How hard should you be training?

This is a tough question but one I get asked alot as a personal trainer and online coach. Let's get into it but unfortunately the answer isn’t just doing the bare minimum.

In daily life as humans we have optimised our lives to make things the easiest possible A-B, imagine a world before, escalators, shopping trolleys and cars. We are not hard wired to want to make things more difficult for ourselves and often choose short term gratification over long term benefits. We are all guilty for this but it's easy to fall into a decline of letting the easy route guide all your choices. If you are new to the gym or wondering why your gym progress isn’t at the rate you would like then this is for you!

I see this even with people who have been training for years wondering why they have become stagnant in their workouts. Getting comfortable in being uncomfortable is really important, how hard you should be training is dependent to the person and their goals but I rarely see people training to their full potential. Lets say your goal is to tone up/put on muscle tissue, then you need to get to that push point during your resistance training. What I mean by this is when you start feeling a resistance/fatigue in the targeted muscle then you need to keep pushing for as many more as you can here. I promise you that your mind is telling you that you're done much before your body will give in!

The science behind building muscle, simply put, muscle is grown through repairing of muscle fibres after they have sustained damage or injury. This sounds dramatic but think of resistance training as a stressor on your body and the reason for a strong recovery technique is to allow muscles to heal and grow. In order to stimulate this growth and repairing process the stressor (training) on the body needs to be influential enough to stimulate this. This is often why people who are new to the gym can make extraordinary progress in a matter of months due to their body's low threshold as to what is currently considered a “stressor”.

There are considerations when starting to train at a higher intensity, sometimes you need to drop a workout day or make sure you are accurately programming to allow yourself time to recover. Recovery techniques such as training deloads when you reduce intensity purposefully or take a break altogether for a period of time can be implemented. On the whole, the average person may just need to fuel their body more efficiently and allow for a good quality sleep routine.

The most important thing to look at when you are training is making sure to overload movements, this can be through weight but also through reps, tempo, control, difficulty etc. In order to overload we have to work harder week on week.