goals didn’t go 100% all the time. In fact they rarely went 100% (that’s in weight training and cardio). Why? As aging athletes, stress tends to run our world (work, kids, etc.). Adding more stress to an already stressed system only causes progress to slow. To create change in your body, you need to add enough stress to the system for the body to respond and grow stronger, and then stop. In fact, their is research to back up the claim that if you want to improve strength and size, you actually require less stress, than more stress (1).
On rare occasions, I’ll work with clients and we will “open up the taps” at the end of workouts (see video below of Prof G crushing a Ski Erg Sprint). These efforts are done to assess where an individuals progress is, feelings of euphoria/achievement, and adjusting what our efforts feel like. However, the all out efforts are always done in a safe manner for the body (loads are lower and competency of the movements are high). I will never take my clients to uncharted waters without them knowing, with confidence, what they are doing.
If you are smashing your head against the wall in your workouts, but aren’t seeing progress, the answer probably isn’t harder. The answer is most likely less but smarter. Need help charting a course to the best version of you? I’m here to help! Sign-up for a free assessment today!